This blog post is funny, a masterful use of YouTube and a potentially valuable reframing of big data and dataviz as 'silly machines'.
"I’M SORRY, you can sit there and look and play with all your silly machines AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE…"
This wasn’t just a rallying cry for all Proper Football Men, as Sky’s stranglehold on vacuous football discourse began to take hold, but a prophetic one. For 1996’s “silly machines”, read today’s football analytics boom, Owen Coyle’s dismissal of tactics writer “Zonal Whoever” in 2011, Tim Sherwood’s belief that “players only call themselves No. 10s because they can’t score goals” and Sean Dyche’s ongoing war against the fraudulent European managers who simply make their players “run harder” and that’s it.
Back to 1996, though, and this was a football world struggling to come to terms with the prospect of a man in a TV studio rewinding all the errors and playing them back in slow motion until everyone had been taught a thorough retrospective lesson.