Swansea City: Another Orange Revolution?

Published: 18^th Mar 12 8:53 pm

by Eric Imhof
Soccer Blogger

RANT It!

Swansea City: Another Orange Revolution?

Mute Swan by Jörg Hempel on Flickr

Now that South By Southwest is over, and the haze from Saint Patrick’s Day has lifted (ah, coffee), I can finally turn my attention to the great weekend of football that I sadly wasn’t able to watch live—specifically, Swansea City’s thrashing of Fulham, which thrust them up three spots to number eight on the EPL table. The Swans, who wore orange (just like I did yesterday, to the English pub pretending to be an Irish pub for that one lucrative green day of the year—not really for William but mostly to be contrarian) were dominant in almost every phase and aspect of the game.

As this post on Wales Online explains, “Less than a week after one of the biggest wins in the club’s history against mega-rich Manchester City, Swansea bettered it with their best performance in the Premier League.”

The first sentence of said post sums it up nicely: “At the beginning of the season Swansea City were learning lessons away from home, now they are handing them out.”

Indeed. And I for one could not be happier to see Swansea make its way up the table, since hopefully they will restore the idea, seemingly long forgotten in England, that football is a team sport. They also offer great and continuous proof that spending on superstars (and its logical conclusions: mercenary bankrolling and treating individual “production” as the basis for all value) can only take a team so far.

As Michael J. Sandel writes in What isn’t for sale?: “When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this way. The most obvious example is human beings.”

The Fulham supporters, for their part, seem to be expressing a sentiment similar to my own, as they graciously applauded the opposing players after the match, as if they were thanking them for not only an entertaining display but also a welcomed reminder. Mark Schwarzer, Fulham’s keeper, went further with his compliments, saying that Swansea was more impressive than United (who beat Fulham 5-0 earlier this season), according to this Telegraph recap.

Perhaps, like William “the Silent” (bringin’ it all back home), the Swans will champion a quiet revolution within the league—a restoration (the word revolution connotes the completion of a circle, after all) of beautiful football in England.