Page 150 - Sport Culture and the Media

TAKING US THROUGH IT || 131

of varying length and type: manager profiles, features on significant weekend
games, a ‘where are they now?’ section, a ‘lifestyle’ segment (asking traditional
questions of players like their favourite foods, although now with some less
traditional answers than ‘steak and chips’), and so on. For many lower division
games, there are snippets (sometimes without by-lines) like the report of a
match, with the punning headline, ‘CHIP OFF THE OLD BECK’, between
Cambridge United and Chester:

GRANT BREBNER showed David Beckham is not the only Manchester
United man capable of hitting long-range stunners.
On loan with Cambridge United, Brebner got two drives on target only
to see Chester keeper Ronnie Sinclair produce two great saves.
Brebner said: ‘I couldn’t believe he stopped them’.
Stuart Rimmer scored Chester’s first before Paul Wilson equalised, but
Rob McDonald sealed City’s win in the final seconds.
(Sun Super Goals, 26 January 1998: 17)

This is a report of a game lasting a minimum of 90 minutes involving 28 players
(including substitutes), various team staff and match officials, and a crowd
(admittedly not of epic proportions) of 2473 – all in just 66 words. But in that
small print media space, room is found for mentions of an elite team and of
a footballer who, as is discussed in Chapter 3, was ‘exclusively’ interviewed and
pictured in the same issue of the newspaper on the occasion of his engagement
to a Spice Girl (so enabling a little word play on the ‘Sun-speak’ word ‘stunner’).
Apart from this celebrity association, a theme of thwarted ambition is intro-
duced and the opportunity taken for verbatim comment from the story’s
main subject, while the final paragraph is a condensed account of the identities
of the goal scorers, the order of scoring, and the dramatic resolution to the
narrative ‘in the final seconds’. In other words, this ‘cameo’ print news story
operates as precisely that – a narrativized account that introduces character,
conflict and the passage of events. Yet much of the information contained
in it (which teams and players were involved, who scored and when) is pro-
vided only four pages away (p. 21) in the Soccer Results Service section. This
duplication of the spare, summary data of match statistics operates as narrative
supplementation which contextualizes and elaborates on the sports event. This
is a technique that is used just as routinely in august broadsheet newspapers as
in tabloids.
The following report (supplied by the Associated Press news agency) with the
headline ‘Bourque Out, Pens Win’ of a National Hockey League game in the
New York Times Sports Friday Scoreboard section is one such example from
the broadsheets: