A page dedicated to the most preposterous and pretentious posts we can find on t’internet, inspired by Private Eye’s legendary Pseuds Corner. Whether you’ve found a Proustian exploration of Tony Hibbert’s right foot, or yet another person using “milquetoast”, all suggestions are welcome, send me an email!
January 31, 2012: “Transfer deadline day: Oh what a circus”
Barney Ronay – The Guardian
This is knockabout stuff really, a peculiarly entertaining lacuna in football’s continuing mutation beneath the irradiating forces of money and television.
December 2, 2011: “The Joy of Six: football unbeaten runs.”
Scott Murray – The Guardian
“Wayne Rooney’s saucy triple salchow and pike.”
(Thanks to Julian from Gingers For Limpar for this submission)
November 29, 2011: “Goodbye Twentieth Century”
Samuel Goff & James Coleman - The Run of Play
At first, the working class was conspicuous by its absence. In place of the trade-port city-urban working class matrix that brought football to Bilbao or Odessa, in its primordial days in l’hexagone, football was the preserve of an urban social elite intent on imitating the dying wildebeest of British amateurism; a welter of different ‘national’ federations resembling country estates.
November 21, 2011: The Story So Far — Nov. 21st LA Galaxy win MLS Cup (“Milquetoast” Part 7)
Richard “Milquetoast” Whittall – The Score
Beckham’s impact on American soccer from a marketing perspective would take up an entire post and then some, but his impact as a whole on the league from a competitive standpoint was fairly milquetoast. Good on him for the Cup win, but he was not the Galaxy’s lodestone, nor Major League Soccer’s.
17 October, 2011: Mohun Bagan’s Steve Darby – A Lesson Learnt From Aristotle’s “The Poetics”
Rahul Bali – Goal.com
According to Aristotle’s “The Poetics”, a tragic hero must have six key qualities – Hamartia, Hubris, Anagnorisis, Peripeteia, Nemesis, and Catharsis. In the following paragraphs, we shall draw similarities as to how Darby meets each of the above mentioned criterion.
October 13, 2011: Kantona
Put more simply: what space does fantasy occupy in football?
For reasons that should become more apparent later, this debate can be framed very neatly through a brief consideration the notion of the good will in the work of the fusty Konigsberger, Immanuel Kant. Kant bases his ethics upon the notion of the good will – a will elicited in line with pure practical reason as opposed to pathological motivations founded upon material practical reason. For example, one must refrain from theft because this is the right thing to do, rather than from fear of punishment; fear of the hangman’s noose does not make one a good man, for otherwise all cowards would be men of great virtue. But how can Kant prove that these non-pathological acts exist? The elusive quality that allows pure reason to be practical (hence not pathological) – termed the ‘philosopher’s stone’ by Kant – is crucial to his philosophy. And yet the only way that Kant can get out of this apparent dead end is to appeals to das Faktum der Vernunft (the fact of reason), although he himself admits that no example can be offered to support his argument: ‘the moral law is given as a fact of pure reason of which we are a priori conscious, and which is apodictically certain, though it be granted that in experience no example of its exact fulfilment can be found.’[1] As such we are left with a moral law which is simply a Faktum that cannot be demonstrated. What we have is a supposed basic fact and an apodictic appeal to a conception of morality which is binding from that point on. Barcelona offer perhaps the closest approximation to this in today’s game. The basic fact that they play football in the ‘right way’ is undemonstrable, yet noted moralist Silvio Berlusconi recently advised his Milan side to go out against Juventus and ‘play more like Barcelona’. Proof if proof be need be.
October 4, 2011: Truth often the first casualty when separating “journalist” from “fan”
(“Milquetoast” Part 6)
Richard Whitall – Media Takedown
Avoiding pointed criticism to keep your sources happy under the guise of “impartiality” leads to a noxious form of sycophancy that is rife in certain quarters of Canada’s soccer media, to the extent that speaking out too vociferously on the game here can cost you your job. Give me Paul James any day over a milquetoast, post-match quotes guy.
September 21, 2011: Captain Colo saves the day! Nottingham Forest 3-4 Newcastle (AET)
“Whumpie” – NUFC Blog
Toonsy – brilliant write-up, really enlightening and positive.
But “A great prospect, with great potential”…
Is that a pleonasm? Or a tortology? Or a tortological pleonasm perhaps?
June 27, 2011: THT Heroes: Michael Ballack – A Swansong That Was Never To Be
Arnav Bose – The Hard Tackle
Pocher also mocked Ballack for claiming his captain’s armband which was given to Philipp Lahm during the recently concluded World Cup as if he considered it as an usufruct.
May 17, 2011: Arsenal FC Transfers: 5 Veterans Who Could Turn Gunners into Title Winners
(“Milquetoast” Part 5)
Andrew Jeromski – Bleacher Report
With club’s like West Ham facing relegation—and seemingly putting all the resistance of the archetypal milquetoast—players like Scott Parker and Matthew Upson will be memories at Upton Park faster than you can say, “mass exodus.”
April 25, 2011: Canadian soccer writers need not shun detail or story to draw in readers
(“Milquetoast” Part 4)
Richard Whittall – Media Takedown
Smart writers like Stephen Brunt or Paul Attfield will resort to hyperbole to draw in the non-fan to a soccer story (Beckham saved MLS! RSL’s Morale’s goal was the most important in MLS history!), and even sports mad Sun Media will often provide milquetoast, paint-by-numbers analysis rather than truly challenging its readers.
April 15, 2011: “Does it look like I’m here”
Andi Thomas – Twisted Blood
Football philosophy blogger Richard Bellis has suggested that football as we know it can be divided into the game – being the fundamental component parts of football itself; players, goals, rules, a round ball, and so on – and the sport – being everything external-but-parasitic to that. If so, it makes sense to suggest that the actors within the game and the actors within the sport are in some way distinct. One is a person, playing football, defined only by the way in which he plays; the other is a footballer, defined in part by his actions within the game and in part by his actions (and the presentation and perception of those actions by others) within the sport, which essentially encompasses everything else he does: his medals, his off-field life, his adverts, his relationships, his haircut, his boot deal, his transfer rumours, his blah, his etc., and his so on. Formally we could designate these as gNeymar and sNeymar; alternatively, and a trifle pseudishly, Neymar and “Neymar”.
(Ed. – “a trifle pseudishly”!?)
September 30, 2009: What is MLS? A Ground of Our Own (“Milquetoast” Part 3 )
Richard Whittall – A More Splendid Life
I went on a visit to England over Christmas 2006 and went to see Aston Villa play Charlton at the Valley, followed by Colchester City at QPR. These were pretty milquetoast fixtures, but they were my first proper live club matches.
August 1, 2009: Serie A: Prognosis Negative? (“Milquetoast” Part 2)
Richard Whittall – A More Splendid Life
WSC Daily turns attentions to Serie A, and with a few minor exceptions, Juve’s slight beefing up and Inter’s maybe good/maybe not Ibra deal for Eto’o and a giant wad of Euros, declares the league financially and competitively milquetoast.
March 1, 2008: Toronto FC Season Preview (“Milquetoast” Part 1)
Richard Whittall – A More Splendid Life
Where had they come from, and how had they been overlooked in the build-up to Toronto FC’s first season? Certainly support like this was generally unknown in the sterile, pastel-coloured and milquetoast world of North American professional sports, which may have been one reason why the MLSE didn’t see this interesting broadside coming.
Rooney’s post card home from away trip to Portugal.