gambitch - now available in blue

Friday, March 31, 2006

Regular readers of my blog may have noticed I have not been updating lately. The reason, as usual, was work. I am still swamped by things to write, so much so that I have not been able to get much free time on the Internet lately. That is life, but I am happy with that, especially when I am trying to save up for a decent digital SLR and lens (I hear the lens is rather steep).

Anyway, the nice thing about my work lately is that I am finding it increasingly joyful for, ahem, other reasons. Yes, I know, I've mentioned this recently before, but hey, I really like these other reasons because they add some cheer to my drab old outlook on life. I'm even doing my hair a bit lately - which as people who have seen me in person know, I usually can't be bothered to do.

And I just thought it'd be a good idea to remind everybody that my Johari window remains open for people to fill. If you have the time and you haven't done this one before, please go ahead.

Finally, on to the main body of this post, which is a brief discussion on the main differences between a proper football writer (like gambitch) and a regular football fan (like many other people).

One of the things that a serious football writer must do is hunt for information. This means knowing the little nuggets like who these teams are, what their features are, who they have among their playing squad, how they play, etc.. It also means knowing things like fixture schedules when it comes to tournaments. And sometimes, if you're willing to talk to coaches in a more casual capacity - like I do - you also learn extra things on the side, like how modern professional footballers nowadays need 48 hours of proper rest after a match for their body to recover to full preparedness before training can resume.

You can imagine the body of knowledge that a football writer of some kind of credibility must possess in order to earn that credibility. Now, obviously, much of that knowledge and the deductions that come with it are not exactly the sort of thing that a regular football fans needs to know or even wants to know. The natural result is that they often do not know, and therefore do not appreciate, these things.

As an example, consider a 12-club league that plays one match a week. If clubs play each other twice a season then the league would last 22 weeks. Three times a season, and the number changes to 33 weeks. Go back to what I said earlier about needing 48 hours of rest, and you can imagine that there have to be certain limits as to how far you can cram this.

Now, no domestic league exists in isolation. There is this concept called the international calendar, where there are events held at national team level or club level across countries or even continents, such as the World Cup or the Asian Champions League (hey, I'm in Asia). You add all these external factors and you will end up with a pretty nasty little list of limitations.

It gets better - tournaments tend to be planned not just months, but years in advance. We knew in 2001 that Beijing would host the 2008 Olympics, and while the exact dates were not confirmed then, we had a rough idea what time window we were talking about. What this means therefore is that any new project that comes along must take into account all these other things that are already 'on', which limits the choice of dates one can have, to the point where some supposedly brilliant ideas just don't work out because the time would not allow it.

But, you would not know all that if you didn't have this vast body of information regarding fixture schedules and all.

This situation demonstrated itself recently at a football fans' forum I happened to be a member of. Someone was suggesting running a new cup competition for a certain group of clubs, and someone else suggested the idea of marking certain weeks as designated only for cup matches, like they do in England. Which is a great idea, except that the league schedules work differently in England.

And so it just happens that fans who think they have lots of great ideas that people higher up than they are too stupid to see become frustrated that the ideas aren't implemented. But that's because it's easier to be the critic than to be the guy running the operation. Ask any back-seat driver.

Unfortunately, as a writer, I have some appreciation of what these limitations are. Could they be conveyed to the public? Yes, maybe, but the public won't necessarily care. They usually don't, especially if they are the kind that likes to see all people in the establishment as idiots. That simplistic assumption is rather helpful, you know, in making our understanding of the world simple, if potentially outright wrong.

I've seen many critics who blast coaches and players for their ineptitude. On occasion I have been tempted to challenge these critics to join the writing profession and go interview some of these coaches and players. I don't quite know why I never got around making that challenge. Maybe it's because I'm happy to earn the money myself, so asking for new guys to join the industry would only harm my own income potential. Or maybe it's because I already know what they are going to say, namely they have no time to be a writer, being a writer is beneath them, blah blah blah.

Well, being a writer is not beneath yours truly. In fact, I enjoy doing it, "other reasons" aside (though I enjoy those too). Maybe it's just my inquisitive nature, because I like to investigate things. But I guess you need things like that to survive, if not prosper, in the world of writing and journalism.

Did I remember to say that I love my job?

gambitch [ 4:07 AM]