The Heat of Color

The strip of the soccer team I grew up supporting – the Sporting Clube de Portugal, also known as Sporting Lisbon, with its horizontally green and white striped shirt, black shorts, and green and white striped socks – has never ceased to give me a thrill that I can be deceived into thinking derives from the colors themselves, independently of what it is I associate them with. It is difficult to imagine a different set of colors provoking a similar reaction in another team’s fans, yet I know they do. For such is the power of color, of colorful banners, flags, uniforms, to arouse passionate identification – a power so great as to seem independent of the power of what is represented by the colors. It is as if it were the colors that were lending appeal to what they represent, rather than the other way around. And that may at least partly be the case: it seems to me that poorly colored teams do tend to be lackluster, as nations with uninspired flags tend to inspire little patriotism. Whence this power of color to promote and indeed to intensify or even replace identification with a group? I imagine it has to do with the fact that, in nature, it is color that primarily enables us to group things. First there is light, which renders things visible; then form, which lets us distinguish one thing from another and classify it; then color, which is so effective at letting us group things that we tend to think of their colors as their primary attributes, as if they were their colors. In other words, color is naturally an attribute of the group, of the team, and sports have simply, and wisely, copied nature. But not all sports – not, say, baseball, which uses club colors sparingly, with uniforms predominantly white or gray, and so cannot hope to arouse the passion that color-reliant sports like soccer do. And the relatively recent introduction of color uniforms into cricket may not only have marked but perhaps caused a heating up of a traditionally very cool sport.

The Value of True Reporting in Sports

In the Manchester Guardian, Duncan Castles offers an example of something that is in short supply in sportswriting – true, post-mortem reporting at the level of individual games. How was Germany, until then lacklustre, able to pull its act together, move into high gear and viciously upset talent-laden Portugal at Euro 2008? One suspected that something unexpected and mysterious, a sinister coup of sorts, had occurred. But the usual commentators and supposed pundits were in no way enlightening about it, as they usually are not, with all their opinion-mongering and makeshift pseudo-expertise. With Castles, true reporting comes to our rescue: He goes behind the scenes and gets the scoop from coup leader Michael Ballack, who speaks about his private meeting with other players, his protracted strategy session with the Joachim Low, the secret rehearsal the day before the game. (No doubt Ballack is going to be one great manager when he retires from play.) Now I would like to hear the Portuguese side of the story. Why did they fail to anticipate German preparedness? Why did Scolari not have any tricks up his sleeve? Or even a thinking leader on the field, good not only with his feet but on his feet? Why would he even go so far as to announce that he did not, and to let the Germans know whom he would be fielding and in what formation? Why was Portugal not better prepared to defend the deadly deadball plays and to counter Schweinsteinger’s threat, which was old news to Scolari? Why was he rather too sportingly embracing Ballack (whom he had repeatedly praised before the game) after this shock defeat of the Portuguese team? And what of Russia’s snuffing out of Holland’s orange fire? How did treacherous Guus Hiddink engineer that? Reuters had coach Marco van Basten denying his team’s loss had anything to do with his deciding to rest his best players the game before (something which, notably, Scolari also did, for the game against Switzerland.) But van Basten was not asked to advance his own theory of what occurred. Yet these are upheavals of historical significance to the sport, so they ought to be thoroughly and intelligently reported. Why have we never found out why, last year, Manchester United played so badly, so strangely heavy-legged, against A. C. Milan in their second game in the Champions League? These are the stories most worth reporting in the football pages, stories that can serve to illuminate the workings of the sport. Yet, because they are also stories that require actual leg work, they mostly go unwritten, their absence camouflaged from readers by the proliferation of the cheap, thumbsuck blather of columnists and bloggers who know little more than the average TV-watching fan.

What’s Wrong With Showboating?

In a live report in the Manchester Guardian, the writer condemns a scissor-kick cross from Quaresma in Euro 2008 as ‘an unecessary bit of skill.’ More casual fans tend to love showiness in an athlete, drawn as they are to the spectacle of the sport; but the most hardcore fans can be hostile to it. They perceive a threat in it: although spectacle helps any sport succeed, too much of it and the sport can die, turning into sheer spectacle, something akin to professional wrestling or the Harlem Globetrotters.

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.