A smaller world with Cup blogs
On the World Cup-themed website https://brazil.worldcupblog.org/group-f/rio-after-australia.html, a Brazilian man displays photos of himself, his friends, and mobs of Brazilians and Aussies partying down in Rio de Janeiro after the national team’s victory over Australia. A YouTube video link, naturally, is attached.
Floating deep in the archives of cyberspace, Brooding Persian (broodingpersian.blogspot.com), an anonymous Iranian woman, strikes a note of melancholy defiance as she muses on how “about 30 very gutsy women” managed to force their way into a soccer match in Iran, risking the scorn and “strange profanities” of the male fans who consider the sport a guys-only pastime.
Though the post was made more than a year ago, its themes reverberated through the World Cup’s opening rounds this month, as Iran played hard but was bounced early from the tournament. (See, for example, blogs.guardian.co.uk/worldcup06/2006/06/21/stoic_iranianstake_it_on_t he.html.)
Meanwhile, over at the Hoy Online blog out of Ecuador, Cecilia Merizalde of North Hollywood sends felicitations to her “beloved countrymen” for their World Cup victories and says how proud she is of her South American roots.
It’s a small, and rapidly shrinking, world this summer, at least if you’re a soccer fan with Internet access. If catastrophes such as the Sept. 11 attacks and the Indian Ocean tsunami showed the Web’s potential to link humanity in times of tragedy, this summer’s showcase of the “beautiful game” highlights that same ability in times of global carousing.
For those of us who follow soccer with the passionate devotion of a Sufi mystic, this timely convergence of sport and technology is akin to an ecstatic prophesy fulfilled. (OK, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but bear with me; this thing happens only once every four years.)
Internet coverage of the World Cup tournament, being held in Germany, provides an almost ideal synthesis of form, content and function. At its best, soccer (hereafter referred to, in a Benetton-like spirit of planetary harmony, as “football”), is sinuous and fluid. For all its ingenious strategizing, it’s mostly a game of spontaneous invention as it unfolds in uninterrupted 45-minute halves. It’s the athletic equivalent of stream-of-consciousness writing, and its all-time greatest artists -- Garrincha, Pele, Maradona, Cruyff, George Best -- practically scribbled “Finnegans Wake” in the sod with their cleats.
The Internet, likewise, is a technological platform whose logical circuitry camouflages its mainly intuitive and serendipitous nature (when it’s not busy flashing pop-up ads and spewing out spam, that is). Like football, blogging captures and replicates the ebbs and flows of how people actually think and act (and talk) in real time. That makes it a fine medium for tracking the World Cup’s virtuosic meanderings, as well as the related thoughts they trigger on the social status of Iranian women, the bizarre game-day apparel of Japanese fans or the Brazilian striker Ronaldo’s body-fat ratio.
“That’s one of the reasons I like soccer: it always leads you somewhere else,” says John Turnbull, editor and publisher of the Global Game (www.theglobalgame.com) and a connoisseur of football-as-metaphor-for-life websites.
“Somewhere else” is precisely where football is taking us this summer, as hundreds (thousands? tens of thousands?) of World Cup-related blogs and pod-casts crisscross the planet at the speed of thought.
The best place to follow the Cup if you’re stuck on the job sans television is one of the relatively limited number of sites offering blow-by-blow commentary on the games. The best of them aren’t mere recitals of kicks and passes, but colorful, insightful soliloquies -- a kind of performance art -- that rival anything the TV talking heads or traditional newspaper columnists can dish up.
The best share three features:
* They update their postings early and often; in blogs, as in football, speed counts;
* They quickly incorporate fan-blogger comments and respond to questions e-mailed in by fans following the action;
* They weave multiple strands of commentary into their narratives: pop-culture subplots, side debates on individual players’ performances, or an account of the blog author’s attempt to scarf down a bowl of ramen noodles during the halftime break.
One of the most adept sites in this emerging blogging sub-genre is Britain’s Guardian newspaper. For football fanatics, following Scott Murray’s June 21 Guardian report on the Portugal-Mexico match was the journalistic version of watching Yo-Yo Ma slice through Bach’s cello suites: “Simao wriggles down the left, skidaddles into the box, turning two Mexicans this way then that, then lays the ball across to the Lindsay Davenport lookalike, who opens his body and sidefoots the ball high and fast past Sanchez.”
Between updates, Murray also found time to moderate an amusing reader symposium on the physical endowments of Mexican national team star Rafael Marquez (“Could easily be an Antonio Banderas body double,” gushed one contributor) and a running joke based on reader “translations” of Latin celebrities’ names into English (“Antonio Banderas = Tony Flags,” “Placido Domingo = Peaceful Sunday,” etc.).
Though the comments sometimes strain to be snarkier-than-thou, the Guardian site is generally livelier and more fun than English-language competitors such as that of the New York Times. It also impresses with its sheer number of contributors from all over the world. But it unimpressed with its decision to prominently post a picture of England midfielder David Beckham puking his guts out after scoring in Sunday’s torrid England-Ecuador match, under the headline, “The sweet taste of success.” Yuck.
The World Cup Blog network impressively includes blogs on all 32 countries in the tournament, plus one on the referees. Alas, some of the live commentary, submitted by fans across the world, is written in a plain-vanilla, just-the-facts style. (From the summary by “Chris” of Sunday’s nerve-wracking, infuriating Portugal-Netherlands psycho-drama: “Portugal hold on to win it! Amazing game. 16 yellow cards and 4 red cards.”)
But the same site scored big with a poignant posting from “stacy-marie” on the now-exited Trinidad and Tobago squad: “The Soca Warriors are going home without a goal and without a trophy, but they are not going home empty handed. They take with them the love of millions, the passions of a small country with big dreams and the respect of a whole world. Vibes it up my Warriors, now and forever.”
International football face-offs have the power both to sublimate and tame, or exploit and enflame, nationalistic feelings. That’s clear from the 223 blogged responses to a Scotsman newspaper website story about Scottish First Minister Jack McConnell’s comment that he would be rooting for Ecuador to upset England. Outrage flew across both sides of the cyberspace Hadrian’s Wall.
JoJo from Lockerbie (#222), an English woman married to a Scotsman for 36 years who says she is “more patriot towards Scotland ... than a lot of Scots themselves,” said the minister’s comments turned a “healthy rivalry” between England and its northern neighbor into “a hate campaign.” “What a nasty man. Does he have nothing else better to do?”
Elana Berkowitz, at the New Republic site, also seems to believe that, when it comes to football patriotism, testiness is next to godliness: “With the U.S. out of the tournament,” she writes, “many of us may not quite know which flag to wrap ourselves in for the duration of the Cup. (I only know it won’t be the flag of the air fiddling, cry baby, possibly fascist, greasy-maned Italians.)”
A kindlier spirit prevails at Cultural Treasures From the Lusosphere, which tracks blogging developments in Portugal and its former colonies, such as Brazil, Angola and Mozambique.
While lamenting the omnipresence of football chat, a Portuguese woman writes: “it feels nice to say that [Brazil’s] Ronaldinho has an incredible hairdo.”
Half a world (but only a few computer keystrokes) away, a man in Portuguese-speaking East Timor -- currently on the verge of social and political meltdown following violent outbursts prompted by a clash within the nation’s military -- uses football and blogging to let off steam: “I froze all my anguishes about the present situation of my Timorese country. I have traded for the anguishes of football as I watch my Portuguese countries play.”
Reading or writing World Cup blogs may not make the world a less dangerous or difficult place. But it does make it more interesting and, somehow, closer.
“It’s such rich insight into these people and places that you couldn’t possibly visit,” says Turnbull, the Global Game editor. “I have no idea what’s going on with the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Falcons, even though they play two miles from where I live. I might as well be in London.”
Or East Timor. Or Trinidad. Or....
