Every goal ends an old match and begins a new one. That’s the hardest thing to recreate, after the fact, when you read about heroic comebacks: the sheer tremendousness of the goals, the way whatever happened took place in a reality that was totally conditioned by what had gone before, and not conditioned at all by the (still-unforeseeable) events to come, which to us are the most famous, and hence most inevitable-seeming, part of the story. 1-0 is a completely different universe, psychologically, from 0-0, or from 2-0. And by the time you reach the improbable airless heights of 3-0 or 4-0, you know the match is over, it would be crazy to expect anything else, the competitive game has been definitively killed off by the last goal or by the goal before that, and what you’re now watching is a kind of limp exhibition whose sole function is to fill a quotient of remaining time.
When it doesn’t work out that way—I mean when you’re in the moment, at the time, watching Newcastle score four goals—it’s a stunning feeling, 
because the whole expectation-climate that’s already configured itself one way in your mind, and then reconfigured itself, each time getting more definite and less alterable, is suddenly disassembling itself in a way that suggests your whole habit of reliance on empirical observation may be fatally flawed, or even basically absurd. Assuming it’s not happening to your team, it’s a giddy feeling. But afterward, when “4-4” has been blasted to Mars and back in radioactive type, so that the only possible reality-configuration is the last one—that is, the amazing one that ended the game—you lose that sense of certainty-taking-itself-apart that made the experience of watching so wonderful. You know you saw an incredible feat, but its very incredibleness makes it timeless and monumental. It feels foreordained, like everything incredible.
I’ve been thinking a lot, in an irresponsible sort of way, about storytelling. I’ve gotten the impression over the last couple of days that, while we all know Newcastle-Arsenal was an insane, historic, staggering game, the sort of game we might not see again for years, it’s actually been a little easier to talk about Chelsea-Liverpool. Admittedly, that’s based on a completely subjective and unscientific survey of the tone of newspaper articles and people I follow on Twitter. But even a lot of the Newcastle stuff I did see involved, for instance, looking at how the result impacted the title race—in other words, how it it fit into an already-established, ongoing media narrative that didn’t require any imagination or effort to re-enter. In the same way, all the “Torres was rubbish!!” pieces hooked into a narrative that had already been proposed and set up by the pre-match hype. Again, this is completely subjective, but it even seemed like it was a relief to be able to talk about a match that lent itself so well to the pull of familiar storylines after the mad sui generis thing that was Newcastle’s comeback.
Isn’t this, on some level, a failure of storytelling? I’m not totally comfortable asserting that, because there are some great storytellers in soccer writing, from Galeano to the Guardian, and obviously the hegemony of the hype-friendly media narrative is built on more than a shortcoming of literary technique. But just in very general terms, isn’t story something a lot of sportswriting struggles with? I mean story at the simplest level, the this-happened-and-then-this-happened level, the level of basic immersion and suspense. Compared to, say, fiction, which is deeply invested in being able to create those sorts of total, head-spinning reality-transformations that a goal imposes on a match (Edmond survived! Esther has smallpox! Mr. Darcy isn’t an asshole!), sportswriting is generally allergic to suspense. It has to be; it’s journalism, or at least an outgrowth of journalism, where the goal is to give the reader the most important information as quickly and efficiently as possible, not to play on her anxieties and provide an emotional payoff. Even the kind of long-form magazine piece that does trade in payoff will often start out with the end of the story: “Before the drugs got him, before the drink and the strippers and the countless strung-out nights in fleabitten hotels, before the nightmares and the doubts, Dominic Corcoran was a miniature golfer.” And as for the weekly, fake-wise, one-sentence-per-paragraph columnists, isn’t their characteristic approach to story to drum it home as clumsily and insistently as possible?
There’s probably no room to imagine a different genre or tradition of sportswriting in Our Current Media Culture, bless its dear inescapable talons, but really as a game more than anything, I wonder what one would look like. What would it mean to open up a newspaper or a blog and find a bunch of pieces that threw out the familiar conventions and tried to give you a vivid sense of what it was actually like to watch a match? What would the conventions of that genre be? Obviously it would be a supplement to mainstream sportswriting, not a replacement—when you just want the facts, you just want the facts. But there’s more to the game than the facts, and sometimes an overreliance on the facts can leave you not very well equipped to think about an astonishing thing you witnessed. As it is, all our narratives are narratives of information; even the airy-bogus, England’s Brave John Terry-type stuff has the compressed feel of journalism working at speed (“this is what you need to know about John Terry; it’s four words long”). So call this an instructive pipe-dream: Would our thoughts about the game have more nuance if more writers were invested in storytelling—in producing narratives of suspense?
“Reality” is obviously too broad a word here, but “climate of expectation” feels too narrow, even though that’s really the significant thing, isn’t it, when you’re watching a match, what you allow yourself to expect.
See note 1.
That’s also overstating the case, because technically you know a comeback is possible. But isn’t that what it feels like, watching it? Like if you threw a ball up in the air it might just keep on rising?
To the point that French TV actually quasi-made up a match-fixing story involving Interpol and Tomáš Rosický’s checking account, of all wonders.
by Brian Phillips · February 7, 2011
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I’ve thought about that quite a bit considering my natural inclinations as a writer, but always stop short of attempting something in the vein you suggest. There’s some fear involved, as there’s no obvious place to for me to post an attempt at vivid storytelling involving a soccer match (and really, with certain muscles either atrophied or under-developed, who knows how good it will be), and I’m almost positive it it will turn out to be for my own edification and nothing more.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that really, I’m just wary about jamming pieces that range too far from the conventional into my little corner of soccerdom. I don’t want to scare off the few souls I’ve been able to attract.
These are terrible, terrible, excuses.
Which leads me to wonder when you’ll be writing the groundbreaking effort in this genre, Brian.
That is why we have http://www.runofplay.com, isn’t it?
Having tried, and probably failed, to write something like a match report after the Newcastle-Arsenal match, your question here is extra-maddening. In a way, though, I can say that I see my job on the blog I write as stuck somewhere between “just the facts” and emotional…er…manipulation? Or something like that.
Are we wanting fiction from our commentary? Do we desire perspective-shifting prose from the newspapers? I suggest that we do not and have to agree, on a certain level, with ‘Georgian’s’ post just above, I would like comments from commentators (i.e., Martin Samuel, Brian Philips) and narratives from reporters. The events on Tyne do not befit themselves to narrative; they are too dense, to contingent–to be frank. What story would one tell, what narrative would do justice to such madness? I suggest that one some days after. Not unlike Barcelona v RM earlier in the year–the Times most certainly did not run with ‘Barcelona as Slimemold’, ROP did. But the times was on the ground, in the moment, reporting the occasion-as-event, Philips et al. provide perspective through narrative and (non senstaionalist) metaphor.
I appreciate the questioning, Brian, but it seems to come down to a blindingly simple question: can perspective, which the sort of narrative you’re curious about, be provided through sublimity-as-event? Or does narrative require a species of perspective which necessarily demands more than immediate experience of the event? That is, our best narratives (as you quite rightly say) are not simply narratives of information and fact, rather they are narratives, partially, of myth; and myth is never born ‘in the moment’.
So, the stuff about Tyne Side will, for the moment revolve around the title race, but that’s cus’ perspective is obtained through percolation, end of.
I definitely had a recap-factory at my site back in the day, where I peppered a certain formula with hints of sarcasm and smidgens of suspense. This probably is not exactly what you are referring to, but my goal at the time was to churn our more “flavorful” and “creative” match reports. I still am obsessed with tracking down “he who shall not be named” that churns out recaps for ESPN.
The formula went like this: (1) First Paragraph – theme such as “comeback, dab draw, goalfest”, final score, and crucial moment. (2) Second Paragraph: condense the opening 20 minutes. Lots of pressure? Hoof long balls? Domination by one side? Sprinkle in key moments. Third Paragraph: condense next 20 minutes. Fourth Paragraph: last five minutes (generally when lots of goals are scored) and half-time assessment of teams & coach. Repeat. Recycle. Reuse. Abuse.
This formula eerily parallels screenwriting courses for suspense films – the first fifteen minutes have to catch the attention, at the 45 minute mark you need a twist, at the 75 minute mark you need a dead body (if you didn’t have one at first), and by 90 minutes try to be done or wrapping up.
Have both been crafted in response to the human attention span? Or have they crafted the human attention span?
I’m pretty sure this Newcastle-Arsenal match you speak of never happened. #continuesdrinking
I sometimes read stale minute-by-minute reports to get a feeling for the ebb and flow of the game and a second-hand report of the viewing experience. Also, sometimes, if the game was spectacular, I’ll read a minute-by-minute report to relive the experience.
Monsignor Waddle came across a simple print depicting a prince in armour, riding a winged horse with a striped scarf about its underparts, couching his lance against a monster with a lion’s head and mane, a goat’s body, a snake’s tail and the legend “Gilbert’s Sausages: Fry-up Free for all” written down his crimson sleeve. Monsieur Wenger, a man tall of stature and lined of complexion, with bleak tartan stockings and a black silk hat, wore dog-skin gloves against the biting cold and chanted over and again “mensch willtu leben sieglich and bei Gott bleiben ewiglich” as his cohorts galloped, puffed, cavorted and ultimately fell down in the glutinous mud.
Ah, its not so easy; I think i may have given some of the plot away already with that last bit.
@Simon Curtis Yup, these are my readers.
Fantastic stuff as per usual, Brian. Though as has been mentioned, we do at least have The Run of Play as a source of story.
As for scaring people off with the somewhat less than conventional, for whatever a minor data point might be worth I’ve found that some of my ramblings that have gone over best have been ones I put up entirely terrified they would result in a fleeing for the exits. Those occasional departures from the norm have still been largely derivative of some source or other, as much as anything because it already seems entirely self indulgent to be leaving the comfortable confines of expected sports reportage or bloggery or what-have-you. Still, I do think there’s room for–and a need for–better storytelling in sports, and I think there might be more openness to it than many would expect on a gut level. Which just circles things back to the existence of The Run of Play.
As creative and spirited as the world of journalism and writing can be, it’s still governed by a fairly mundane set of rules that are protected by fierce editors and jaded copy desks the world over. It’s their expectations that govern the world of text that comprises their domain, and so storytelling in the sports narrative is for us to play with. I say we try it. Or continue trying it. Something.
I feel like your “live-blogs” for the Barca-Man U and Barca-Arsenal matches from the Champions League laid the groundwork for what you’re getting at here. Live blogs in general seem to accomplish something new in sports writing/commentary. I find myself re-reading them after a particularly exciting match just to recapture the suspense and emotions that I felt while in the midst of watching it. Anyway, I can’t think of anyone else I would like to see explore the territory that you’re poking around at here.
P.S. Nice “yup, these are my readers” Simmons echo on the above comment. I sometimes wonder how much crossover you guys have in your readers. And although your writing skill, scope, and insight far outweigh his, I feel there is an element of kinship in your shared sense of passion and playfulness.
im going to be honest. most of the articles written on here i understand pretty clearly, but i don’t think i understand what i just read… but for some reason i know i like it
I can attest to the pernicious influence of the copy desk in traditional newspapers.
In the early 90s, I was a sportswriter, condemned as usual to game story after game story (which is how my compatriots at the time put it – CONDEMNED); and yet I found the game story to be liberating, since here one is reporting on something that actually happened, which people care about deeply, but which doesn’t matter (in essentialist/survivalist terms) at all.
Why write about sports? Because you can actually write about them – at least that was my idea. I believed I could convey some of the physical beauty, some of the emotional bindings, and some of the social reverberations of the game all in one swipe.
Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I failed. Inevitably, though, there was the literalist discussion with a copy editor (“You say here that blood fell from the sky like rain after the local hero struck out on a mundane change-up. Can I verify that somewhere?”). But I don’t think that discussion should be inevitable – there are other kinds of truth, inchoate, present but not sated by mere presence. We should encounter sport as a human truth, and write about it in that way. You do, Brian; Ayjay and Suprinan and all the others do. I do, when I get off my dead ass and write something.
Let’s get to it.
Earlier today, I decided to try and write an explanation of my experience with Newcastle-Arsenal; I enjoyed a surreal kind of awfulness since I downloaded the game after it ended (spoiler-free, of course), got to halftime, decided to save myself some time, checked the Guardian and immediately felt very ill.
Speaking of story telling in the media, two observations on Match of the Day: since when does it tell you what minute the action that you are watching occurred in? It really changes the MOTD experience from its out-of-time gloriousness, for me…plus horribly eradicates the production crew’s ability to fabricate an exciting game from utter dross.
Also, Johnny Motson concocts the weirdest sentences: “well he’s cross, Van Der Vaart, since he put the first one away, or the second of the match, implicitly.” How to Construct Awkward Sentences: Volume 1.
[PS, if my avatar failed to show again, I will NOT be happy. Massive consequences for all involved]
Brilliant stuff, Brian, and it’s something I’ve grappled with a lot while writing match reports and stuff (I’m a sportswriter from India). The need to sum up the entire game in your lead is such a pain, and destroys any element of suspense or storytelling.
I don’t know if you’ve read Neville Cardus, who wrote on cricket in the (Manchester) Guardian either side of World War 2. His style might seem a little dated now, but he was a brilliant storyteller. Do read him if you can.
Could it be a problem with the sport itself? Cardus’s cricket narratives have been mentioned, and I’d toss a mention of Roger Angell for baseball in there too, but could those sports – like American football – lend themselves more readily to such treatment by being pre-divided into short, discrete temporal units? After every innings, out, down, time out or base won, we can take stock of exactly where we are and determine – measure to the inch in some cases – exactly what each team needs to do in the game’s next few quanta of time.
With football we can’t do that; blink, let alone think, and you might just miss the one match-defining event that people will be trying and failing to recapture for hours – maybe even decades – thereafter.
“What happened?” is easy. Just read the police incident report. It’s Lorraine Bracco’s “How did that make you feel?” to Gandolfini that’s the tricky bit.
Do you think its really necessary to have this kind of storytelling in order for football tp produce narrative? It seems to me that this is a piece thats really about sportswriting (which is hardly an insipired comment I know), and we should perhaps break this idea down a little:
By storytelling we either mean building a piece of writing that builds suspense or simply writing about football in a descriptive way (it seems as though Brian was going for the first and a lot of the comments for the second).
Both of these things are probably important to storytelling (unless your Tao Lin) but less so to this media narrative thing that you mention. You say that the Newcastle-Arsenal game doesn’t lend itself to being hooked into an existing narrative as the Chelsea-Liverpool saga, but it does, and has.
Arsenal throw away a lead and show defensive weaknesses, opposition ‘gets in the faces’ and Arsenal collapse again. Newcaslte go from a team of zombies that no longer have Andy Carroll (and almost certain ‘relegation candidates’) to a team of dragons that breath a mixture of fire and broken glass – there not very good footballers but just look at their ‘team spirit’! The fate of Joey Barton’s inclusion in whatever story is produced probably depended on what happened with the Diaby tackle (if he gets it right he’s reformed, if he akes Diaby out and Diaby cries then he’ll never change), etc etc. Everyone is just as lazy as poiting out that Torres’s body language is off and absolutely integrates itself into the various narratives that we already have.
What i’m trying to say is that to suggest that theres no storytelling is proably correct, but this does not mean that a story is not being told regardless. The John Terry is English lion is lazy and no one seems to have written a paper back where he saves the world from Islamic communists, but the story has emerged from somewhere (maybe not that EXACT story) and these plot lines will continue to reproduce themselves.
So my question is where are they coming from and what do you propose this kind of story telling/sports reportage can contribute to or develop or change what is already there?
@BD-80 I too am a huge fan of the ManU-Chelsea and Barca-ManU live blogs on this site. They brilliantly captured the suspense and emotions of watching a game while simultaneously in love and on the run from the mafia, which has sadly not survived the ESPN sports journalism age.
I haven’t made it through my first cup of coffee this morning, so it’s quite possible I missed the boat on this one- but isn’t the game itself the best method of story-telling? Like seeing the Grand Canyon (and if you haven’t seen it, you may not understand what I mean- but I think that’s the point)- there are no words to capture it’s everything like when you are standing before it… it becomes that unfortunate situation when you realize cliches actually have validity- and you hate yourself for agreeing with them.
I adore this blog most because like all great writers you hold high expectations for your readers- you don’t treat them like they’re stupid…. and I’m truly despising my word choices this morning, so I’ll cease. In my defense, that Chelsea v. Liverpool game has left me in the Doldrums. Seriously. I’m all for Liverpool (they’re my team!), yet the entire game my brain kept telling me- Chelsea’s going to win, Chelsea’s going to win- as much as my heart protested… then they didn’t. So why do I still feel like Chelsea won? *headdesk*
I think that a significant issue is the ability of fans to actually attend the matches. Kári Tulinius touched on this when referring to reading the minute-by-minute accounts of matches, in order to revisit the scene and the emotions it created.
Many football fans either cannot attend a match live due to cost/circumstance etc., or cannot view such a match live, due to the broadcasting restrictions (in the UK at least). Whilst many of us commenting on here would devour any such attempt at ‘Football Prose’ – in a way I suspect many of us have with books like Nick Hornby’s ‘Fever Pitch’ – the majority of football fans prefer a blow-by-blow account in order to supplement the fact that they weren’t there in person.
This could also potentially be due to shows such as BBC’s Match of the Day portraying an oft different view of how the game played out.This is something which is to an extent unavoidable in a 20 minute highlight reel but which shouldn’t pose such a problem in a half/full page spread.
I do wonder whether the quality of journalism we are exposed to hinders our expectations of what a good sports report is. As consumers however, I think we would be more open to less solid-fact reporting if other media formats were able to provide us with a more accurate portrayal of what actually went on.
PS. Howay the Toon! Cracking result!
Oddly enough, some of the most suspenseful football-storytelling that I have read has been re-tellings of great games of the pre-TV past. Such as some of the brilliant 30s and 40s stuff in Andrew Ward’s *Football’s Strangest Matches*: http://www.amazon.com/Footballs-Strangest-Matches-Extraordinary-Football/dp/1861052928/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1297174065&sr=1-1
Reading The Guardian’s minute by minute reports after the game has ended is the football fans equivalent of a bedtime story for a child.
You can thrill to the unexpected twists safe in the knowledge that you know how it all ends.
@Russell That’s a good analogy. Earlier today I was watching on TV a recap of this last round of Bundesliga matches. Even though I knew the results of the Bayern – Köln game I still was thrilled to see underdogs’ second-half comeback victory. That was very much a bed-time story experience. I knew the result and wanted to experience the glow of seeing the fallen great power of Köln beating the ultimate top dogs Bayern (whose admirable conduct during WWII keeps me from being able to truly hate them).
However, the next match recapped was Mönchengladbach – Stuttgart. Like many Icelanders I’ve supported Stuttgart since the days of Ásgeir Sigurvinsson and Eyjólfur Sverrisson. They’ve been having a dreadful season and are fighting to get out of the relegation zone, where Mönchengladbach also lie. The recap was delivered well, and I genuinely was thrilled and joyed to see Stuttgart pull off an identical 3-2 comeback. I went on an emotional rollercoaster. Because I didn’t know the outcome and the presenter was careful to give nothing away, I had a five minute trip through the highs and lows of a full match. It was quite enjoyable, but I would have hated to sit through this as a Mönchengladbach supporter. I think that may be part of why sports journalism avoids the dramatic retelling, because if your team does badly, then it can be near-traumatizing.
Yes. Also: who goes first?
@BD-80 – What I was going to say
I guess you want something more GONZO about the whole reporting, isnt it? I find the whole concept of gonzo journalism very fascinating, i mean if you really want to report reality you have to go out there and do it, let yourself get coloured by the moment and all that it entails and only then get out and report it with all the colours and textures of the past intact!
I find that knowing the outcome while watching – either the full game or the highlights – ruins the experience for me, all the ebb and flow disappears into a wait for the goals I know are inevitable. In much the same way that I avoid films in which the ending is obvious and inevitable within the first ten minutes (much of Hollywood’s output actually). A big part of the appeal of sport is that “anything can happen in the next half hour”, or indeed 90 minutes plus stoppage time. When the possibilities are narrowed down to a 2-1 home win, the journey to that result inevitably loses the sense of possibility. Match reports, almost without fail, seem to begin with not only the final score, but a list of goalscorers and the time of each goal. Even so, it does seem that the reports err on the side of summary, rather than narrative, perhaps not in intent, but in language, and unlike a good storyteller, the writers usually fail to shape their writing into a dramatic rhythm. To be fair to them, they do often have to write most of the piece as the game is taking place and deliver the finished piece in the immediate aftermath of the game, but match reports that end, rather than begin with the final score, and that aspire to more than a simple recap, should not be impossible for those writers with both the ambition and the time to craft a range of Hitchcockian match reports (Blondes and MacGuffins optional). After all, as much as the media moguls might deny it, we’re all looking for something a little bit new and different.
As for the Newcastle-Arsenal game, which I was fortunate enough to attend, I suspect that the experience of those seeing the highlights may well have been very different to the experience of seeing the game unfold before us (beyond the usual differences). If you knew the score beforehand, then perhaps you saw the second half as a Newcastle rally, roaring back from humiliation towards the destiny of an heroic draw. If you watched Match of the Day ignorant of the result, then at 4-0, the simple fact that the game was on first, and Lineker’s introduction to the programme, most likely alerted you to future surprises (although having said that, in the early weeks of the season MOTD had an annoying propensity to schedule Chelsea’s latest tedious 6-0 walkover as the lead game). However, at the game I personally didn’t really believe that Newcastle could get anything from the game until the 75 minute mark when they made it 3-4. Although the sending off on 49 minutes was the first bit of good news for the home fans since the announcement of Sunderland’s defeat before kick-off, and the first moment where we began to think “this might not be over”, Newcastle certainly weren’t that much better in the second half, the main difference being that Arsenal were no longer tearing Newcastle’s defence to shreds. In the second half Best was getting caught offside as often as in the first half, Jonas was still as much of a headless chicken, Barton was still totally ineffective when Arsenal had the ball, and Tiote was still the most effective player in black & white. At times it felt like the only change was that the home crowd finally got into the game, and the Ref kept giving Newcastle penalties.
The point I think I’ve been trying to make in the second paragraph is that your experience of the game will be shaped by a number of factors and even writing an engaging narrative match report will perhaps twist the narrative of the game by the simple fact that it is written or at least revised after the final whistle. The first half of the 4-4 draw was completely one-sided, so much that some left the stadium (although not as many as the “media” would have you believe), and we all know – storytellers of not – that writing a boring first half of the story is not the way to engage your readers. The inevitable perspective of knowing the outcome will perhaps always influence the writer unless they are very aware of that fact.
@Sean Spence
Genius – if I remember correctly. Get off your dead ass.