Football
-
Booing as legitimate protest
(Warning: Mainly football related post) There was some fuss at the weekend that Arsenal fans booed one of their own players, Eboue, to the point where he had to be substituted. Most of the pundits have been outraged, and the common complaint is that it is counter-productive, as well as vicious. Not being an Arsenal fan, I don't really know the history, but my guess is there is some background as to why they booed Eboue, and it wasn't just a random attack. Football fans may have a mob mentality but it is a highly contextualised mob mentality. A few months ago, a similar event occurred during an England game…
-
Gordon Brown is the Steve McLaren of politics
I don’t ‘do politics’ in this blog usually, but really, the analogy is too good to pass up. Look at the similarities: Both were second in commands Both took over from someone who had been in post for a long time. Both of their predecessors left on a wave of unpopularity Both enjoyed brief periods of (unexpected) success. Both then made a series of strategic errors I think the foot and mouth outbreak was Gordon’s draw with Macedonia, the election that never was his away defeat to Croatia, and this week’s armed forces attack his away defeat to Russia. If the analogy is to be played out in full, that…
-
Football commentators, elearning and the legitimacy deficit
There was much discussion last week about the BBC appointing its first female commentator on Match of the Day. Rather predictably this assault on the last bastion of maleness caused some debate. The ant-argument seems to fall in to three camps: i) She hasn’t played the game and you need to have done so in order to be a good commentator. This is just plain wrong and like many fields confuses experience with critical prowess. Many good literary reviewers are not good authors and vice versa, the same goes for film, and most of the printed press in any sport. Indeed I have been rather disappointed with the rise of…
-
The irrationality of preference
Having posted about Google desktop and Netvibes it made me consider why Netvibes is my preferred personal portal. There are many others available and while I could come up with a justification for Netvibes over Pageflakes, say, it would all be a bit post hoc. In a recent survey on VLE use in universities the OECD pointed out that "there was little to choose between different systems. The past seven years of intensive LMS development and adoption in tertiary education have seen considerable system convergence…. Some respondents asserted that a particular system was the “only genuine” enterprise LMS, or “by far the easiest” to use, but it was difficult to…
-
Why you should love Zidane
Watched the world cup final last night which was of course marred/made memorable by Zidane’s headbutt and red card. I’ve been puzzling about this. He was about ten minutes away from being remembered as the greatest French player ever, probably overtaking Platini. And I think that is the key to his action. He could see the endless smug after dinner speeches, the fawning chat show appearances, the publicity work with Blatter and Chirac. It was a frightening epiphany. So he committed reputation suicide. Now he can enjoy his retirement in peace. You’ve got to admire that. More people should do it I think and save themselves from a kind of…
-
The constraint of choice (and a dodgy football analogy)
Watching England play on Saturday made me think about VLEs (that is not a sentence many people will write I expect). Whether that was an indication of my current VLE monomania as I complete the book, or an indictment of the quality of the game, I’m not sure. All football fans suffer from the ‘football as a metaphor for anything’ complaint, and here is another. I appreciate that to actually understand the analogy you need to have a good grasp of both VLEs and football, so it fails the first test of being a useful means of explaining one topic by mapping to another, but hey, how often do you…
-
Watching england abroad
Today England play their first game in the world cup. I was determined to find a bar in Como to watch the game. Being a footballing country I thought this would be easy, but after an hour of trudging round Como I began to suspect their passion in this region. I asked in every bar if they would be showing the football and they greeted the request politely, but with an element of confusion, as if I’d gone into a hairdressers and asked for a bacon sandwich. It’s interesting how you take so many things for granted. Yesterday I was thinking Como represented some type of apogee of civilisation –…
