Not the greatest day to be an England fan.
But as I sat there watching England being torn apart by our arch rivals the Germans, I started to wonder how a game that basically involves 22 men kicking a ball into a net can garner such passion in people, which in turn led me muse on whether there was any connection to our heroes on the pitch and our heroes on the screen.
The first thing that springs to mind is that the protagonist on the screen represents us, the audience. We like to see what action they take in relation to the action we believe we would have taken ourselves if we were in a similar predicament.
The same could be said of football.in that we feel the players 'should have crossed the ball early,' or 'shot first time!' So we see the players as representing ourselves on the pitch. I guess that's why we get so frustrated when the don't play as well as we know they can. If your team looses there's no cathartic release at the end of it, just frustration.
The best football matches are those in which the plucky under dog wins in the last moment, but how often does that happen?
In the end, stories are structured where as football matches are not, in the sense that no one knows what the end result will be.
Hmm....not the best post in the world, but it does keep my one-a-day intact.
2 comments:
picture this: the Irish English teacher decides that the best way to amuse herself/extend the Year 8 creative writers today was to force them to write empathetically, first from the perspective of an English player, then as a German. Cruel? There's a short story in that; I'm writing it now.
Would be quite interesting to get them to write from an English commentator's point of view, and then a Germans!
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