Argument by analogy is not a good technique at the best of times. Any attempt to draw an extended analogy between the England football team and the coalition government is horrible in principle and in practice, and receives an automatic entry to this series.
With an opening line like this:
There are remarkable similarities between Team Cleggeron and Team England
… I don’t even have to read the rest of the letter to know this is entry number 7.
I’ve not been able to write as many entries in this series as I’d have liked or as there is material for. Nevertheless, I’m soldiering on with this one from that intellectual powerhouse, Prospect magazine:
In the post mortems that are to come, whether we are talking about football or about the state of the nation, we are going to have ask ourselves how and why or free-market, high-wage, globalised industries are so phenomenally successful at enriching themselves, but cannot seem to be mobilised to deliver public goods.
That’s exactly the question we’re going to ask.
(Previous entries in this series can be found here.)
I actually liked this little paean to goalkeepers. Having been a keeper myself, I fully recognise how weird you need to be to fulfil the duties of that role.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t let the article pass my intellectualising series (the previous entry, with links to other entries therein, is here) with a line like this in it:
I assume he has never compared his role between the sticks with that of the versifier, but his apparent solitude and contemplative demeanour after his fumble on Saturday night was nothing short of poetic.
arbitrary constant 