Artsmonkey Blog

Whilst the poor girl who came on to play the Harp before the match must have felt a million miles of detachment from the impatient crowd eager for the game to get going, she was a message. Music plays an important role in setting the patriotic tone of the game – allegiances are made, emotions toyed with as both the harpist, the band and choir who led the national anthems galvanise the audience, er sorry crowd, into a deeper emotional link with their team. In fact, with a bit more stage management the whole game could have left the crowd exhausted and begging for more.

Purists, I’m sure, could happily watch the game of Rugby played in a field half-way up a mountain and do without all the flim-flam but that doesn’t pay for the horrible polyester kit, sorry, I meant hi-tech, wind shear, shower proof, breathable membraneous sportwear – (whatever happened to those good, thick, quality cotton rugby shirts that actually look good on most people? ) and probably wouldn’t begin to pay the team’s nightclub bill for the celebration/commiseration party after the game to reward all the pre-match sweat, blood and tears of rigourous training.

You can tell I’m not sports orientated but I do appreciate the skill involved and am looking forward to seeing what Football and the Arts Award Academies get up to over the next year. The important thing is that young people have a chance to learn skills and that they have icons like Football & Rugby players to encourage them to aim high. The young welsh mascot who was marched on at the beginning of the game (alongside a goat??!) was beaming and it is very likely that he’ll be trying harder in PE for a good few months, if not years and as a result he might grow up to be a sportsman or maybe a sports commentator, a camera man or sound engineer, all equally vital parts of the modern world of Sports – if it wasn’t a good watch (ie. Entertaining) people like me would stay at home.

So we need to celebrate the opportunities where organisations invest in young people or they’ll end up like two young girls I bumped into at Cardiff Central, one clutching a bottle of Malibu, the other so high she couldn’t do her clothes up properly (or walk straight), overlooked by two stoic members of the St Johns Ambulance who’d voluntarily given up their Saturday night to be on hand with first aid, as the girls thrashed about in pursuit of a good time, looking like their ‘night out’ may just be about to end in the gloom of the platform one toilets.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 07:32 pm and is filed under sharing, Culture, Youth Arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.