NORTHERN PLANNER

I’ve never been a football fanatic (but don’t wind me up about Leeds United’s stolen 15 points), but it’s hard not to appreciate this year’s Premiership, it’s a doozy. It’s gone right up to the last day of the season, the momentum has moved between teams, you really haven’t been able to predict what will happen.

This is the beauty of sport at its best…despite rigid rules and elegant predictions with stats, endless variation and nuances in form, luck and fate mean every event will be slightly different. I’m sure that’s why football is the maybe the world’s most popular sport – anyone can play it to a decent level of fun, and there’s so much room for variation between every single game. Even hot favourites lose.

Mens’ tennis is a little dull right now, basically, if it’s not clay, you kind of expect Federer to win everything. You can only admire inhuman levels of talent and sheer artistry for so long. Eventually, there’s little point when you already know the result.

As a child of the 70’s/80’s I was obsessed like everyone else with Star Wars, but there’s only so many times you can watch it. I’ll never get the thrill of that pivotal moment when Vader tells Luke he’s his father in the same way again.

Just like I’ll never feel alternately hot and cold at hearing Sign ‘o’ the Times for the very first time. The great thing about sport is that it reinvents itself with every game, with every race.

That’s the beauty of video games of course. Which brings me to brands and the obsession with simple. linear stories. We watch films and TV to because we like to not know what’s coming next, like sport. We watch repeats as long as there’s enough depth to reward a second viewing. Isn’t that how brands should operate? Opinion is divided, but I love the Budweiser work. Feels like a story I want to follow (and makes sense of the American heritage and dedication). Whatever you thought about Cadburys Gorilla, there was a true element of surprise and delight that’s missing from the dire trucks thing.

By the way, they’ve re-issued these tennis shoes.

They’re from Agassi’s daft pink cycle shorts period. And I WANT them. I know I’ll look daft, but when I wore those 15 years ago, I felt like a could do anything. I took the ball earlier, hit the ball harder..all at a time when an impressionable teenager was feeling hemmed in by ‘all white’ rules and stuffy old England attitudes. I WAS him. In my head. It would be nice to feel a little of that thrill again.

This ad captured it all for me. What is sport if it isn’t about being able to dream of the impossible?