Welcome to what I hope you will experience as a four or five night midwinter-lull footie video festival, to warm your hearts and hearthsides as we trek together round the globe in search of the 2008 perfect goal…
This feature purports to represent many of the best goals of 2008 by way of video evidence. The brief remarks framing the video clips are intended mainly to provide relevant archival information—with, here and there, a bit of mostly enthusiastic appreciation, amateur aesthetic critique, and common-fan gossip added in purely as stuffing.
It should perhaps be explained, to qualify the above, that the intent to provide relevant archival information was limited in important respects by several decisive factors. First, the basic research for the piece was done by looking at video clips. Of maybe 500 matches, containing maybe 2500 goals, which were then reduced down to a thousand, and then… well, you get the sad picture. One’s two-week “holiday” (!) expedition to the Land of a Thousand Goals had its enthralling moments certainly, but eyeball death repeatedly appeared imminent, sleep became a forgotten memory, and finally, lest it take till Doomsday to finish the video-searching, clip-shuffling and fact-checking, some lines had to be drawn. I mean, after all, who wants to keep watching other people scoring for weeks on end when you yourself, due to this strange endeavour, aren’t?
