Guardian Snubs Ronaldo

For a couple of years I have been closely following the career of my countryman, Cristiano Ronaldo, not only because I regard him as the most astonishing, aesthetically satisfying athlete I have ever had occasion to study but because of the drama of his emerging into greatness before a foreign and xenophobic soccer public that could not have been more reluctant to recognize it and that continues to find excuses to deny or belittle it. It is a drama which his finally winning the Fifa World Player of the Year award has obviously not brought to a close. For example, all day Tuesday I found not a whisper of his triumph ont he Web site of Manchester United’s hometown newspaper, The Guardian. Had I simply come too late – had the story already been taken down? I searched their archives. Nothing. Had the entire British press boycotted the story? I turned to the London Telegraph’s Web site and found that it had set up an entire category of CR stories to link to, including of course the latest on the award. So what could explain the Guardian’s snub?

Intelligence in Sports Writing

Even in sports writing you can sometimes denote a sign of intelligence. Most English writers assigned to cover the Portugal-Switzerland game in the first round of Euro ‘08 just phoned it in, making no attempt to sound interested. How do you make a good story out of a game that doesn’t mean much to either team? Henry Winter, the writer for the London Telegraph, found a truly smart way: he wrote it as a study of how Scolari, the new Chelsea manager, operates. It created a whole new perspective on the game and was fun to read.