How to write like Sportingo
Most of us here on Left Back are mere amateur bloggers.
We write because we enjoy writing about football. We write because we want to get things off our chest. We write because we live in the vain hope that somebody out there might find it mildly entertaining.
We’re under no illusions about our place in the grand scheme of things. Yet some days we look wistfully at those whose skills are far beyond anything we could ever hope to achieve. Such keyboard panache coupled with the on-the-money opinions and just the right amount of credibility is not something everybody can pull off.
Oh, sure. We can try but what would be the point? It would be like us setting up a stall selling our pitiful sketches when next door is Picasso selling his genuine paintings for a fiver a time.
It would be akin to us trying to flog our home made rap album while 50 cent and Jay Z and Run DMC gave away their masterpieces for free. Truly we would be pissing in the wind.
But I know there are some of you out there with ambitions loftier than our own. Perhaps you just need that extra bit of impetus or advice to get you going. So, in the spirit of blogtasticness here is our guide to help you write like Sportingo. It looks like it’s a fairly easy recipe but then unicycling while juggling basketballs looks simple when you see an expert doing it. Once you get up and running and get a few months practice under your belt you should be fine but it’s getting started that’s the difficult bit.
Here’s what you need:
One player name
One, or two, club names
One large amount of money
The word ‘in’
Sounds easy so far, I know, but it’s trying to combine them that can be difficult.
The first way is to take one of each ingredient and combine them at random, so you might get something like:
In Lampard Barcelona £50m
That obviously doesn’t make much sense so you need to flesh it out a bit and jiggle things around. With a little practice you’ll come up with something like:
Lampard in £50m Barcelona move
To add a bit of spice you can throw in words like ’shock’ or ‘mega deal’. So now it becomes:
Lampard in shock £50m Barcelona move
Where it gets complicated is when you add the other team name in.
Lampard in shock £50m Barcelona move Chelsea - doesn’t work, does it? But think. How can we do this. Yes, that’s right.
Chelsea’s Lampard in shock £50m Barcelona move.
That way you get maximum exposure on all the football newsfeeds and your story gets lots of hits from suckers who think there might the slightest shred of evidence to support it.
Try a couple yourself. Here are your ingredients: Ronaldo - Real Madrid - £75m - Man United or Fabregas - Inter Milan - £60m - Arsenal
Just try a few out yourself before you start blogging and in no time you can be as good as Sportingo. Why not be creative and throw in words like ‘wonderkid’ or ‘megastar’. It’ll make all the difference.
Now, if you’ll excuse me we’re going to sit in the corner and weep at how crap we are.