Over the course of this summer, West Ham United striker Andy Carroll shared a series of short videos with his Twitter followers. They were filmed from a camera mounted about 20ft in the air above his club's Chadwell Heath training facility, and showed the six-foot-four target man running through a series of fairly basic training drills as he gradually worked his way back to fitness after a serious knee injury. The footage is silent, so he chose to soundtrack some of the clips with a remix of the song Cheerleader by Jamaican singer OMI, a track which features the refrain "Do you need me? Do you think I'm pretty?" which aside from being either very knowing or very ironic – Carroll himself looks like the muscular, ponytailed saxophone player in Lost Boys – only added to the surreal, dreamlike quality of the clips.tekkers
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The clip then fades to footage of Carroll and a West Ham trainer running side by side, initially in real time before seguing into slow-motion. I guess the running is to demonstrate that his knee is now totally fine, although maybe someone should have suggested to Carroll that if you want to show the world that you're back to your electric best, maybe don't film yourself doing stuff in slow-motion. It's possible that he realised this, as he posts the exact same video a second time that same day, only with this time with the caption "POWER". This, presumably, is to emphasise the fact that even though he's running in slow motion and scoring piss easy close-range goals, there's actually a fuckload of POWER going on too, it's just invisible or something. While all this is happening, the Cheerleader remix continues to play in the background. The whole thing quickly becomes odd and hypnotic, like something you'd find projected inside a dark room at the Tate Modern.
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Another video features Carroll and the trainer just knocking a ball about. Nothing fancy. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. It looks like quite a nice day and you wouldn't be totally surprised to notice a few bottles of Kopparberg and a disposable barbecue on the grass beside them while they casually debate whether to buy some weed. The final clip Carroll chose to share with his followers involves him engaged in some more light running – this time to a remix of Blackstreet's No Diggity – before doing a few keepie-uppies and then, for the grand finale, booting the ball into a totally open net. There's a good chance that you yourself know what it feels like to boot a ball into a totally open net. It feels nice, right? Just because Carroll is a professional footballer with a combined £50m worth of transfer fees behind him doesn't mean he can't enjoy the sensation too. If the video came with sound, I bet we'd be able to hear him mutter "bosh!". There's something unquestionably cathartic about watching it. Which I did. Loads.It took me a while to realise why I couldn't help myself coming back to Carroll's weird little Turner Prize submissions, but once I twigged, it seemed so obvious: they represent the polar opposite of the online "skill vids" which have become endemic over the last 12 months. If you like football and if you also use the Internet, you will know exactly what I'm talking about, the fact that every third tweet you come across is now a short clip of a footballer executing magnetic close control or mental 40-yard volleys. Often as not, these skill clips are accompanied by a particular form of excitable CAPS-LOCK footy dialect, which always seems to have the tone of a 13-year-old girl trying to banter with Rodney Marsh on WhatsApp. Amazing goals are posted with the words "Utter filth!", "Unreal!", "Take a bow son!". We see "worldies" scored with clockwork regularity. Vine loops show wingers sending their fullbacks "for a hotdog", "humiliating" them or, if they manage to nutmeg them, "ending their career".Read on VICE Sports: The Cult: Paul Scholes & Patrick Vieira
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I blame Ronaldo. I blame the sugar-rush of three minutes each way on FIFA or Pro Evo. I blame Sepp Blatter and the fact that the sport has been marketed so relentlessly for so long that there are now millions of self-professed football fans that don't actually like football all that much. Not really. Not when it comes to it, and they have to commit to dicey risk/reward prospect of 90 minutes worth of low-scoring caginess. Safer, surely, to fall back on the comforting buzz of nutmegs and worldies, of mad tekkers and filthy skills.These guys just know how to take a free-kick. — Football Super Tips (@FootySuperTips)August 26, 2015
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"Bla bla bla…," he tweeted in reply. "You just show your 4-5 goals on hundred shoots, where is my 95 saves?"It's a good fucking question Adrián. Profound, too, because you know the truth of it. Skill vids and highlight reels are all vanities. Smoke and mirrors. Something to entertain the children. Personally, I would now quite like to see those 95 saves. Most of them are probably pretty boring but that's life. That's football. It probably doesn't hurt to remember that.@ben_machellMore football on VICE:How Playing 'FIFA' Helps Men Deal With Their FeelingsWhy I Should Be Jermain Defoe's PA and Save Him from a Life of Extreme SadnessThe World's Most Anarchic, Hectic Sport: Inside 'Three-Sided Football'One man is gutted to see me back!! — Andy Carroll (@AndyTCarroll)September 1, 2015