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Video

Football as Art: Gareth Bale Animated

March 23, 2011 — by Suman

This fantastic video was making the rounds of the footy interwebs last week–animator Richard Swarbrick (@RikkiLeaks) with an dreamlike impressionistic rendering of Gareth Bale’s Champions League performances vs Inter Milan:

This blew up especially after it was listed at #1 among “Our Favourite Things This Week” by Guardian Football–they specifically linked to the Run of Play’s post of it, titled “Bones Like Ghost” (“If there were a channel that showed live matches in this style, I might forget what living people looked like”).

For those of you that somehow haven’t seen the “IRL” version of Bale v Inter, see here. Though that video clip, like most of the hundreds of soccer highlight videos on YouTube, has a jarring soundtrack–which is a regrettable phenomenon that Run of Play addressed in an earlier post: “On Soundtracks“:

It’s a universal in football that the only people who take the time to find every single Dennis Bergkamp goal on film and then edit them together into an attractive looking YouTube-length clip listen to either emocore, pop schlock, or trance/house music.

Finally, whenever we revisit Bale v Inter, we’re reminded of Gazzetta dello Sport’s line–still the best of 2010 by our estimation.  Translated from the Italian by the Daily Mail: “‘He is devastating. How else can you describe him ? He doesn’t have one extra gear but three. This time he didn’t score but he assisted. He is a force of nature.”

"L'Inter crolla col Tottenham. Bale scatenato. Benitez: "Troppo veloci"

News

Spurs Unfortunate to Draw Sunderland

November 9, 2010 — by Sean

I use an emulsifier with some holding creme, then a bit of spray on top before I head out the door.

Tottenham put on a lovely footballing display this afternoon, their best stuff in the first half when they moved the ball around the pitch with ease, linking through van der Vaart and even getting peripheral winger David Bentley in on a good amount of the action.

The game ended in a draw and should’ve really gone to Spurs. Of particular interest were Bale’s lack of accuracy serving the ball from the wing (he needs more consistently excellent play before he can rightly be called one of the best wings in the world), and the amount of time the home side spent moving up the right wing, through the oil-coiffed Bentley.

I hadn’t seen Bentley in a long while. I’d forgotten about him in fact. The last time I think was 2007, he had just fallen over after having the ball swept away from him, and he stood up to adjust his hair before trotting back to look for an outlet pass. I was flabbergasted. Shouldn’t a professional athlete be prepared for the rigors of the game, and apply a sufficient amount of styling gel to keep his hair in place throughout the match? For shame.

No such acts of vanity today (at least not on the pitch, something must’ve happened in the dressing room to achieve the evening’s look). Bentley looked sharp, playing intelligent balls that kept up the pressure on Sunderland’s rearguard, and his set pieces suggest that he hasn’t lost much in terms of accuracy. Bale on the left, Bentley on the right, all’s well that ends well — in that they didn’t lose…