Tag: Jeremy Crump

Empty stands threaten to make football boring. That’s no surprise to prolific Norwegian novelist and seasoned football aficionado Dag Solstad. Irish sports writer Stephen Glennon believes that football is at a fork in the road. Norwegian journalist Anders Firing Lunde, Morgenbladet, interviews two commentators of the beautiful game about the future on football in light of the present pandemic.

In this opinion piece, Mads Skauge convincingly argues that VAR, the video assistant referee, goes across the inherent nature and beauty of football (The Beautiful Game! ), He lists five main paradoxes of VAR, and concludes that VAR technology is sucking the life out of football. He fears that the fight against VAR may be lost, but he believs that it is a fight worth fighting.

He is hardly the first to say this, Håkon Lutdal, but he argues well for his proposal for a shutdown of the Olympic Games. The Games, argues Lutdal, is an obsolescent event that costs excessive sums, which stands in the way of more interesting and sustainable international contests, one sport at a time. He holds the FIFA World Cup up as a perfect example.

Second homes feature in a number of countries worldwide and is a well-researched area in leisure studies. In this article, Arne Lie Christensen delves into the history of the most common form of second home in Norway, the hytte, hut, with its strong presence in the Norwegian cultural identity, and he shows that the use and role of the hytte has changed over the years.

Anne Tjønndal reviews the special issue of the Norwegian sociological journal on ‘Sport’ published on the occasion of ISSA’s 50th anniversary. In her meritorious presentation of the issue, Anne gives prominence to two articles that in different ways take ah holistic approach to the changing conditions of sport, health and physical activity in Norwegian society.

Rebecca Alpert is Professor of religion, and in her new book Religion and Sports: An Introduction and Case Studies (Columbia University Press) Dagmar Dahl recognizes thoughts from her own studies of sport and religion. The many case studies in the book makes it suitable as textbook in sport studies as well as religious and social sciences.

At the World Championships in cross country skiing in Lathi, Finland, the 50K race was won by Canadian Alex Harvey, with a Russian in second place and a Finn in third. The apparent strategy of the Norwegian coach didn’t work, and in a blogpost Arve Hjelseth problematizes the decision to let one man, the non-sprinter Sundby, try and split the field. This is Jeremy Crump’s translation of Hjelseth’s post.

In a blog post following the surprise Premier League victory by Leicester City FC, Arve Hjelseth presented an analysis of the unexpected triumph. Highlighting four principal explanatory factors, Hjelseth appears to have come very close to understanding the mechanisms of the Foxes’ win against the odds (which were in fact 5,000 to 1). This is Jeremy Crump’s translation of Hjelseth’s post.