Something to think about while waiting for that announcement. Yesterday evening I went to a philosophical discussion about football at the LSE. Two professors of Philosophy one from New York and one from Gloucester and a Professor of French from Durham Uni. Some good stuff and surprisingly entertaining it will be up on the LSE website and I will post a link when its available. There were a number of quotes which I liked and which I'm setting out below: the first is the most famous and is from Albert Camus - "All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football". One I hadn't heard before from Warren Fralegh - "Good sport is the sweet tension of uncertainty of outcome". (this made me think of Barnsley away games). From the Panel: "Fans are the living archives of football teams" "Football - the delusion of hope" (Barnsley away again) "The form of football is socialism but the content of football right now is money". Simon Critchley (the Professor from New York) has a book entitled "What we think about when we think about football". Worth a look I think. Here's a synopsis: "What do we think about when we think about football? Football is about so many things: memory, history, place, social class, gender (especially masculinity, but increasingly femininity too), family identity, tribal identity, national identity, the nature of groups. It is essentially collaborative, even socialist, yet it exists in a sump of greed, corruption, capitalism and autocracy. Philosopher Simon Critchley attempts to make sense of it all, and to establish a system of aesthetics - even poetics - to show what is beautiful in the beautiful game. He explores, too, how the experience of watching football opens a particular dimension in time; how its magic wards off oblivion; how its dramas play out national identity and non-identity; how we spectators, watching football with tragic pensiveness, participate in the play. And of course, as a football fan, he writes about his heroes and villains: about Zidane and Cruyff, Clough and Revie, Shankly and Klopp." Sorry for going on so long.
