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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Sunday, July 02, 2006
A Nation of Nervous Nellies
Listening to Frank Skinner and David Baddiel's excellent World Cup podcast the other day, I heard a football statistician talking about penalty kicks.
Now English supporters have reason to go cold when we hear those two dreaded words (and how nice it is, therefore, to hear American commentators talk about PKs, which makes the whole terrifying ordeal seem quite innocent).
Penalty kicks mean the anguish of repeated World Cup and European Championship loss, layer upon layer of pain going back to 1990. That was the mythical year of Gazza and Pleat and Lineker, when we lost the World Cup semi final to West Germany on a single miskick.
Then came 1996, the year of Gareth Southgate's slow, trundling gutterball kick into the arms of the waiting German keeper. And I, working on a newspaper in Scotland, had to turn from the TV screen with moistened eyes and quickly write a lead to a story that scoffed at the sassenach ninnies for losing to Germany on penalties again. Once was bad luck, it said. Twice? Twice suggested the English had a problem.
I count that as the moment I became a professional journalist.
Then, a mere two years later, France in 1998, I shared the moist eyes with three Liverpool gents in a pub in Lyon. It was England v Argentina, I was doing color stories for Time.com, and the Scousers had been on typical joke-loving form. When I'd asked them if I could record their comments for the duration of the game, they'd agreed, but decided to put one over on the posh kid reporter from America by insisting repeatedly that their names were Quentin, Charles and Sebastian.
Two hours later, England had lost a World Cup on penalty kicks to Argentina, too, and the looks on the Liverpool trio's faces were the most mournful I've ever seen in my life, including funerals. (It was a Liverpool coach, after all, who said football was more important than life or death.)
Quentin, Charles and Sebastian probably would have given their real names for the story then, if I'd asked. But I couldn't say a word. I had a hard enough time meeting their eyes. No one knew what to say. Back in my hotel room I wrote another screed against England's performance on penalties, this time without disguising the writer's Englishness.
By 2004, when we lost on penalties to Portugal in the European Championships, it was getting ridiculous. Hadn't we seen this movie before? What on Earth was wrong with us? If penalty kicks were, as their reputation had it, a lottery, we should have won two of those four tournament-busting tie-breakers. But England player after England player was losing his bottle when put on the penalty spot. Why?
Which brings me back to Baddeil and Skinner's football statistician, because this was the first answer to that question I'd ever heard that made sense. The guy had studied hundreds of games that end in penalties, not just England's, and found one common thread: the losing side was almost always facing their fans. "If you're an England fan and it goes to penalties," he advised, "the best thing you can do for the team is to leave the stadium. You're spooking them."
Oh, how I wish the fans had heeded that advice yesterday. In fact, I wish the entire nation had said to the team: "what, you're playing Portugal again today? Oh, well, good luck. It's okay, we won't be watching. Especially not if it goes to penalties. Don't mind us. You go do that thing you're perfectly well-trained for. Let us know what happens. Oh, and Wayne: relax. Enjoy yourself. You're only young once."
We English are, it has to be said, a nation of nervous nellies. We're so overly dramatic about our football. We mythologize our "forty years of hurt" since we won the World Cup, as if our country were under constant occupation by a foreign power rather than simply suffering a disappointing result every two years. We produce dozens of songs about how we're going to win the tournament this time, and millions of us sing them in pubs around the world. We feel such anxiety about match day and can barely sleep the night before. And the British media reflects that nervousness back at us, amplifies it a thousand times, and transmutes it to the players in endless rounds of interviews.
Is it any wonder the players are spooked by that kind of pressure? Is it any wonder they play in such a stilted, uncreative manner, scared of making a mistake, terrified of next morning's headlines? Is it any wonder our game has become so boring and negative?
Gerrard, Lampard and Carragher, standing on the penalty spot yesterday, could not help but know that sixty million pairs of English eyes were watching. They could not help but be spooked by the fans in the stadium -- our fans are some of the loudest in the world. They'd seen this quarter-final-ends-on-penalties movie before, just like we all had. They could not visualize any other ending to the movie. And I don't blame them.
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