Scissors Kick

“Well, this is how you layer in a multimedia presentation. The national sports daily in Spain, Diario Marca, produced a highly interactive World Cup calendar for its Web site. Find the graphic here.” (MARCA)

“We present an epic contribution from Bill at Bill’s Sports Maps on the 2010 World Cup, that event you might have heard starts this week. Bill’s illustrated map features all 32 team jerseys, and statistics on World Cup performance. It’s pretty damn awesome. Click on the image below for the glorious, full-size version.” (Pitch Invasion)

“Dizzee Rascal has already had four number one singles in the United Kingdom. His motives, therefore, for getting involved with the atrocious Simon Cowell vehicle World Cup song ‘Shout’ (a cover of the 1984 Tears For Fears protest song), remain unclear. Perhaps he genuinely feels that hollering at the top of his voice about “Bobby Moore an’ that” will really help the team while they struggle against odds that seem to be getting longer with each passing day, five and a half thousand miles away in South Africa. Perhaps he is really desperate for that fifth number one single. Perhaps he merely has a particularly persuasive agent.” (twohundredpercent)

“Yes. The books I’ve chosen are very broadly oriented, but the one aspect they all have in common is that soccer is both primary and secondary at the same time. Soccer is the reason for the books being written, but the writers’ interest is everything that goes on outside the stadium. Which makes it more effective and more interesting than writing that just covers the game itself, which is very hard to describe. As Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer, says, ‘Football is faster than words.’ It’s very hard to capture, but it becomes something more transcendent when you look at what happens outside the arena.” (Five Books)

“The Football Haiku World Cup is a project based on the writing of haiku (俳句) poetry specifically geared to the football/soccer World Cup in South Africa in 2010. We want to publish beautiful poetry written by you to accompany the beautiful game. Please do not worry if you do not consider yourself to be a writer or a poet: the beauty of haiku is its simplicity, universality and flexibility. Whoever you are around the world, we would love to hear your voice in haiku form.” (The High IQ Haiku World Cup Project)

“For most of the 21st century Smith has logged his working notes and research on sport theory at sportsBabel, a site that “examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture.” As evident below, he is interested in technical developments in sport and in its consumption, which leads to reflection on the postmodern spectator. Smith’s commitment to praxis as well as theory comes through in his annual promotion of Global Village Basketball, a Web-aided melding of pickup results from Poland to Serbia to the USA that illustrates the potential of ‘sporting multitudes.'” (The Global Game)