I like football. I still play 5 a side for an hour on Friday nights. Each year I'm probably some centimetres slower, and some millisenconds slower on the uptake. But now and again, there's still the move, the shot, the feint, the turn, and yes, even the goal that for the senior footballer is every bit as satisfing as the straight drive for the golfer, the ace serve for the tennis player, the try saving tackle of the rugby player. Yes I watch football on TV, occasionally in the North East Arctic Saturday risk the South Stand in Aberdeen, but still nothing like scoring in the glorious ordinariness of the Torry Leisure Centre on a Friday night.
So I feel qualified to laugh at the silly punditry of this article here.
Premier League - Leon Osman's wondergoal: genius or mis-kicked fluke?
What a fatuous, wonderless, unimaginative, right brain no brainer question that is! The armchair experts looking at video footage try to judge a spectacular goal on technical merit, artistic impression and amateur geometry!
Given the combination of human intention, learned skill, inherent gift and ability, training, tactical awareness, alertness to opportunity, instinct to move and be in certain positions at the right time, team awareness and individual co-operation, the strengths of the opposition, balance, physical fitness, height (yes sometimes size matters) age, weather conditions, flight of the ball - och and any other of the multi-variables I've not mentioned - given all that it could be argued every goal is a mis-kicked (sic) fluke; and every goal is an act of genius. Neither is true or false - what it is, is a goal, a joyful indication that we are quite good at this game, a successful fulfiulment of effort and energy harnessed to purpose and held within the constraints of the game's rules and regulations!
It is a wondergoal - the more enjoyable because technology shows you how unsaveable it was - except it would have been saved easily if the goalkeeper had also chocen amongst a multitude of variables and was standing nearer his right hand post. In a contingent creation, football is possible. Analyse it with nonsense like the above and you are arguing for a world where all that ever happens is deserved, precictable, analysable and wonderless world.
Or to put all this more succinctly, the so-called experts who dissect a goal, dessicate spirits - from such those who live wittily cheerfully dissociate :)
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