Juan Manuel Olivera scores the winner for Al Wasl against Al Ain in the UAE league. Al Wasl’s head coach, Diego Armando Maradona, must be pleased to see his lessons translated into magical “golatos.”
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“Playing the Game”
“Playing the Game” by Sophie Alegi
Chests heave
Legs run
Tendons work
Bones stretch and pull
Muscles bulge
Brains flash in a spark of neurons
Sweat drips.
The defender tears a tendon trying to steal the ball.
The midfielder blows past a defender in a flash of speed.
And the forward collects the ball and shoots.
The goalie stretches all of her fibers to catch the ball.
But it slams into the net.
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Fútbol in the Classroom
The Football Scholars Forum — an online community of scholars that discusses serious fútbol scholarship — convenes on Wednesday, November 9, at 2pm EST (-5 GMT) for a session on “Soccer in the Classroom.”
Several scholars will make short presentations about university football courses in various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Course syllabi have been pre-circulated on the website.
Among the questions to be discussed: How can teaching a course or unit on soccer expand or contribute to disciplinary knowledge? What are the challenges and opportunities of teaching a fútbol class filled with everyone from fantasy soccer geeks to soccer neophytes? How can students apply what they learn in a football course outside the classroom? Interested participants can join the conversation via Skype by contacting Alex Galarza.
In related news, FSF is to be featured in a poster session at HASTAC 2011, a conference on digital scholarly communication at the University of Michigan in December.
The 1990 World Cup hosted by Italy is often remembered for the exploits of Cameroon’s Indomitable Lions. Led by 38-year-old striker Roger Milla, Cameroon legitimized African football on the global stage with their 1-0 victory over Maradona’s Argentina in the opening game and then becoming the first African team to reach the World Cup quarterfinals. In 1994, Bea Vidacs, a Hungarian anthropologist based in the United States, landed in Yaoundé to begin her research on football and identity in Cameroon. Visions of a Better World: Football in the Cameroonian Social Imagination is a revised version of a doctoral thesis completed in 2002, a study that over the years midwifed several very good journal articles and chapters in scholarly collections.
Read my full review at H-Soz-u-Kult.
In Making History, a BBC Radio 4 series exploring ordinary people’s links with the past, we learn about the first African team to play in Europe. Making History listener Eryl Freestone has a memoir written by her grandfather which describes a tour of black South African footballers that he helped organize in 1899, just as the South African War was about to start. Eryl meets with Chris Bolsmann at Aston University who has been researching the tour and was desperate to find an ancestor of WM Williams’ – Ery’s grandfather.
Listen here (segment starts at 09:00).
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Super-Mario and Friends Do Man U
Manchester United – Manchester City 1-6. Mario Balotelli and David Silva lead Roberto Mancini’s men to a historic victory at Old Trafford. Does this outrageously humiliating scoreline signal a changing of the guard in English football?
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Fred’s Golazo
Fluminense’s Fred makes a diagonal run into the box, traps the high vertical cross with his chest, and executes a bicycle kick that sends the ball past the stunned Coritiba keeper and into the back of the net. Pure magic!