GOL?

by John Lim

Good as it’s gonna get?

For a good while now, Astro has been using Frank Lampard and Lionel Messi to convince us – in the same manner that Sylvester Stallone convinced us that he could play in goal – that watching football in HD (or, as Messi said, “esh-de”) is as good as them entering our living room and playing right in front of us.

Their message is clear as the definition they’re pitching to us: HD broadcast is as good as it’s gonna get when it comes to watching sports. Technology is racing to bring the full experience of the live match right into the living room, bar, restaurant – anywhere but the football stadium – to a level of realism that’s more real than real. Just earlier this year, Arsenal vs Manchester United was shown on Sky Sports in 3-D, and by jove, what can be more real than actually feeling like you’re on the pitch?

The high level of detail, however, was no substitute for the dire match that was Uruguay vs France – the first match I’d ever seen in HD. Have no doubt; the quality of the detail is amazing, and as promised, you could see Franck Ribery’s face-long scar in stunning resolution. I can’t deny that I might one day be suckered into getting a big screen.

But where Uruguay and France were concerned, however, HD brought to light in stunning detail the evidence of why football can never be a truly global sport for Americans and Western Samoans. In the absence of an actual match, HD captured droll highlight scraps and replayed it several times in slow-motion: flying tufts of grass, the soaring dive, and team captains desperately urging us to wake up.

We didn’t, and the score stayed 0-0.

When I tried to recall the match’s events for this essay, what ended up in my head was a jumble of disconnected slow-motion action scenes that somehow managed to occupy 90 minutes – a preview of what would happen if Michael Bay opted for a New Wave interpretation of Shaolin Soccer.

In the race to become more real that real, the sport we now see in HD is becoming increasingly surreal instead. In the real experience at the stadium, there are no replays. If you blink, head to the bathroom, or try to scrape that chewing gum off the seat, there won’t be a commentator analysing the goal.

What I’m saying is obvious, but I fear many of us now will feel a sense of loss in a stadium (“Where are the multiple camera angles, Andy Gray’s commentary… why are the football players so small?? – this sucks!”). It’s sad to think that HD live telecasts are as good as it’s going to get for football viewing for us and our kids, as the advertisement proclaims.

Not that there’s any compelling reason to head to the stadiums these days – the quality of local football is a shadow of itself, as are the crowds; only the odd exhibition matches against a foreign team stirs some excitement before we realise that the score is nearly always a 3-0 defeat, with one almost-goal for the national squad.

Stadium experiences are so rare that writing about them sounds like an eulogy of better days gone by. Among my surviving memories of them are the Klang Valley derbies, particularly of KL’s magnificently bearded Zoran Nikolic laying a pass that would cause a collective anticipatory gasp; The charging runs of Selangor’s Mehmet Durokovic from the back that urged supporters to shout their lungs out “JANGAN BOLOT WEIII ” upon seeing a left-back break into free space.

It didn’t matter that we didn’t see every blade of grass, every tackle in slow-motion, every spit on the ground. What we didn’t see was replaced by something heard and felt: the rise and fall of the crowd, the blind accusations of referee bias, and the inevitable post-match mamak session to make up for the stone-cold Ramly burgers.

In Esh-De, we are presented with a toned-down version of football – safe and sanitized for your experience to be relived in stunning detail. You can walk away from the screen when the team is down, hoping to catch the replay if they score a goal. Your influence on a game is only through superstition and mind-waves sent through the television screen broadcasting a game that’s thousands of miles away. Your shouts bear no significance to the outcome.

Is this as real as football is going to be? I hope not, but I feel that the day when we put on our 3-D glasses and proclaim “Wow, who needs a stadium when you have this?!” is an inevitability.

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