“It’s All About Trophies”

By: Martin | August 15th, 2009

Nike has done a series of commercials with some clubs’ top players making a “pledge” to reach certain goals this season. Arsenal’s is pretty sweet:

Man, I love this team. Although am I evil for thinking it would have been funny if it had had Diaby saying something like “Dribble past 6 defenders and kick the ball out of bounds for no reason,” Emmanuel Eboue saying “Tackle the ball away from my own teammates,” or Lukasz Fabianski saying “Come and out and challenge for every ball . . . in the other team’s half.”? Any way, good stuff. Although for my money, it still doesn’t hold a candle to the Guy Ritchie “Take it to the Next Level” commercial that gives you a first-person view of what it would actually be like to sign for and play for our beloved Gunners. Awesome:

I always like to begin and end every season by reading the following quote from legendary baseball writer Roger Angell, which I consider to be the best description I’ve ever read of why we follow sports:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

That caring starts all over again in less than 5 hours. I cannot wait.