(The) Mothers of Invention

So Ryan's done his team. Here's mine:



I stuck to the two-players-from-one-team rule. It's a nice constraint.

I went with Jose Reina in goal. I think this is a safe option to get some points. Oh balls, I just realised I have three Liverpool players now. I added Johnson after another change. There goes the rule. OK, changing Reina to Cech. Reina I originally chose because he was the cheapest of the big three, and I think Foster is a risk for a permanent slot, despite VdS's injury. Ha, Cech's picture is better than Reina's. He has his protective hat on and is shouting. I think Chelsea have just scored a goal. Or perhaps he just saved a penalty. This made me smile.

My defence is less of the midfielder-cum-defender style that Ryan went for. I'm not sure what the style of mine is. I changed my mind a few times. Glen Johnson is probably the safest player here. If he settles into the team and doesn't do a Robbie Keane. Jagielka I'm not sure if he's going to be fit for the start of the season. I should probably look into that. Everton do OK with clean sheets, and Jagielka pops up with stuff now and then. Onuoha I don't have a clue about, to be honest. I'm curious about Man City and want to see if he might pick up some points on the sly. I'll probably transfer him out. Rafael seems like a decent punt at 3 mil. He might not play much. I'll see how it goes.

(Oh, I also went with a 4-3-3. It seems the easy option but I might mix it up during the season. Can we do that? I hope so.)

Gerrard is my other guaranteed points-getter. I think he is value for money. Kranjcar is a cheap option. I've liked watching him play for Portsmouth. I think how good he is will depend on how Portsmouth start the season. Barry Ferguson is sort of a joke choice. But McLeish loves him. I think he has a chance of doing well. He takes a lot of free-kicks and penalties. But he didn't do that well the last time he left Rangers. I will probably transfer him out. When he moved to Blackburn I thought he would do well. I don't particularly think that now. This feels a bit cruel.

I hope Wayne Rooney does well this season. It seems that Ronaldo leaving might be the best thing for his career. We'll see. Robbie Keane should hopefully be back to normal this year. And Agbonlahor has so much potential that I think he is worth trying. I am a bit worried that all of my strikers tend to have dry spells. I will have some money to play with if they don't work. It seemed too easy to go for Anelka as well as Gerrard. I may regret this later in the season.

I think I am most worried that some of the players I picked won't even play. This would be embarrassing. I am looking forward to this making me more active in my following the Premier League.

Le Tour

It seems a bit perverse to get obsessed with the Tour de France just because I ride a bike everyday. Like if I became really interested in the socio-cultural implications of the design of change-pockets, just because I keep my money in them sometimes. It's an almost incidental connection that I could make with thousands of things. (Obviously our interests have to come from somewhere. This is just the conceit for allowing me to think aloud about why I like the race. Hello, journalistic conventions!)

So why do I get so into the Tour?

I know that what these riders do on a bike is not what I do on a bike. I cannot cycle at an average speed of 25 mph consistently for up to five hours. I do not strip the frame of my bike of non-essential components to make it as light as possible. I don't have a car following me everywhere I go to provide me with food, water, and a spare bike if mine gets a puncture at an inopportune moment.

I'm not a hardcore cyclist. I don't have a track bike, or even a road bike. I've got a Ridgeback Hybrid (ugly and inelegant, but at least it's lighter than the Dutch cruisers I rode in Amsterdam last week). I don't have any interest in doing what the Tour racers do. I don't wear lycra. I use my bike for getting from place to place. Which is what they do, too, but they make this travelling into an occupation, into the definition of their existence. But there's something about this vicarious experience that persists. It's a fundamental part of our experience with sport. We enjoy watching it because we imagine we could do it. To make a somewhat obvious point.

I ride my bike everyday. The start of the summer season combined with mounting financial pressures (insert "there's a recession?" gag here) has made me into a bit of a fascist on this front. I'll only use public transport in London now in certain drunken situations (and I have to be close to blindingly so for this to happen). Combined with watching the ITV4 highlights of the previous day of the Tour with my breakfast, this means that whenever I cycle I'm doing some imaginative recreation of yesterday's events.

When I'm having a good day on my bike (read: two breakfasts, not carrying my laptop, and none of this insane wind we've been having this week) I do a lot of over-taking. The day after Alberto Contador's attack on Stage 7, when he accelerated away from the rest of the race favourites to become the virtual maillot jaune, every time I put in a burst of speed to get round a fellow commuter, I was Contador. Lifting myself out of the saddle and powering up hill, leaving that cocky Yank, the upstart Brit, and those lookalike Luxembourgians behind.

Going round corners downhill becomes much more fun with the psychic context of the Tour. Cycling through a corner is one of the most exhilarating things you can do on a bike. Head down, the wind rushing past you, bending close the road but not quite hitting it. It's like being on a rollercoaster! Just don't do it like Jens Voigt, who skidded 50m after a high-speed crash over a bump in the road. I've wrecked a couple of pedals in the past with these antics, but that's all so far.

If I was more patriotic, I'd be Mark Cavendish whenever I stand out of the saddle to sprint through a traffic light that's about to change to red. I've got fuck-all stamina, but when it comes to raw speed, I'm one of the best you'll see trundling through the lights at Kings Cross when I probably should've just slowed down and waited.

When I'm having a bad day, going up Camden New Road and down to my lowest gear, people walking past me faster than I'm cycling, I'm Lance Armstrong's struggling 37-year-old body, just physically incapable of matching the freakish acceleration of Contador. I'm wondering why I ever got back on this bike. Why didn't I take the Tube? And I always forget my rain cape, too.

What's going to happen to me after Sunday? Start looking forward to next July, I guess. I mean, it's not like there's any other bike races going on, is there?

(Photo by Joe Shlabotnik)

If You Read One Article This Week...

...make it the Guardian's From-the-Vault on Celtic's Lisbon Lion's European Cup victory. This is the stuff I grew up with. This is why I love football. This is what I believe in:

"Inter will play it defensively. That's their way and it's their
business. But we feel we have a duty to play the game our way, and our way is to attack. Win or lose, we want to make the game worth remembering. Just to be involved in an occasion like this is a tremendous honour and we think it puts an obligation on us. We can be as hard and professional as anybody, but I mean it when I say that we don't just want to win this cup. We want to win it playing good football, to make neutrals glad we've done it, glad to remember how we did it."
Jock Stein.

You can't say fairer than that for a philosophy of football.

Look out for some end-of-season features next week!

If You Read One Article This Week...

...make it Behind the Scenes on FA Cup Matchday with Setanta.

Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/Guardian

I've always been fascinated by the theory behind television coverage of football. The philosophy of televising a game can go one of two ways: 1) mimetic representation 2) ultimate representation.

1) The idea of mimetic representation is that it attempts to provide a faithful, authentic replica of the experience of attending a live football match. This is the classic model. The fundamental feature of this is the gantry perspective. Where is the best seat in the stadium to watch a match? Bang on the half-way line, maybe three-quarters of the way up the stand. It was a logical move for this to become the default angle for television coverage. It covers as much of the pitch from a vantage that's physically easy to access. Simple geometry!

What's interesting is that the gantry angle never switches sides. Obviously this would involve setting up cameras on both sides of the pitch, which is an extravagance, but at no point that I'm aware of in the explosion of football coverage has anyone ever attempted this. It may be pointless to have a flip/reverse gantry option, but most matches have cameras on either side of the touchline. Is that really necessary? What this points to is the desire to maintain authenticity. Every football fan knows that the teams swap sides at half-time, and so television coverage represents this switch.

I've discussed the philosophy I think lies behind the gantry perspective. But few football matches now, especially in the top leagues, are covered with just one camera. The rudimentary diagram to the right (thanks, Photobooth!) shows what I think are the basic principles of covering a football match. You've got the gantry camera (1), two cameras behind each goal (2/3), then I've been generous and allowed for two cameras on the touchline, one on each half (4/5/6/7). If we're being stingy, we could squeeze this down into two touchline cameras, on the half-way line (8/9). There are probably lots of variations on this, but I think this gets the idea across.

OK, so you're the director of a team of seven cameraman, and you're covering a live football match. How do you mediate all of this? When do you decide to jump to close-up shots? Can I just use the gantry camera for 90 minutes? Help! This is why the Guardian article is so interesting. Directing a football match, especially a live one, is an insanely complicated job. It's an art form. You're creating what will hopefully be a dramatic and suspenseful experience for millions of viewers. You're conducting an orchestra for a captive audience in pubs and homes around the country. Nuff respect to the man/woman who takes on this job. (Incidentally, Mikey Stafford's article points out that you probably benefit from being an ex-footballer if you want to be involved in this field.)

To elaborate on this a bit, let's watch a brief clip: Shunsuke Nakamura's goal against Rangers from an Old Firm derby last season (Yes, I'm a Celtic fan. No, this isn't shameless. Also, while I'm here, I might as well recommend watching it via Quietube - this lovely little bookmarklet removes all the crap from a Youtube page to let you watch in peace.).

0.00 - 0.03: gantry shot of some passing along the Celtic back line. This is your basic shot.

0.04 - 0.07: switches to a touch-line shot of Gary Caldwell receiving a pass, taking stock of his options, and lofting a ball forward. Why did the director choose to switch to a close-up here? The action was in Celtic's half, with the defence. What were the risks? Minimal. What were the potential benefits? A bit of texture, on the off-chance that Caldwell's pass might lead to something positive. And it did! Good work, director. I'm not sure these sort of cuts are welcome in football - too often, I'm shouting "JUST SHOW US THE GAME!" at the TV, but there are times when it works OK, like here.

0.08 - 0.12: back to the gantry angle for one of the sweetest goals in history. We get the traditional vantage point for this, which is appropriate as we're all sharing in the same experience, and it's in the traditional codification of the 'fans angle'. There are those horrible moments when we see a goal via a close-up first, and it causes dissonance. Have we watched a replay by mistake? Who hit that? What was going on? The gantry angle leaves everything neutral, the perfect medium for us to enjoy the action.

0.13 - 0.17: cut to a touch-line focus on Nakamura as he reels away to celebrate. The classic post-goal shot.

0.18 - 0.27: the benefit of extra cameras; we get more of the 'story' this way, seeing Nakamura face-on as he yanks on his badge with Celtic Pride.

And so on. The replays give more on the luxuries extra cameras afford, but the twenty-seven seconds above show the intricacies of mimetic representation. Just to finish up, it's worth noting that the mimetic mode only gives the 'luxury' angles during replays. You won't get a shot from the opposite touchline, or an angle from above the goal during the live action. These features are reserved for when the ball is out of play, so to speak, so as not to disrupt the realism of the presentation.

* * *

2) Ultimate representation, then, is a style of coverage that takes advantage of the technological advances of the last decade. More specifically, it foregrounds how it uses this technology. The director of this style of coverage breaks with the codes of mimetic representation, embraces the pleasure of the text, if you will.

The apotheosis of this was the Champion's League final a couple of years ago, between Porto and Monaco. I can't find any footage of it, unfortunately, but they had a Matrix-effect set-up where they had multiple cameras positioned so that they could pause a reply and spin around behind a player. It was pretty flash, but as the guy says in his blog post, pretty useless.

Watching the Milan derby on BBC Three this Sunday, we had the usual range of camera angles, with a bonus one that is best imagined as a toy-helicopter camera. The majority of the action was covered using the mimetic mode, but every now and then we'd get this floating swoop across the pitch. This angle comes from a gyroscopic camera on wires, that hangs above the pitch and can give some incredible shots. You can catch a glimpse of it in the first two seconds of this clip. It was pretty disorienting, as you don't expect to get given such freedom of viewing within the real-time flow of the game.

They used it for free-kicks a lot, and the effect you get is that you're virtually standing right behind Pirlo as he gets ready to strike the ball. It's useful for giving you an idea of the kicker's chances, but it takes you outside of your comfort zone. But perhaps this is the future of television coverage!

The question comes down to (and this is where you get involved, Badgekissers readers) whether or not we want to maintain the pretense that watching a match on TV should replicate the experience of watching it in a stadium. Should we have the same limitations and restraints that are involved in that experience? Or should TV take advantage of the possibilities of technology and give us a fully immersive feast for our senses, getting as close to the action as possible?

His Name is Rio

Rio Ferdinand guest-edited the Observer Sport Monthly this week. After reading about his soon-to-be-launched online lifestyle magazine, Rio, I was a bit uncertain of how the OSM would turn out.

It's actually pretty good.

Just in terms of the breadth of content, you get a really good article from author David Peace in which his son interviews Rio on Man Utd's trip to Japan; interviews with big sportspeople going back to their hometowns, like Ricky Hatton, Mark Foster, Kelly Smith; Rio interviewing Gordon Brown; a series of features on why Barack Obama's connection with sports is a good thing for America; a few other good features too, on academies and sporting development.

The David Peace article has four sections to it, and the last one is probably the best, as Peace describes taking his son to his first ever Man Utd game, at the World Club Cup. His son shouts for Ronaldo, adamant that he can hear him. Peace tries to convince his son that he should support Huddersfield Town. It's a nice little sketch of what football can mean for a family. Go read it.

The interviews Rio conducts, with Gordon Brown and Usain Bolt, give a picture of a decent guy. Both interviews are enjoyable, the banter between Rio and Bolt conveying an impression of a pair of down-to-earth sportsmen just enjoying the success they've had while still taking pleasure from the fact they're paid to do something they love. Rio and Gordon Brown are just a pair of football fans chatting shit, some references to the positive values that sport can give back to a community, but more interesting for their shared respect for Alex Ferguson, talking about home/away changing rooms, and Brown saying he couldn't understand as a kid that his dad clapped when an opposing team did something good.

So, Rio does a good job, I think. And I've come away with a much better opinion of him. Rio's World Cup Wind-Ups did a lot of damage to that, but I might be getting a bit of respect for him now.

Just to fill some more space, what about Rio's internet presences? His Super Cool Celebrity Fan Site:

This is probably a template site, not something a fan has actually set up. Probably.

His Myspace page gives a bit more value. Favourite film? Silence of the Lambs. Drink? Ribena. Of more interest to me, a three-part video series of When Rio Met Usher (actually one of my favourite musical artists right now; Love in this Club Part II? Incredible!). Rio and Usher's chat is a bit bland, but I like that he uses the time/position he has to do cool stuff like this as well as starting up football academies in Uganda. And meeting P Diddy.

Expect more posts about Rio Ferdinand's media adventures at some point in the future.

Until then, there should be some actual football-related updates from Ryan and the boys soon.

Edit: I chose the title for this post before seeing this one. Promise!