Page 198 - Sport Culture and the Media
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SCREENING THE ACTION ||  179


                         that the discursive positioning of English and African people was not always
                         consistent, there was a strong tendency to represent Cameroon as ‘“happy-go-
                         lucky” amateurs’ lacking England’s  ‘old bulldog spirit’, and an unfolding
                         process of  ‘discursive upgrading’ which  ‘involves narrators in constructing a
                         coherent narrative by progressively spelling out the system of oppositions on
                         which the account of national (football) character depends, and by reinter-
                         preting these oppositions as necessary’ (p. 410). Yet, Tudor goes on to argue
                         that distinguishing ‘us’ as superior to ‘them’ also lays bare the anxieties that
                         ‘we’ might feel about the state of the nation and our personal wellbeing
                         (O’Donnell 1994). It is for this reason, perhaps, that there is so much emphasis
                         in television sport and its commentary on the final score in sports contests as an
                         absolute and unquestioned measure of success and failure, so that ‘Televised
                         sports allows viewers to take comfort in the possibility of unequivocal
                         decisions, of being able to distinguish winners and losers, as well as in the
                         possibility of  “records” that are quantifiable and measurable’ (Weber 1996:
                         127). Of course, if the hoped-for victory does not occur, it is also necessary,
                         short of mass suicide, to come to terms with failure (a painfully acquired skill
                         at which English sports supporters excel). This loss rationalization process
                         opens up other narrative possibilities present in the age-old popular cries of ‘we
                         wuz robbed’, ‘string up the Board’, ‘the ref was bent’, and so on. Alternatively,
                         ridicule and abuse constitute common responses. When, for example, the
                         England association football team lost to lowly rated Australia in February
                         2003, the online version of The Sun newspaper digitally grafted the head of
                         England coach Sven Goran Eriksson (enhanced with outsized marsupial ears)
                         onto a kangaroo’s body, alongside the headline ‘Get tough or HOP OFF Your
                         message to Sven after Aussie disaster’. Television, however, because of its ‘live-
                         ness’, tends to handle such moments with greater restraint, even poignancy.
                         Thus, the BBC brought down the curtain on England’s 2002 World Cup
                         campaign, after its defeat by Brazil in June 2002, with a succession of touching,
                         slow-motion images to the mournful strains of ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’
                         by the pop group Oasis.
                           The analytical possibilities afforded by the moving sports image go well
                         beyond showing the sensitive side of contemporary sporting masculinity.
                         The television sport package, complete with its own visual grammar and
                         semiotically anchored by commentary, is readily available for the exploration of
                         socio-cultural power in, outside and through sport. Considerable space now
                         exists in cultural, media and sport studies, and in sociology, that opens such
                         texts for close inspection in seeking to understand their ways of working
                         with the ideologies and mythologies at hand. Simply consulting recent issues
                         of one academic resource, Journal of Sport & Social Issues, provides a plethora
                         of analyses of TV sport and its relationship to various dimensions of the
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