You might have noticed the photo daily feature has been MIA for a while. Frankly, I was burned out posting it every day for almost a year. But I do miss the photos, so here’s the first in a new “photo occasional” series, which might show up every day, week or year.
And we kick things off with a return to look at one of our favourite Japanese clubs, Sapporo, who hosted Yokohama for their first game of the new J-League season. They lost 2-1, but you can’t blame the fans, can you?
Photo credit: Sasakei on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion photo pool.
My least favorite feature of Pitch Invasion. Sixteen people with a banner at a PDL or NOFV Oberliga or the Spartan South Midlands Football League match means at least as much to me as yet another photo of Gigantor Corporate Football Stadium.
I didn’t miss you putting up this kind of thing at all. The fact that this blog seems to love this kind of thing reflects a basic incoherency of Pitch Invasion: glorifying what’s possible only at the massive scale of international corporate football, and yet claiming to abhor the commercialization of the sport (Red Bull New York, for example, although there’s nothing but a superficial difference between them and any other MLS team).
We’ve shown plenty of photos of non-league and lower league football. We did an entire series on non-league football featuring some wonderful photography of less than fourteen people. I’m sorry you didn’t at least enjoy those. If you have suggestions for other photos to feature, please do send them along. I don’t think showing photos of larger stadiums precludes respecting that just as much, but they do tend to dominate the Pitch Invasion photo pool, from which these are drawn.
There’s also a difference between abhorring any kind of commercialisation of the sport (when did I claim that I did exactly?) and criticising particular forms of corporate behaviour. To me, changing the name and identity of a team wholesale overnight marks more than a superficial difference between Red Bull as an MLS owner-investor and most others who have not done that. Maybe you disagree; fair enough.
And sure, perhaps this whole thing has been incoherent from the beginning — I’m just a football fan running a blog in my spare time, there has never been a grand manifesto proclaimed anywhere here.