Let’s you and him fight.
It is at this point of anti-hierarchical anarchist debate that the correspondent from another football magazine chooses to ask Richard Essex if he is in charge. This really is the wrong question. Essex, kindly, lets it go and continues. “This is not just a case of scoring goals and it’s not just about footballing skills, other skills are required, too.”
Mainly, it seems, the skill to trick people from another team into thinking you are going to form an alliance with them. This is illustrated early on in proceedings when Jason Skeet of the AAA, calling for the ball, takes delivery of the pass and promptly scores in the goal of the side the pass came from. Embarassingly, this is the end that Goal is defending. More embarassingly, it is one of our representatives who has been so obviously and completely duped. Worse still, it’s me. It has taken a very short time to realise that with three sides playing one is going to be picked on. It is us.
That’s from a piece called “The Anarchist’s Ball,” an only slightly condescending description of the delightfully dotty game of three-sided soccer—rather, football. (Found while browsing Chris Bertram’s miraculously unbloggered blog.) Which puts me in mind of moopsball, for no particularly good reason—those adhering to the rules of moopsball as written by Gary Cohn (and, it must be admitted, as remembered by fallible me) would rather sniffily didain Richard Essex’s intrepidly interplanetary footballers; the sentiment, I imagine, would be rather heartily reciprocated. —Granted, the moopsballers would with their bicycles and Scadian armor and squeaky hammers probably eat the more gently anarchistic dissolvers of the homoerotic/homophobic bipolarity of two-sided games for lunch, but so what? Strength is for the weak, and easy travel to other planets always scores beaucoup style points in my book.
Oh—the comic book that mentioned moopsball was one or another incarnation of that venerable fan favorite, The Legion of Superheroes. Which, for some reason, ties it all up neatly for me in one strange and inarticulable pop-culture ball of thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
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