Soccer-punch

A very amusing e-mail circular has been landing with a thud in hundreds of thousands of in-boxes around the globe, containing extracts purporting to be a rolling, minute-by-minute Internet text commentary by CNN on the USA’s shock victory over Mexico in the second round of the World Cup finals. For anyone who hasn’t received a copy, its general gist can be garnered from the following description of team USA’s second goal, a well-taken Landon Donovan header from an Eddie Lewis cross on the left wing.

“64 min GOAL Mexico 0 – 2 USA: Two soccer points to no score! Eddie Lewis makes a cross-pitch play from the left zone, finding Landon Donovan alone in the danger area. He top-bodies the sphere into the score bag and Mexico have a double-negative stat!”

The implication of the mail is clear: “Jayzus, look at the gobshite yank sports reporters. They’re still a bunch of ignorant hicks and they still know nothing about football. Cross pitch play from the left zone indeed… will the fools never learn?”

Which is all fine and dandy, except that I happen to know that this rolling, minute-by-minute commentary by CNN isn’t actually anything to do with CNN at all. It is in fact from the Guardian newspaper’s excellent website Guardian Unlimited Football. I know this to be fact, because I was sitting opposite Scottish sports journalist Scott Murray when he wrote it for a laugh at some ungodly hour of the morning as part of Guardian Unlimited Football’s rolling, minute-by-minute Internet text commentary on the USA’s shock victory over Mexico.

Imagine Murray’s surprise later on, when he tuned into Match Of The Day to see Gary Lineker, Mark Lawrenson, Peter Schmeichel and Alan Hansen quoting liberally from his text, while enjoying a smug chuckle at the stoopid Americans they mistakenly believed had written the commentary. It got better. The following night, it was Johnny Vaughan’s turn to labour under the delusion it was genuine, while Gazza’s best friend Danny Baker lined CNN up in his cross-hairs the next morning on his radio show. How deliciously ironic it was that three of the BBC’s smuggest presenters should fall hook, line and sinker for such a simple hoax.

In fact, calling it a hoax is lending it a gravitas it scarcely deserves. If Gary, Johnny, Danny or their researchers had looked a little more carefully, they’d have noticed the report getting increasingly surreal as the match progressed. There was this bit, for example…

“71 min: Perez miskicks wildly to give away a corner. From the angle, Lewis swivel-kicks against the stanchion. If that had gone in, a place in the semis of the Summer Soccer Kickabout would have surely been the USA’s. Nick Walsh has e-mailed in to say: ‘With such a narrow lead and the clock running down surely they will be bringing on a closing pitcher any minute?’.”

Or this…

“89 min: The US are closing this one out. Their fans have started to sing. Altogether now: “Take me out to the ball game, Take me out with the crowd, Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjacks, I don’t care if I never never get back, Let me root, root root for the home team, If they don’t win it’s a shame, For it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out at the old ball game!”

No. As hoaxes go, it certainly wasn’t the cleverest or most carefully orchestrated of all time.

The bulk of the minute-by-minute internet commentaries were done by four of us. I got involved after deciding that if I was going to be getting up at the crack of dawn for a month to watch World Cup footie, it would probably ease the pain to find some way of getting paid to do so. A few phone calls to a couple of pals later and I was lucky enough to get on board.

The brief from on high was simple: “There’ll be a lot of office bound people following our reports during the day because they won’t have access to televisions, so make sure they’re both informative and as amusing and entertaining as possible, so they’ll keep logging on for more.”

It took less than a week for us to completely lose the plot, and once we hit on the idea of interacting with readers during games, we completely disappeared up our own arses and – amazingly – the hit-rate went completely off the scale (averaging – I believe – over a million hits per match from all over the world). We were quoted at length in German and Swedish newspapers, roundly criticised on assorted (mainly American) websites and – this was a really pleasant surprise – I’m reliably informed that I even managed to grievously offend Eng-er-land’s Danny Mills with remarks I made about him during one game.

One of many funny experiences I had occurred when I threw one match commentary open to “the floor”, inviting e-mails from readers who had had real-life encounters with international footballers. Within an hour, I’d received over a thousand. Thanks to the pesky libel laws, the best of them were and remain unrepeatable, not least the very funny story from a bloke in Newcastle involving his father, a theatre toilet, Danish striker Jon Dahl Tomasson and a river of vomit.

Then there was the occasion that, in passing, I mentioned that the official for the Portugal v Poland encounter was “Scottish referee Hugh Dallas from Glasgow Rangers”. What was in essence a fairly lame quip elicited more pompous e-mails than you could possibly imagine from irate football supporters from the blue half of Glasgow. And that’s before you count the alarming number of semi-literate death threats. All I can do is apologise to those humourless Scottish folk and say that no offence was intended. If you really want to kill me, I’m really flattered. However, might I suggest you get in the queue behind Eng-er-land’s Danny Mills.