Football Stuff and Kate Zambreno Writing Brilliantly Again

Round-up:

Great K-Punk articles on football:

"Postcolonial melancholy and all that" - "The FA has gone from being a quasi-Feudalistic shambles to being a neoliberal shambles. Same English malaise, different systems. Once a crumbling repository of old English power (members of the Admiralty used to sit on committees), it is now the kind of business ontology-oriented body of which Adam Crozier was the CEO. (Crozier's dismal passage through English institutions like the FA and the Royal Mail tells its own story about life in neoliberal England.) Like English culture in general, the FA has passed from dithering cronyism to post-Fordist short-termism. Neither mode provides much appetite for planning or strategy. Reading Zone Styx's account of Germany's reconstruction after their 2001 defeat by England, one is astonished by the clear contrast with the situation in England. There is in English football no infrastructure capable of implementing a long-term strategy in the way that Germany has. Löw is not a lone aunt sally in the way that England managers are; he is the figurehead of an institutionally-defined strategy and one reason that Germany have had a consistent level of success in international football is institutional memory, something that England conspicuously lack (what they have instead is a kind of bad hauntology)."

and "Football/capitalist realism/utopia" - "If the brave new world wouldn't arrive for the working class, it did arrive for Clough personally. Instead of being at the vanguard of a newly assertive working class, Clough's period of greatest success coincided with the ebb tide of postwar proletarian collectivism. Clough was sometimes sneered at as a ‘champagne socialist’ because he saw no contradiction between being a leftist and achieving success. Like many born poor, Clough was never able to fully believe that he had finally vanquished poverty from his life - hence, all those TV appearances, ghosted columns and the bung-rumours."

and Kate Zambreno writing brilliantly, again: "What would Foucault say. Yes. Foucault. On Lebron James. "

Football football football!!!

Football football football! I love the World Cup. I love the games, I love the endless geeky conversations about performances, what Rooney's best position is, whether Spain will choke, how good those North Koreans were, and what I love the most is statistics, statistics, statistics. I could go over them for hours and hours. I like reading every column inch I can find on the things, right down to the design and manufacture of the Jabulani ball (which is rubbish, apparently) and those buzzy things drowning out crowd noise, as well as going over the passing stats, the assist stats, the possession stats, everything.

Now I discover Mark Fisher, aka Kpunk, is blogging the World Cup with a few other distinguished bloggers. This is exactly the sort of writing I want about football. Engaged, knowledgeable, thoughtful. And written by teachers and writers of philosophy, politics and critical theory! Excellent! I recommend it for anyone. Anyone.