Brand on the World Cup
One of the highlights of this World Cup for me has been Russell Brand and his weekly column in the Guardian sports section. He’s a fantastic writer. I hope the columns aren’t ghosted; I get the impression they aren’t. He’s got a turn of phrase that I’d kill for…
And his apprentice don’t inspire much hope either – Steve McClaren has been present throughout this drab catastrophe, blushing in his shorts like a suspect PE teacher dogged by vicious rumour.
In the run up to the Portugal game, on the difference between Eriksson and Scolari:
I don’t want to harp on like a gigglesome Heat devotee about “magnetism” and “fellows” but the man has qualities that inspire admiration. He is bold where Sven is insipid; confident where Sven is meek. I imagine that after victories “Big” Phil strides, nude, into the team bath and embraces his charges, guffawing and proud as the gleeful players unwittingly release inadvertent spurts of grateful widdle.
Sven, I expect, enacts some nutless shuffle from tunnel to limo perhaps issuing handshakes to the more senior players. I bet he wears pants in the bath.
And this was my favourite, about Rooney’s substitution during the Sweden match. The imagery is fantastic:
How many pairs of boots did he remove on Tuesday? Every time the camera cut back to him he was petulantly tossing aside another boot. Was Sammy Lee acting as an obsessive-compulsive blacksmith re-shoeing him to prolong the outburst. It went on interminably. “There’s Rooney throwing down his boots in disgust.” It was like a tantrum from a centipede.
Posted on July 8th, 2006 at 12:00pm under Culture, media and sport
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• 3 Comments |
My guilty pleasure…I enjoyed the duly corrected:
Good presenter as well (yes, I’m fanatical enough to watch BBBM), although that’s an opinion not shared by most of the cognoscenti.
Although Brand was quite wrong when he was writing on the difference between British football and, say, that played in Latin countries. He argued that the Brits treated football as a job, while abroad it was a game, to be enjoyed.
He then followed this with a decently witty article built on this difference.
Unfortunately he was simply wrong. According to Gianluca Vialli, who, unlike Brand, has been a professional footballer, Britain has a football culture unique among manjor European nations – that it is a game to be played and not a job to be done. Vialli writes that, because for them it is a game, British players keep playing until the last minute, while Continental footballers ease off if the result looks beyond them as it would be an unprofessional waste to tire and risk injury. He writes that British footballers would train by playing full-blooded games if they could, rather than simply perform the required drills and then leave work and go home as the professional Continental footballers do.
[...] Brand doesn’t just tell rude jokes about Big Brother though. He is still on MTV (despite being sacked from it several times), and he now has a weekly radio programme on 6music. Justin at Chicken Yoghurt, though, likes him most for his World Cup column in The Guardian. [...]