Trinidad & Tobago | Watching the match by not watching it

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• Tags: 2006 world cup, Global Voices, Nicholas Laughlin, Roberto Arlt, Trinidad and Tobago

Global Voices on Feb 24 profiles writer and blogger Nicholas Laughlin of Port of Spain, whose innovations include watching a football match by not watching it.

Laughlin

Laughlin’s postmodern triumph—detailed in a 17-post series during the first-leg 2006 World Cup qualifying playoff between Trinidad & Tobago and Bahrain, concluding with the entry “After the match I didn’t watch”—occurred on 12 Nov 05 (see part 1). Laughlin for the most part rejects the TV for radio, and in the time of mediated existence his experience of the match seems strangely direct for not being there. He writes, “A roar has just gone up over the neighbourhood—T&T’s scored a goal.” We thank him for dispensing, in the moment, with the football live blogger’s exclamation point(s) and boldface type.

The confessions of angst and naïveté recall Argentine crónica writer Roberto Arlt witnessing the South American Championship between Argentina and Uruguay in Nov 1929. “You will say that I am the most extraordinary liar in the whole world from what I am going to tell you,” Arlt begins, immediately squashing the journalist’s pretension to expertise. “Yesterday was the first football game I ever saw in my twenty-nine years of existence.” He does not give us an author-vacated match account, but notices the oranges that hit supporters in the head and urination from lofty places. (For the full account, in translation, see the 2002 collection from Duke University Press, The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics.)

In Hornby-esque fashion, Laughlin reminds us that the football watcher—or the one not watching—connects to the spectacle in his own way, at a remove, yet still intimate with the game. In part 7, Laughlin types:

My father’s not happy about how the team is playing. He’s wondering if coach Leo Beenhakker has told the players to “take it easy.”

Snatch of TV commentary from the next room: “The sun was very, very hot.”

In the half-time crowd shots, it looked like people were partying with a kind of grim determination—jumping up & waving their flags not for fun but to show they weren’t dispirited.