I know this may be coming a few weeks too late for my fellow female football/soccer fans, as the leagues have already been going since August in most countries. Hopefully you’ve been struggling through, but it’s international break and I’m bored without football so whether you follow that or the other football or baseball or hockey or any of those other SUPER MACHO MANLY SPORTS, here’s a little guide for being a “real” fan:
At the start of the season, I predicted, like most, that Liverpool was still in their rebuilding period. We would finish 6th, maybe 5th if Tottenham really screwed up. I wasn’t being pessimistic, just realistic. The top 4 spot that would bring Champions League football back to Anfield was a dream for next season, and that was okay. If you’d told me then that I’d be sitting here now, sad that we didn’t win the league… well, sure, supporters of every team down to the ones that get relegated are sad that their teams didn’t win the league. But if you’d told me how close we came, I’d have never believed you. As I write this, I’ll admit I’m a bit teary-eyed that City (the team I predicted to win at the start of the season, mind) came out on top, but we’re in second. We’re back in the Champions League. We’re so far ahead of United you have to scroll down the league table to find them. I’m nothing if not very, very proud. It’s been a wild ride, and here are a few of the most memorable moments:
Liverpool 1 – 0 Stoke, 17 August 2013
The day before I left for Ireland, I got up at half-six on a Saturday morning and went to the pub with my father (dragging along my still-half-asleep mother and sister). There we were joined by about fifty other people, mostly my father’s age, mostly men, but some women, some young people, and nearly all wearing red. We said hello to the bartender, got our pints—yes, at seven in the morning—and sat down to watch the football. Liverpool v Stoke, at Anfield, the opening match of the 2013/14 season. Things got off to a good start, with Daniel Sturridge (more on him later) scoring a few minutes before halftime. It looked like we were on track for a win and the atmosphere in the Iron Abbey was upbeat. Then, in the 88th minute, when all we had to do was sit back and defend, Daniel Agger, my second favourite Dane after Hamlet, handled the ball in the box and the referee called for a penalty.
Here it is, I thought. Business as usual. Stoke will equalise and we’ll be on track for a season just like the ones we’ve had for the past few years; the ones that made me dread waking up on those early weekend mornings, hungover and watching Liverpool lose to Aston Villa. And then, and then. Simon Mignolet, our new keeper (whom I immediately liked even though I’ve always been a big fan of Pepe Reina), saved the penalty, and saved the win for Liverpool. At that moment I knew—I think we all knew—that this season was going to be something special.
I’ve never quite understood patriotism. It’s not that I dislike America or that I’m unhappy to be American, but I’ve never felt the need to express it through a $5 Old Navy flag t-shirt (after the age of 8 or so). I find the USA USA chants that break out during every sporting event (even those where both teams are from the states) almost as cringeworthy as that awful, sappy “Proud to be an American” song.
What’s especially weird to me is that the people who are most invested in this kind of materialistic patriotism are often the ones who don’t understand how others may not benefit from the “land of the free” as much as they do. The people who say they “don’t see race” and then take seriously the idea of the President’s birth certificate being a forgery. The people who would try to stop a female Senator from preventing a bill restricting womens’ rights because of “the sanctity of life” but would, in the same week, justify the 500th death penalty execution in the state since 1982. The people who put up signs in their businesses reading “This is America; speak English” but don’t know enough about their country to know it does not have an official language. The people who would keep secret a program spying on peoples’ internet activities (but only the foreign-seeming ones) but who would tell those who complain that if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide.
I don’t know much about the Liga Mx. I follow the English Premier League and the Spanish Liga, and I’ve even started watching a bit of Bundesliga recently (although I’ve yet to find a broadcast with English commentary so the only words I can pick up are things like “Dortmund” and “das fitness coach”), so I hardly have time to watch yet another league anyway, although I sometimes catch a match on Univisión while I’m at the gym. I know a few key words and names in Mexican football, Hérculez Gómez and Chivas and Chicarito and the Azteca, but comparatively, I’m in the dark. Before reading Robert Andrew Powell’s gripping book, This Love is Not for Cowards: Salvation and Soccer in Ciudad Juárez, I had certainly never heard of Los Indios de Ciudad Juárez.
Continue reading “This Love is Not for Cowards by Robert Andrew Powell (2012): 4.5/5 stars”
Roger Ebert died this week. And I’m glad to see that in the countless articles and blog posts eulogizing him, he is never referred to “only” as a film critic. As someone whose dream job used to be entertainment critic, I’ve sometimes felt like my ambitions were less serious than my peers who dreamed of parachuting into a war zone armed only with a notebook and a tape recorder, even of dedicating their lives to small-town papers to report on their city council meetings.
But entertainment journalism, although it has the potential to be “soft” when reporting on the comings and goings of D-list celebrities, has its place. As the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, Ebert demonstrated not only the value of film itself in reflecting or subverting the values of society, but also in discussing and critiquing film and the way it reflects or subverts those values.
In the thousands of reviews he wrote over four and a half decades at the Chicago Sun-Times and other media outlets, he was never afraid to digress into a commentary on social and political issues. Ebert was criticized over the summer for speaking out in favour of gun control in the wake of the movie theatre shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and many of his opponents said that he should stick to talking about movies. But as Ebert so often proved, there are so many times when you can’t talk about movies without talking about life.
*I am so, so tempted to give it a straight-up 5/5 stars, but I feel like I’m just being biased due to my undying love of Batman (my entire Facebook bio for the past five years has simply read “I’m Batman.”). I reserve the right to adjust up (or down, I suppose) upon subsequent viewings.
Last week the final film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy was released. Obviously, the main topic of conversation since then has been the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado, which is understandable and appropriate. However, upon seeing the film again this morning I still have a lot of feelings, so without further ado here is my entirely biased opinion on the amazing finale to an amazing group of films about my favourite superhero.
Continue reading “The Dark Knight Rises (2012): 4.5/5 stars*”
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