by Rob Gallagher
Sport’s love affair with cliché is the stuff of legend. So rich has football’s battery of stock phrases become that it’s possible for especially gifted commentators to weave together minutes-long tissues of dead metaphors and banalities, never letting an original construction pass their lips (this post’s title, by the way, is Jonathan Pearce – who used to do the commentary for BBC’s Robot Wars - getting poetical at an FA cup game). As we metioned in the podcast, David Foster Wallace once suggested that maybe great players are great because they can take clichés seriously. Having studied A Level Lit. with a relative of gangling England striker Peter Crouch, I’m inclined to think this ability may even be genetic; he’d discuss pathetic fallacy in Lear or Milton’s verse style in exactly the same vacantly platitudinous register Pete favours post-match.
Clichés aren’t just retrospectively applied to sport though; they also inform how we watch and consume it. I’d argue sport is increasingly being disseminated in ways that literalise and perpetuate certain clichés. It’s a process which technology is accelerating, and one with potentially pernicious consequences. Let’s take a simple example: you might talk about how someone attempting to head a crossed ball or make a slam-dunk seems to hang in the air – which, of course, if you freeze the replay, they do. This sort of manipulation of footage is so common it goes completely unnoticed. It makes total sense, too – of course by slowing or freezing movements we can get a clearer idea of what’s just happened. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t reinforce certain habits of thought and speech though. Paul Stretford’s said of Wayne Rooney ‘I imagine if we had the technology to look into his head we’d see that he sees everything at a slowed-down pace.’* We don’t have that sort of tech, obviously, but we can slow down on-pitch action to examine a player’s physicality or a ball’s flight as if we were Rooneyesque sporting savants, substantiating the conviction that’s how sportspeople see.
And what about when we hear a star player can ‘beat a team single handed?’ The way sport’s shot and circulated has undeniably changed to support the idea that single actions on the part of individual virtuoso players (Kobe, Kaka, Wilkinson) can shape games. It’s a sexier notion – one more in line with capitalist individualism and sleb culture – than the truth of concerted and sustained team effort. David Beckham’s far from the greatest player to have graced a pitch but his bone structure and the nature of his game means he has a massive appeal for football-illiterate audiences (who, understandably, aren’t that interested in Wes Brown and Gary Neville cannily and tandemically capitalising on the offside rule but can understand and enjoy the sight of a ball scooped mercurially past the keeper from 30 yards). Ronaldo’s skills likewise translate beautifully into the medium of ten-second youtube clip viewed on a mobile phone screen.
Video games and interactive red button-type viewing technologies are making new modes of cliché-concretisation possible – the phrase of ‘turning on the skill,’ for example, takes on a new meaning in games like FIFA or ISS, which allocate a button on the controller to doing just that. Sports games and sports broadcasts have been incestuously trying to mimic each other’s aesthetics for years now, institutionalising all sorts of immediately recognisable visual, verbal and stylistic conventions and clichés in the process. And as sport – and European football in particular – has become more enmeshed with the entertainment industry, a whole bunch of new, capitalist realist clichés (which is to say ways of throwing one’s hands up and albeit reluctantly acknowledging the inexorability of market forces, thereby painting anyone who’d wanna question their inexorability as hopelessly deluded) have also sprung up.
Which is part of the reason Ken Loach’s Looking For Eric was so fascinating (N.B: fascinating but not necessarilygood). Eric Cantona – who I’m going to mostly refrain from waxing devoted about here – never had much truck with merchandising and image rights and extracurricular monetisation in general, and Loach makes him stand for a bunch of leftist-amenable qualities (humility, generosity, courage, fraternity etc.) which, though clichéd, are actually pretty worthwhile. Loach also engages with a another vein of cinematic cliché; the film’s structure is basically cribbed from ‘kid meets creature which teaches kid key life lessons then heart-wrenchingly leaves/dies’ films like E.T. and Free Willy and My Neighbour Totoro.** Throw a few staples of blue collar masculinities films into the mix – strained father/son relationships, reflections on the post Thatcher job market etc. – and you’ve got a cocktail of tropes that shouldn’t work but does. I’m willing to accept that, given my age and sympathies and familial sporting fealties, I’m maybe subject to a perfect storm-style conjunction of susceptibilities here, but for me the movie was both moving and thought-provoking, showing sport doesn’t have to go proving itself right all the time.
*Which – so stop sniggering at the back – he meant as testament to Rooney’s preternatural genius with regard to positional play rather than as an insinuation Wayne’s a bit slow, though the idea that to be blessed with sporting genius you’ve got to be cursed with a subpar IQ is part of the myth, like the artist/madman, comic/depressive thing.
** Coincidentally enough, I think my first experience of the thrill of cliché-detection came when, as a precociously media-savvy kid, I came to the confusing realisation that all these movies had the same plot.
