In For The Hat Trick

Anders Lindegaard is not short on self-confidence. In January the well-built, combative Dane told reporters that he hadn’t joined United to “pick my nose.” That was before Lindegaard realized he was the only goalkeeper in Premier League history never to have conceded a goal.

The six-foot-four-inch keeper cultivates an aura of invincibility. “Calmfidence – 6” Lindegaard tweeted on Boxing Day. Lindegaard’s Twitter account provides a window into his personality. His 65,279 followers are willing to tolerate his unyielding arrogance. Anders Lindegaard does what he wants.

He started the season as the clear understudy to United’s big-money goalie, David De Gea, who is meek and skinny where Lindegaard is boastful and broad. But since then the hierarchy has blurred.

Lindegaard has transmitted his off-field swagger to the Manchester United penalty area; winning over fans with his commanding direction and hot temper. The anemic De Gea is sporadically brilliant but has failed to live-up to pre-season expectations.

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With the year edging towards completion, it’s time to review a great twelve months for footballing innovation..

1. The Blizzard– The best idea of 2011. The Blizzard is a quarterly publication designed to defy the constraints of mainstream media. Edited by Jonathan Wilson, the magazine/journal gives a variety of high quality writers the space to stretch their creative muscles.

The Blizzard

2. A Life Too Short, by Ronald Reng- In a year where yet another celebrity sportsman took his own life, Reng’s book is an important reminder of football’s brutal pressures. A Life Too Short is the biography of former Germany goalkeeper Robert Enke. It details Enke’s struggles with depression and eventual suicide. Moving, but never sentimental.

A Life Too Short

3. Fox Soccer.com- While Fox Soccer Channel still resembles the work of an intoxicated twelve year-old, Fox deserves to be commended for its success on the online platform. Foxsoccer.com is a well-designed, smoothly operating website featuring coverage of all Europe’s major leagues, MLS and South America. Editorials by the likes of James Horncastle, Rupert Fryer, Andy Brassell and Amy Lawrence enhance an impressive product.

Fox Soccer

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With hair spiked and narcissistic boot inscription glittering, Cristiano Ronaldo will emerge from the Bernebeau tunnel to the sort of fanfare once reserved solely for Michael Jackson and The Beatles. A group of smiling Japanese tourists tucked away in a corner will enjoy 10 seconds of celebrity, as their “We Love Cristiano” poster greets the eyes of watchers around the world. A stadium of fans will rise together to cheer one-half of modern football’s most overwrought conundrum.

Several seconds later a shorter, less assuming young man will make his entrance. This time, though, the screams of tourists in the stands will be drowned out by the whistles of 80,000 Merengues. In Madrid, they’ve never quite taken to Lionel Messi.

Then statistics will appear on the television. Cristiano Ronaldo has scored 26 goals in all competitions this season (including internationals). Messi betters that record by three. Just one goal on Sunday would tip the balance for either player, though. Goals in the Classico tend to take on a significance that transcends the numerical.

“Who is the best in the world?” Jose Mourinho asked in 2010. “There are two options, Cristiano? Messi?” Such is the footballing public’s almost unanimous consensus. They are the figureheads of Europe’s two best teams; it is natural that choice comes down to them and them alone.

Choosing between them has sparked intense wrangling.

In a cyber powered footballing forum dominated by Michael Cox devotees and facilitated by new-fangled Opta technology, the argument blossomed from pub-table banter into global controversy. It will never be resolved and, really, no one wants it to be. “Sports Entertainment,” as Rory Smith dubbed it in  The Blizzard, feeds off of such dull yet  addictive melodrama.

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Finally, after four years of disappointment, Major League Soccer’s prodigal son looks set to propel his team to a legitimately satisfactory finale.

If all goes to plan, David Beckham will gain redemption on Sunday night. Victory for the LA in this weekend’s MLS Cup Final would represent the pinnacle of a tumultuous Galaxy tenure.

Only, it shouldn’t have taken this long.  The blue-and-gold confetti that greeted the United States’ newest idol in 2007 was supposed to have inaugurated four years of revolution. Beckham had promised to stimulate soccer’s growth in America, to push the game into the forefront of previously dismissive minds. Instead, during his first four years stateside the London born star faced up to a grim reality: eradicating the American view that “soccer” is the exclusive domain of children under thirteen would take actual commitment, actual effort.

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Simon Kuper’s Soccer Against The Enemy is a classic of modern sports writing, covering immense cultural ground in its exploration of the game’s political and social influence.

Published in 1994, a time when football’s historical and cultural impact had yet to be fully appreciated, Soccer Against the Enemy convincingly counters the dismissiveness of intellectuals and gives two fingers up to Americans’ happily glorified ignorance. It cast the world’s most popular sport as a key player in games where the goalposts move – where the stakes are life, death and political power, not just a weekend’s three-point haul.

“When a game matters to billions of people it ceases to be just a game-” Kuper writes in the book’s opening lines. “Soccer is never just soccer.” The rest of the book’s 300-odd pages develop that intricate and multi-dimensional thesis, backing it up with mountains of evidence from Cameroon to Argentina, Margaret Thatcher to Maradona. In Kuper’s hands, football’s century of growth, controversy and drama comes to life and the sport comes into its own; not just as a staple of the modern world, but also as a force that holds society in thrall.

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