End of Year non-review

I’ve had little appetite for the end of year reviews this year. Usually they’re a guilty reading pleasure for the final week of December – guilty in part because reading them involves surrendering to a positivist view of events that suggests they were inevitable. And for a lot of non-sporting reasons, that seems a particularly unpalatable idea right now.

So instead of a review, I’m going to post up a single video from this year, that doesn’t claim to be particularly representative of the 12 months we’ve just been through, but which does represent the type of ideas I’ve been becoming more interested in in my own work this year and which this blog is a part of. The video is a talk by artist Roderick Buchanan in Glasgow, from March of this year, where he talks about his ongoing art work exploring sport as a cultural force in our lives. If you don’t know his work it’s much broader ranging than a single issue (the talk is for a very specific sport-related context), but sport is a recurrent theme in his work and he’s an artist who treats its complex presence in our lives with respect and genuine enquiry – not least regarding the impact it has on himself.

On that note, there’s a moment in the talk where he’s remembering the 1988 Scottish Cup final between Celtic and Dundee United, where then prime minister (and folk demon to much of Scotland) Margaret Thatcher was invited to present the trophy. At the moment she did so, thousands of fans of both teams began brandishing ‘red cards’ – actually red leaflets produced by the Greater Glasgow Health Joint Trade Union Committee to protest Thatcher’s swingeing attacks on Scottish health provision.

 

(images courtesy of celticprogrammesonline.com)

Seeing the mass of red cards symbolically rejecting Thatcher, Buchanan talks of the image as his personal “Tommie Smith moment” (a reference to Smith’s infamous black glove protest at the 1968 Olympics) - in terms of the galvanic effect it had on him as a young artist.

More on Roddy in the future. For now, link to the full talk is below.

Roderick Buchanan

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As per the previous blog, I’ve started doing some work for the Guardian US site, mainly covering MLS and Boxing – which I’m really enjoying. Am still working out how it works alongside my other ongoing art work and writing, but it feels right and to anyone who knows my other work and is puzzled by this development, I’d just say that the con artist and the sport rubbed shoulders in more than one saloon…

Happy New Year!

LiveBlogging for The Guardian tonight

I’ll be live-blogging the Andre Ward v Carl Froch Super Six final for The Guardian tonight (Saturday 17th, 9pm Eastern).  So no blog entry here as such, but you can write in whilst I’m doing The Guardian blog (I need the encouragement…) and I’ll try to use the best comments.

Thank you.

Martin O’Neill: The Messiah’s honeymoon

Last week Sunderland appointed Martin O’Neill as their new manager. Within a couple of days the fanzine A Love Supreme (ALS) were selling an O’Neill t-shirt with a quote from the latest messiah – affirming his commitment to the club he’d supported as a boy. Actually, it being O’Neill, it was less an affirmation than the sort of carefully caveated clause you might expect from a former law student. For the Wearside mythmakers parsing his comments though, it was enough – a definitive statement that the spiritual son of Clough (the messiah who never made it back) had come home. And with that, the latest savior’s honeymoon period had commenced.

Sport being sport, local messiahs tend to follow a doomed trajectory of disappointment amongst fans – the best possible scenario being that it’s great until it isn’t. Before their appointment though, they are quasi-mythical creatures, who fans make beseeching noises to every time they’re lumbered with an incumbent who has carelessly lost the dressing room and left the club “precariously perched above the drop zone”. If only their idol, who understands, would fulfill their destiny, return to their spiritual home and effect a rescue…

Sometimes these messiahs are former much-loved players with a connection to the club (Dalglish, Keegan, Hoddle etc.), others are former managers whose first reign has cast such a shadow over their successors and their own subsequent achievements that they are tempted or coerced back ‘home’, often with anti-climactic results (Gordon Lee at Everton, Keegan’s second coming at Newcastle, Sunderland’s own re-appointment of Bob Stokoe). The latter phenomenon is particularly sad to witness – the idea of a spiritual destiny is a grandiose one that has little in common with the painstaking empirical reality of repairing and rebuilding an underperforming team (and the latter process has no place or time for fond sentiment).

A manager inheriting a new club usually does so when that club is in crisis. To succeed, they have to identify the source of the malaise, move players and staff on (easier said than done if the previous manager has been profligate with the checkbook), identify replacements and impose their own ideas on training, tactics, diet, mental approach, youth development etc. During all this they have to attempt to get immediate results from the existing team and keep the fans onside. All meaningful change takes time of the unTweetable variety, but is usually reported in terms of the new appointment giving everyone a “massive lift”, perhaps with a cursory follow up glance to see if the immediate results have achieved a corresponding “bounce”. For the majority of the media the messiah better clean up quickly if they want to stay known as a miracle worker.

(This is a blog, so I get to put in the kind of non-sequiturs that may only make sense to me, such as the paragraph that follows. Something of the events of the last week and the press coverage of the expectation around O’Neill’s arrival made me think of it, but I’m just putting it out there without further comment than this. If it seems strange, it’s in italics and indented so you know where to skip to. And to really help, I’ve substituted the name Alan Shearer in for Allan Sekula – which has had the unexpected consequence of making me appreciate the former’s punditry as a deadpan satire on the manic, entertainment-driven mechanics of the media)

With my other professional hat on, I was writing the other day about the artist and filmmaker Alan Shearer and in particular about his criticism of media tempo and the way it produces meaning – for example the routine vocabulary for telling the story of a disastrous oil spill will run as follows: images of a stricken ship, a helicopter pan across the slick on the ocean, a close up of a struggling oil-coated bird and a sombre 20 second commentary piece to camera whilst overall-clad volunteers poke tentatively around the beach in the background… Maybe one minute of news story. In his 2006 film “The Lottery of the Sea” Shearer counters this by showing long extended sequences of actual painfully slow clean-up operations – insisting that the soundbite news version of events diminishes the apparent consequences and simultaneously misinforms and absolves the viewer of responsibility to interpret and act. Or just as damagingly, it reports and mirrors events with such a recognizable symmetry that they appear to be part of a natural order rather than ruptures to one.

This is not to say that the fans are passively consuming the media’s version of events. As O’Neill astutely pointed out this week, his fulfilling of a destiny largely invented by others probably buys him around two games worth of grace, before the self-appointed guardians of the soul of the club start wondering what he is doing bringing on a sub five minutes too late and not playing the Argentinian lad. Fans are myopic dreamers by nature – impossibly and helplessly fixated on the immediate minutiae of games whose tactical fluctuations they have no ability to affect, yet spiritually wedded to existential ideals about locality and identity that find an uneasy and contradictory expression through their support of the club (and an extreme sensitivity to how others do the same – as Steve Bruce found out).

In Sunderland, this worldview is as pronounced as anywhere – the city itself has not yet produced as coherent an account of itself as it did in its industrial prime as a shipbuilding and mining town, notwithstanding an expanding university and the ubiquitous spectre of call centres. So the football team, as a surviving (though transformed) relic of that earlier moment, becomes a fetishized icon of a cultural identity whose certainties are only ever fixed in the rear view mirror. For local fans, finding themselves in a transformed landscape, the club comes to stand for a collection of ideals that include working class pride (and sometimes sentimentality), sublimated rivalries that once were articulated at least as much around industry or local politics as sport, and the elusive promise of continuity and heritage.

Within this kind of cosmology, current players are derided as either badge-kissers or as not fit to wear the shirt, other fans too are held accountable as prawn-sandwich brigades, Sky fanboys, Euro snobs (the popular dismissal here in New York), scarfs, wannabes, or other deviations from the one true path, whatever that might be. And managers, even messiahs, are subject to more scrutiny than anyone. There’s an honorable conservative streak in all this of course, that’s found at the core of every meaningful organized fans’ group, but there’s also a recurring reactionary fatalism that feels it can only locate power in creating and then toppling its own idols.

A Love Supreme T-shirt ad

The latest Sunderland idol then, is Martin O’Neill, whose connection to the club is partly that boyhood fan status ALS picked up on (though he was perhaps more a fan of fellow Irishman Charlie Hurley, who happened to play for Sunderland) and partly because he stands as a proxy for his mentor and Sunderland legend Brian Clough. Around the time he was winning European Cups with O’Neill in the Nottingham Forest side he managed, Clough made the infamous claim that he would crawl up the A19 over broken glass to take the Sunderland job. It never happened – successive Sunderland boards never had the inclination or resources to lure him, or the timing was never right, and perhaps most importantly Clough himself was probably aware that he would have been on a hiding to nothing by taking the job and delivering anything less than the near impossible. If you want to remain as a god to a people, it’s sometimes best to never walk too closely amongst them.

For most of the last decade, Martin O’Neill’s name has been invoked by the fans every time there is a managerial crisis at Sunderland and now, finally, he is there. Having seen the team play he has immediately tried to dampen expectations and emphasize the long term nature of the job. He’s wise to. In response, the fans have been…fans. At least one folk song has already been written in his honor before he had actually taken charge of a game, and the message board talk is generally of a new buzz about the place. But there’s also been some caution – longer term fans have been wary of what might happen now they’ve got what they wished for. The last time the club appointed a high profile manager with a strong local connection, who was touted as a savior, was the decision that turned Lawrie McMenemy into Lawrie MackemEnemy (younger Sunderland fans might want to Google that particular debacle with a strong stomach).

Who knows how long O’Neill’s honeymoon will last, but after a honeymoon comes the rest of the marriage – and those sorts of commitments take work and time and a little bit of faith. And when they’re judged in retrospect, it’s rarely for the quality of the vows at the wedding…

Sócrates

I’ve been pulling various bits of writing together and working on design for the launch of this blog in the new year, but the news that one of my childhood heroes, Sócrates, had died, forced my hand a little and in some ways this is as good an introduction, at as good/bad a time, as any.

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Brazilian footballer Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira died today, aged 57. He was better known as Sócrates, or sometimes, ‘The Doctor’.

29 years ago, the team he captained changed my life.

In 1982 I watched the World Cup in Spain on TV – perhaps the first major soccer tournament where I was old enough to really follow the teams and have a sense that perhaps there were different ways to play this game. As a dutiful young student of the sport, I knew that I was supposed to admire Liverpool domestically and that the 1970 Brazil team of Pele et al were the greatest team ever, but if I was honest I was still repeating orthodoxies heard from others. I had yet to find a feeling for soccer that was my own.

Enter Brazil and Sócrates.

They played an attacking soccer that was perhaps the last true expression of an ideology of play that Brazil sides ever produced. Subsequent Brazil teams would be accompanied by exponentially ambitious ad campaigns featuring montages of Joga Bonito as practiced by the 1970 team and their supposed spiritual heirs, whilst their actual playing style devolved to more defence-minded pragmatism (arguably haunted by the ‘failure’ of the 1982 swashbucklers). The dourer they got, the more intense the media invocation of samba soccer became – a cynical and alienating marketing smokescreen. But at that moment, in the early days of the 1982 tournament, when Sócrates was waltzing around sprawling Scottish and Russian defenders and Zico and Falcao were nonchalantly lofting passes and shots into tiny windows of space no one else seemed to have noticed, this boy was transfixed by their movement, their cool and by the fact that they always believed in their ability to outscore the opposition (as Steve McClaren later said of the turn of the century Man United team, they were never beaten, they just ran out of time).

I wanted them to win. Actually, no, I wanted Northern Ireland to win and willed them through a torturous siege against Spain in that tournament with what I now recognize as the traditional religious agonies of the long term fan. But I wanted to keep watching Brazil – I wanted to see what they were going to do next. When they were surprisingly eliminated by Italy and a resurgent Paulo Rossi, it felt more traumatic than Northern Ireland’s eventual, inevitable defeat because it was like a line of thought being suppressed – a teacher’s command to settle down now.

Yet once you’d known it, it couldn’t be unknown. I kept watching the tournament – I remember Tardelli’s operatic bliss at scoring the winning goal in the final, I remember gasping at Harold Schumacher’s assault on Battiston in the France v Germany semi-final, but my abiding memory of that World Cup is a feeling, synaesthesic in its combination of color, film grain, audio compression and a sense of sustained anticipation. It’s a memory that starts not with goal highlights but with a transition: either the moment when Brazil would pick up the ball at the edge of their own area and suddenly their whole formation would transform into one of fluid potential, or a later moment when that wave is just about to break on shore – when an attacking midfielder (usually Sócrates himself) would be poised with the ball 30 yards out as players swarmed in front of him and across each others’ paths and I’d find myself leaning in to the TV waiting for his creative decision.

I didn’t know at the time that Sócrates said of soccer:

“To win is not the most important thing. Football is an art and should be showing creativity. If Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Degas had known when they were doing their work the level of recognition they were going to have, they would not have done them the same. You have to enjoy doing the art and not think, ‘Will I win?’ ”

I doubt I’d have been happier then if I had known he’d said that. Even now, I don’t need the appealing post-rationalising that might reference his life as a medical student, a polemicist, an advocate for Brazilian democracy, an admirer of Guevara, Castro and John Lennon – rich biographical texture though that might be. I knew then what I know now, that seeing him play was the moment I first trusted my own taste in the game. I didn’t need anybody to tell me that this was beautiful and the fact that Brazil didn’t win the cup was ultimately irrelevant. Because in those moments it felt like anything could happen and having happened once I thereafter had to believe such moments could happen again. I watch for them in soccer of course, perhaps more in hope than expectation, but I treasure them when they appear in other aspects of my life.

Recently I was in Zucotti Park on the night before Bloomberg’s first threatened eviction of Occupy Wall Street. A mass clean up was in progress, intended to thwart his claims that the protest needed to be broken up for reasons of public hygiene. The mood alternated between conviviality and tension at the thought of possible violence the next day. It had been raining intermittently but around midnight the skies suddenly opened and there was a palpable moment of uncertainty, as if everyone might scatter – a moment broken by a belly laugh that swept across the whole square and dissolved into cheers and chants of defiance.

I heard the news of Sócrates’ death this morning. And when I summoned that affective memory of his 1982 team in perpetual brimming potential I ended up thinking of that much more recent, absurd, fantastic moment in the park. This is not a facile equation of the two phenomena, but an admission that my own limited ability to appreciate the latter started not with my political education, but with a foundational moment of recognition granted to me by Sócrates’ particular generous genius. It was from his team that I first learned that no matter what the results on paper say, what happens next might be beautiful. Now more than ever, I am grateful for the lesson.