We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
The odd dull, negative game apart, I thought the European Championship football tournament, held this year in Austria and Switzerland, has been excellent with plenty of attacking flair to savour. For me, the highlights have been the Holland-Italy match (the Dutch won it decisively); the Russia-Holland game (the Russians turned over the Dutch in superb style) and the final, won by the wonderful Spanish side, which has waited a long time for this moment. It is good to see a flair team win a tournament like this rather than some dour, heart-breaking finish involving a penalty shoot-out. Here is a good Reuters summary of the whole tournament.
And I will not be the first, or probably the last, person to write that I did not miss England’s involvement this year (the English did not qualify for the tournament). We missed the worries about English football fans misbehaving, or endless media agonising up to the games and the inevitable penalty shoot-out losses to the Germans or the Portuguese. Bliss.
Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero
Leo McKinstry
first published by Partridge, 2000, fully revised and updated edition published by Harper Collins, 2005
Sportsmen seem to be arranged along a spectrum. At one end are those who are so naturally gifted that their careers are, to them and to us, a gift. They don’t have to think about it, they just do it, with supreme grace and style. You watch them, and marvel. You think: I could never do that. But glory be, homo sapiens can do it. Because look, he just did it, although heaven knows how. At the other end of the spectrum are sportsmen of relatively average talent, who, by supreme effort and constantly applied strength of mind and character, make the most of what they have, often defeating more naturally gifted opponents who haven’t learned to fight until too late. These talent maximisers do better than they have any right to, so to speak. You watch them, and you think: If I tried that hard, I could do that do. You probably couldn’t, because you are probably as lacking in the necessary mental strength as you are lacking in natural talent (and they actually have rather more natural talent than you do along with their superior mental attitude), but that’s what you think while you watch.
When cricket fans like me think of supremely gifted cricketers, we think of players like David Gower. Gower unforgettably (I watched it live on TV!) hit his first ball in test match cricket for four, as if he had already been playing cricket at the top level for half a lifetime. And when we think of cricketing talent maximisers, the men who make the absolute most of what they have, we think of Geoffrey Boycott.
Because they have to think so hard about their game, the talent maximisers tend to make the best coaches and the best commentators. Having made the most of their own talents, by analysing relentlessly what needs to be practiced and applied on the pitch, and having applied their conclusions with total discipline and single-mindedness, they are ideally prepared to bring the best also out of others with similarly imperfect natural gifts. The talent maximisers are likewise well prepared to explain what’s happening to us ignorant onlookers, because they have been analysing this relentlessly for the previous twenty years. Thus it is that Geoffrey Boycott, having been for so long such an effective and successful – if often hideously slow-scoring – opening batsman for his beloved Yorkshire and for England, is now a very skilled coach and one of the world’s most effective, sought-after and immediately recognisable commentators.
I don’t usually read sports biographies. Niagaras of cliché, most of them. But when I saw the names of Geoffrey Boycott and Leo McKinstry on the cover of what was obviously a widely selling paperback (if it wasn’t widely selling it wouldn’t have been in the sort of shop I saw it in) I didn’t hesitate. McKinstry is a writer already known to me, and probably to many other readers of this blog, in particular for his many Spectator pieces over the years. Boycott is Boycott, still a unique figure in English sport. He is still commentating now on international cricket, in his typically trenchant, no-nonsense style, and in that delightfully immitable Yorkshire accent of his. He is also a man who seems to proceed through the world surrounded by a force-field of controversy and confrontation, in both his cricketing and his personal life. Yorkshire cricket has been plunged into such rows in recent decades that no cricket fan however casual could fail to notice, and nor is any cricket fan like me unaware of the black cloud of tabloid coverage concerning Boycott’s trial and conviction for assaulting some woman or other, whom he was having a fling with, or something. Many, me included, used at first to suppose that Boycott was gay, but more recently a very different, very un-gay and now not nearly so private Boycott life hit the headlines. What was that all about? I knew that even at new-in-a-real-bookshop full price this book had to be worth a punt, and I was not wrong. → Continue reading: Geoff Boycott and the vices and virtues of selfishness
The annual jamboree that is known as the Wimbledon tennis fortnight gets going in a few days’ time. I watched the Roddick/Nadal match yesterday and was stunned at the sheer speed with which Andy Roddick, the US player, served the ball. On several occasions he hit serves of more than 140 mph. Jesus. It made me wonder whether there is any wisdom in John McEnroe’s suggestion that wooden racquets are brought back to put some more finesse into the sport. There is no doubt that modern sports technologies, including the materials used to make everything from tennis racquets to the heads of golf drivers, have evolved at an amazing pace. One reason why modern tennis championships have to use special gadgets to test that a ball has fallen inside a court boundary is because of the ferocious speed with which the ball can be hit. It is almost impossible for a line judge to see the fall accurately over the course of a long game. I play occasionally and bought a racquet in a sale that, to my amazement, can be used to hit the ball incredibly fast. But I wonder whether this makes for a better game overall.
In the meantime, here are some good reasons to watch the sport. As for the ladies, I am told they are rather keen on the young Spanish maestro, who threatens to dethrone Roger Federer, one of the greatest tennis players I have ever seen, from his spot as best player on grass.
A story here which says that fans of computer games are not all weird. I have never quite understood this whole media fixation with games just because they are on a screen rather than face-to-face. A lot of games draw on all kinds of creative energies and are arguably far better for cognitive development than just passively watching TV. As for the arguments about various social pathologies, well, this book is an excellent corrective to the social scolds, pointing out that games involving superheroes and vanquishing monsters is actually a very healthy thing.
Coming next, research shows that people who like to play poker with their mates on a Friday night, play tennis on a Sunday afternoon, do the Times crossword, are also normal. (Sarcasm alert).
Of course, by some yardsticks of social behaviour, gamers, or other hobbyists, are “weird”, but then what counts as normal, exactly?
Personally, I think the world could use a bit more eccentricity, not less.
I am glad to see that a long-standing US friend of mine, Russell E. Whitaker, is back posting to his blog, which has had a bit of a haitus due to the man’s shift from California to New York and his being incredibly busy with work. Russell writes a lot and has a lot of knowledge of martial arts. Thanks to him, I started to go to Bujinkan classes in London’s Hammersmith. It is great fun and an extremely useful set of skills about self-defence, although physically tough as well to learn. Unfortunately, due to work reasons – I had to work late in the evenings last year – I was not able to attend as much as I liked last year but that has changed and I intend to resume. In the meantime, I have started to fence. Fencing, I find, is even more physically demanding than Bujinkan (yes, really). Initially, I am learning to use the foil, a very light sword where you score if you hit the opponent on certain parts of the body. Depending on which type of sword one uses, you score differently by hitting certain body parts. Of course fencers wear lots of protection these days so there is little chance of getting injured although you cannot afford to be reckless. I find it incredibly good for eye-hand co-ordination. I have also learned that one needs to do lots of stretching exercises since fencing requires people to be flexlible. My knee joints felt pretty sore the following morning after a class. It is a good incentive to get really fit.
Our lead instructor is a Frenchman – French seems to be the language of fencing – and another instructor is a Hungarian. More than half of the class are women, who are often much better than the men.
On the subject of fencing, we all have our favourite films. There are some great sword fighting scenes in Cyrano de Bergerac, Le Bossu, and in the excellent Ridley Scott film, The Duellists (starring Harvey Keitel).
For those interested in fencing as a sport, here’s a book worth looking at. But in the end, if you want to have a go, you have to go to a class. One word of warning: the kit can be expensive, so it is best to go to a few classes, use the class stuff to see if you like it first.
As a child, I was indifferent at team sports – especially rugby union – and my preference was and is for individualistic games like golf, tennis, squash, martial arts (Bujinkan and fencing), or the odd game of poker (I guess some card games like Bridge count as a team game of sorts). One exception to the Pearce Crapness at Team Games was cricket. I loved playing it, unless some sadist of a captain put me on the boundary at point on a chilly afternoon with no prospect of a bat or bowl. I do not play much any more. My fielding was one of the best parts of my game: I once took a flying catch off a batsman who was beginning to rack up a big score and the catch was the pivotal point in the game. Our lot won. There is also the sensual pleasure of hitting a cover drive on the ‘sweet spot’ of the bat. You get a similar tingle down the spine when you do that in other sports, such as baseball. But cricket was my great team sporting love if only for the entirely selfish reason that I was just about competent at it.
I was reminded of all this by this excellent piece in the Daily Telegraph today. Like the author of that piece, I played cricket at a state school; cricket is being taught and played less in the public sector education system, to the detriment of the national game. Personally, as an advocate of private schooling and of reducing, not raising, the school-leaving age, I would not want to moan if the sport is taught less if that is what the parents, and just as importantly, the pupils, want (some kids hate team sports so much it has scarred their memories of schooling for life). But I would like to think that in a genuine private sector school system, where parents can use their consumer power to drive up standards, that the Greatest Game Known to Man would flourish a bit more.
I would be interested to know what fellow cricket nuts and Samizdata conspirators, Brian Micklethwait and Michael Jennings, have to think about this. Brian recently linked to this book, which looks very much worth a read.
“The only way that that Liverpool is going to win the [English Premier] League is if Robert Mugabe is counting the points.”
An anonymous commenter on the Guardian’s sports pages, arguably the best bits of that outfit.
It is increasingly clear that much of the current wave of repression is occurring not in spite of the Olympics but actually because of the Olympics.
– Amnesty International which has detailed numerous arrests and the harassment of Chinese civil rights activists
Yesterday afternoon, and again this afternoon, my hopes of getting a day’s worth of stuff done in a day, and then another day’s stuff in another day, were dashed by cricket, on the television. This was no ordinary cricket. This was not, for example, English county cricket, which has just begun again, and whose first round of matches concluded today, mostly in draws made inevitable by the gloomy, drizzly English weather. I did not get to see those two test match under-achievers but county supremos, Mark Ramprakash and Graham Hick, score their inevitable opening match centuries, in front of the usual tiny smattering of chilled spectators. No, what I saw was something quite different to all that. What I saw were two games on the first two days of something called the Indian Premier League.
On the face of it, this was not cricket of any great profundity, being twenty-overs-each-way slogfests, quite lacking in the long-drawn-out subtleties of five day test cricket or four day English county cricket or Australian Sheffield Shield matches. Nevertheless the Indian Premier League is something extremely profound. It signals the emergence of India as the superpower of cricket that it now is. Everyone in cricket agrees. It’s a new era.
India is not the cricket superpower because of its players, excellent though those players are. Yes, Sachin Tendulkar will soon become the greatest run-getter in test match history, when he overtakes the West Indian Brian Lara. But Australia are still, despite the recent retirements of Warne and McGrath, what they have long been, the best international side in the world. No, what makes India special is the number of its fans. I am fond of saying that there are more cricket fans in India than there are people in Europe, and my friend and fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings would have corrected me long ago if this was wrong. And now, these fans are starting seriously to shift the centre of gravity of cricket.
The Indian Premier League doesn’t just feature Indian players. Their plan is to make the IPL have a place in cricket much like that the of the English Premier League in soccer, namely something played by the best players in the world, and watched and followed all over the world. And now, it has started. The atmosphere I got from watching these two games on my television was of a big, big country, self-confident enough not just to offer the world a compelling sporting product but to share the glory of it all with whoever in the world has the nerve and the determination to grab it.
And it so happens that the visitors are seizing their chances, so far rather better than the locals. Perhaps the Indians are weighed down a little by the burden of what they must be telling themselves is cricket history in the making, and are taking it just that much too seriously, whereas the visitors just see it as the chance of some fun and some (in some cases a lot of) highly welcome cash. Warne and McGrath have both forced their tired old bodies to have one final outing, I notice.
In the opening game, the Kolkata Knight Riders crushed the Bangalore Royal Challengers, from whom there was alas not much of a challenge, and the result was settled long before the end of the game, as often happens in these types of games. But New Zealander Brendon McCullum nevertheless got the IPL off to a suitably headline grabbing start by making the biggest individual score ever recorded in a twenty-twenty game. And today, another rapid not out century by Australian run-machine Mike Hussey was also the difference between the two sides, as the Chennai Super Kings set an even bigger target, which the Kings XI Punjab made a decent stab at but in the end couldn’t match. The Punjab side would have got closer if their top scorer, another Australian, had hung around longer and hit some more boundaries.
No wonder the best of England’s county cricketers are envious. They can hardly wait to get involved.
There are genuine fears that cricket is not so much being played as used up, and that spectators may in due course get bored with all this vulgar slogging, and instead of turning to more refined and antique versions of cricket, may instead switch their allegiances to other sports. But good or bad, this is certainly an event, not just in the history of cricket, but, because of the emergence-of-India-as-a-superpower angle, in the very history of the world.
I chanced upon these excitements (by coincidence immediately after posting this about the IPL at my personal blog) on something called Setanta Sports 1, channel number 34 on my digital TV, which is sometimes “encrypted” (i.e. it doesn’t work), but sometimes not (i.e. it does!). Can anyone tell me what further games I might be able to watch here in England on Setanta, given that I am not a subscriber to Setanta and do not plan to be? I get very little live cricket in England to watch, unless I visit a pub. I would love to be able to watch more of this tournament in my home.
The Olympics are a vulgar, ruinous hullabaloo the chief functions of which are to facilitate graft on a spectacular scale and to act as a vehicle for the promotion of despotic values. They are, at best, unedifying and, at worst, intolerable.
Poor Roma. The Italian football team – which is actually pretty good – has so far not had a good time of it against Manchester Utd. And with Ronaldo, the Portugese ace forward scoring a hatful of goals for ManU, the pain gets worse. Even more so when this young man, who hails from the island of Madeira, not only possesses incredible skill on the ball, but relishes sticking the ball between an opponent’s legs (known as “nutmegging”), flicking the ball in such a way as to bamboozle a defender, etc. Electrifying stuff to watch. Ronaldo, to an extent that many highly-paid players do not, understands that football these days is competing for wallets and time with all manner of entertainment.
But some of those who come up against him do not like it very much. I can sympathise, up to a point. But I do not think this man sets out to grind his opponents’ faces into the dust. It simply his way of playing the game. If the current generation of footballers cannot take it when a winger players coruscating football, god knows how they would have handled the late George Best, who used to take on opponents for fun, even put his foot on the ball to take a breather, then make a face and challenge them like a matador (he could also play a bit).
This sort of stuff does raise issues of sportsmanship, though. There is a fine line, not always easy to draw, between outrageous skill on the one hand and taking the mickey out of an opponent, on the other. Sport, as Brian noted the other day, can tell us a bit about life in general. Great skill is something to marvel at, but we generally do not like taking the piss. But on this occasion, I do not think that the arguably best footballer of our times is doing that. I was far too young to have seen Best, Pele or Di Stefano in their prime, but I am grateful, even as a supporter of another team, to watch this wizard weave such magic.
What Sport Tells Us About Life: Bradman’s Average, Zidane’s Kiss and Other Sporting Lessons
Ed Smith
Penguin books, 2008, 190 pp., £14.99
I rarely buy new books in hardback at full price, because I rarely want any particular book. Usually I am just looking for something that is interesting, and prefer to soften the financial blows by taking my chances in the remainder and charity shops. But something about Ed Smith’s little book appealed to me, despite its combination of brevity and a high price-tag. Partly it was that the first three people quoted on the cover saying how good it was were Mike Atherton, Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Michael Brearley, all of them big names if you are an England cricket fan like me, and all people whose opinions I greatly respect. Ed Smith himself is also a name, if you follow England cricket, because he is one of those many unfortunates who played a handful of test matches (his were in 2006 against South Africa), but who was then, somewhat unluckily, discarded. He now captains Middlesex. On the other hand, maybe he won’t prove to be so unfortunate in the longer run, because England batting places are now up for grabs again, following several batting debacles in recent months, and Ed Smith, who read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, is just the kind of thoughtful, intelligent type – like the aforementioned Michaels, Atherton and Brearley – whom selectors like to have trained-up and ready to take over as England captain, should they be caught short for one. There are a few broad hints in his book to suggest that Ed Smith has not given up on such hopes himself. He certainly still hopes to play for England again. Meanwhile, I was not disappointed by this book, nor did I feel that the fifteen pounds I spent on it was wasted or bestowed upon an unworthy cause. There are basically two big reasons why I liked it.
The first reason is simply that Ed Smith writes not just about sport, but, as his title suggests, about the psychology, sociology and history of sport, and about psychology, sociology and history in general, merely illustrated by sport, in the sort of relaxedly middlebrow way that I particularly enjoy. Recently I have been doing some teaching, having always wanted to, and there is a lot of the teacher in Smith and in his family. You can entirely see why he is now a county captain. → Continue reading: Sports lessons
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
