Why You Should Watch Soccer 5 - Enough Telling

So in the world of writing, one of the biggest advice cliches is “show, don’t tell.” It’s a cliche because it’s a generally useful bit of wisdom, albeit one that can lead to some overly-vivid, drawn out descriptions. I think something like that is true in soccer as well. There’s plenty of time to tell why you should enjoy the game, but that’s nothing like showing you an experience of soccer to help you enter into the story for yourself. Therefore, inspired by this wonderful post at the Run of Play blog, I’m going to start writing game narratives each Saturday. This isn’t conventional sports journalism because I’m not terribly interested in reporting facts for the sake of reporting facts. I’m interested in telling a story. So I want to experiment with soccer-as-narrative. So from here on out Saturday soccer posts (when I’m able to write them) will not be about soccer in general, but about particular games. Most of the time they’ll be games in the English Premier League, which is the league I follow most closely. However, that won’t always be the case. On April 17 we’ll have the 2nd installment of El Clasico in Spain where FC Barcelona meets Real Madrid, this time at Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu stadium. This will be the most anticipated match of the year because it features the two most successful clubs in recent history with probably 12 of the top 30 players in the world and two of the most successful managers. Add in the fact that the match often becomes a symbol of the larger dispute between Catalonia and Castille and this match quickly becomes larger than life. On top of all that, Barca won the last match between the two 5-0 in what many have hailed as the greatest single match performance in the history of the game. Also, when possible I’ll write posts about the European Champion’s League (especially as long as my beloved Tottenham Hotspur is still in the competition).

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