Academic literature on the topic 'GAK (Soccer team)'

<div>The aim of this study was to assess occurrence of sports injuries among professional male soccer players in relation to their psychological characteristics. This prospective cohort study was conducted during the 2013/2014 sports season among all professional players with the first team contract in the first Croatian soccer league. A stratified sample of 182 male soccer players were selected for the assessment. They were surveyed during their preparation period before the beginning of the season and were under monitoring during the season. Seriousness of injuries was assessed depending on the length (one day or more) of players’ non-participation in sports activities. Psychological characteristics were assessed by the General Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7), Revised Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, impulsive behaviour scale from the Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire Cross-Cultural 50-item version and Psychological Skills Inventory for Sports. Majority of players (62.6%) experienced a kind of injury, with the mean number of 1.28 injuries per player, and 30.7% of them contracted severe injuries. Results of the binary regression model suggest that likelihood of being injured is mostly influenced by higher Impulsive Sensation Seeking and GAD-7 scores (OR=1.26 in both cases). In contrast, adequate mental preparation significantly lowers the chance of being injured (OR=0.89).The study adds an insight into proportions, severity, mechanisms and number of sport injuries in the population of Croatian professional soccer players. We propose several variables as important predictors of future injuries. Some scales, commonly used in this field, have been shown to be less useful in injury prediction.</div>

Abstract This study determined whether the fitness status of college athletes, and/or their measurable anxiety levels, had an effect on production of salivary sIgA. High-intensity physical training in elite sports has a negative effect on immune responses, while moderate-intensity training has a positive effect. In addition, psychological stress has a negative impact on immune function. Few studies have looked at the interplay between physical training and stress on the immune response. In this study, we evaluated 2 populations of female college athletes (Division III): one population participating in intense training (ice hockey), and the other group was in the “off season” (soccer). Maximal oxygen consumption (aerobic fitness) was estimated using the modified Balke sub-maximal treadmill test. Saliva samples were collected for sIgA and cortisol measurement. The anxiety levels were measured using a GAD-7 survey. We found that the team participating in their sport (hockey) had higher salivary IgA levels than the team that was “off season” (soccer). There was a wide range of anxiety levels and no correlation between anxiety and salivary IgA or sport. Higher levels of salivary IgA may confer added immune protection to the in-season athletes and these data suggest that the female college athletes were not training to the point of negatively impacting their immune responses. Strategies to maintain immune health are important to consider in designing training programs for athletes.

Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham has shown to delighted audiences around the world. Released during the soccer World Cup (and just before it in Britain in case the Brits did poorly), the film capitalised on interest in the game with its good-humoured look at a young 18 year old’s passion for playing soccer. Where the film would seem to break new ground is that the 18 year old is not only a girl, but also of Indian Sikh background. In allowing Jess (Jasminder) to follow her sporting dreams to professionalism rather than the path her parents initially expect of her (university then marriage), the film stretches the boundaries of race, gender, and generation, allowing audiences the opportunity to identify with an atypical protagonist. The film won almost universal goodwill from critics and audiences alike, however Jess’ success seems to be predicated on the assumption that the audience will only accept a British Indian girl’s love of soccer if any taint of lesbianism is expelled from the film. Girls’ team sport has not much of a public following, yet Beckham topped the British charts for weeks, was voted viewers’ favourite in the Sydney Film Festival, and screened for months in Australian cinemas and elsewhere around the world. While Beckham’s name may have helped draw the crowds, a summary of the subject matter might be expected to have turned them away, rather than dragged them in. When Chandra was attempting to raise finance for the film, the response was invariably, “Soccer? Girl Soccer? Indian girl soccer? – no way!” (Urban) While it is true that positioning an audience to side with a protagonist can result in the most unexpected identifications, women’s sport often attracts either uneasiness or indifference rather than delight and acceptance. By having one set of fears allayed, an audience can often be induced to identify with a cause they might otherwise feel ambivalent about. If Jess is shown to conventionally love a man, then her love of soccer is rendered so much more acceptable. While the reception of women’s sport in the West has come a long way from the alarm which greeted its inception in the late nineteenth century, it still poses something of a conundrum in the public sphere. The first women’s professional soccer match, played in London in 1895, was treated with scorn by the press. In the early 1920s in Britain, men’s clubs stalled the development of women’s soccer (which consisted of about 150 clubs) when they refused to let women use their pitches. Currently women’s soccer is on the rise, especially in the US, but the press in particular often find it, and other non-traditional female games, difficult to report without resorting to tactics designed to allay readers’ (and possibly reporters’) fears. These fears revolve around the contradictions between the public role of sport and dominant cultural constructions of femininity. Such contradictions have been summarised as being between “femininity or ‘musculinity’” (Hargreaves 145). Ultimately, traditional femininity is seen to be in opposition to athleticism and the sportswoman is often involved in a complex negotiation between the two conflicting requirements. When the sportswoman’s appearance, behaviour, and especially her relationships uphold traditional femininity, her athleticism is not seen as problematic. On the other hand, when she fails to sufficiently ‘feminise’ herself, or even if she plays a sport considered ‘masculine’, her credentials as a woman may be called into question. The most devastating allegation to be levelled at the sportswoman is still that sport has made her butch. To be butch is to have failed to adequately perform femininity, and is generally also taken to indicate lesbianism. Even women who do little to conform to traditional measures of femininity may be redeemed in the press and in commentary by reference to their husbands, boyfriends and children. Lesbians present a different problem for sports writers and commentators; while many sportswomen are in fact lesbian, the public is generally shielded from this. Despite the fact that gay issues are being represented more and more in popular culture, in sport it is still a taboo for both men and women. In Bend It Like Beckham, the whole plot of the film depends on negotiating that taboo in as convincing a way as possible. In order to make possible a narrative of a girl’s self-fulfilment through soccer for mainstream audiences, it is necessary for the film to make the lesbian in soccer invisible at the same time. The filmmaker goes to great lengths to do this. The most obvious device is the romance plot, staple of popular film in almost any genre. Joe is the love interest of both girls in the heterosexual plot as, conversely, he is the plot device which separates them, in a potential lesbian plot. As the coach of the girls’ team, he does not detract in any way from either girl’s goal of playing professional sport. In order to satisfy parental characters and audience alike, he is necessary as the affirmation of Jess’ (and Jules’) heterosexuality. But the film goes further than simply making the central female characters straight. In order to expunge the image of the lesbian sportswoman, every scene depicting the team in conversation or relaxing features a performance of heterosexuality. This is done either through their locker room conversations about who is shagging whom and who fancies whom, or by their dress and demeanour at the club in Germany. There is such an underlying anxiety about lesbianism in the film that not a single representation of it is allowed to occur, despite how unrealistic this might be in women’s sport. It is not that Chadha is not prepared to deal with the issue; her last film, What’s Cooking, positively featured a lesbian couple among other couplings and family groups. However, obviously, the spectre of the lesbian is so great in women’s sport that it is necessary to omit it entirely in order to represent women’s participation in sport as a positive thing. This is done, above all, by affirming the girls’ femininity, and most of all their heterosexuality. Although Jules’ mother Paula is the butt of much of the film’s humour – the extraordinary variations in her cleavage provide a running sight gag throughout the film – she is also the voice of the audience’s fears about the direction of the girls’ relationship: “There’s a reason why Sporty Spice is the only one of them without a fella”. Despite the audience being let in on the truth about the girls’ apparent heterosexuality much earlier than Paula is, they are similarly set up to anticipate that these soccer-mad girls, with their posters of either Beckham or butch sportswomen on their walls, will gradually fall in love with each other over the course of the film. But as Jules tells her mother: “Just because I wear trackies and play sport, doesn’t make me a lesbian”. Paula’s response – “I’ve got nothing against it. I was cheering for Martina Navratilova as much as the next person” – hides the fact that she does have something against lesbianism. Finally her joy at the revelation that the girls are both keen on Joe rather than each other is mirrored in the audience’s laughter at her, laughter which to some extent could be interpreted as reflecting their own relief. While Paula is almost as self-conscious about Jess’ Indian heritage as she is about lesbianism, the film is more comfortable about racial diversity than it is about lesbianism. It’s not even gayness as such that is troubling. Jess’ friend Tony tells her of his attraction to men – “no, Jess, I really like Beckham” – and this is portrayed affectionately, despite the viewer’s knowledge that life for him may involve more difficult negotiations than Jess will have to make. The real focus of the film is on choices for women and establishing sport as a valid one of these. Jess’ soccer final is given equal footing with Pinky’s wedding, and the cuts between both occasions construct them as similarly fulfilling events for both sisters. The film is not concerned with undermining Pinky’s choices of marriage and motherhood either, although both Jess’ and Jules’ mothers are represented as conservative and limiting forces in their lives, much more so than their fathers. Bend It Like Beckham cannot, in the end, be ‘bent’ because it is so busy exorcising the spectre of the lesbian in sport. Establishing an Indian sporting female subjectivity comes at the cost of rejecting any potential lesbian subjectivity, let alone lesbian love. If Jess is to love sport, then she must love her man as well. In order to present a palatable narrative of female fulfilment in sport, Jess and Jules have to be pretty and feminine as well as athletic, and most of all, they have to be straight. Works Cited Hargreaves, Jennifer. Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sports. London: Routledge, 1994. Urban, Andrew L. “Bending Forward.” Urbancinefile October 3, 2002. http://www.urbancinefile.com 04/10/02. Links http://www.urbancinefile.com Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Treagus, Mandy. "Not Bent At All" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/beckham.php>. APA Style Treagus, M., (2002, Nov 20). Not Bent At All. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/beckham.html

I called your producer on the way here in the car because I was very excited. I found out … I did one of those genetic testing things and I found out that I'm 63 percent Irish … I had no idea. I had no idea! I thought I was Scottish and Welsh. It turns out my parents are just full of shit, I guess. But now I’m Irish and it just makes so much sense! I'm a really good drinker. I love St. Patrick's Day. Potatoes are delicious. I'm looking forward to meeting all my cousins … [to Conan O’Brien] You and I are probably related! … Now I get to say things like, “It’s in me genes! I love that Conan O’Brien; he’s such a nice fella.” You’re kinda like a giant leprechaun. (Reese Witherspoon, Tuesday 21 March 2017)IntroductionAs an Irishman and a football fan, I watched the unfolding 2016 UEFA European Championship in France (hereafter ‘Euro 2016’) with a mixture of trepidation and delight. Although the Republic of Ireland team was eventually knocked out of the competition in defeat to the host nation, the players performed extremely well – most notably in defeating Italy 1:0. It is not the on-field performance of the Irish team that interests me in this short article, however, but rather how Irish fans travelling to the competition were depicted in the surrounding international news coverage. In particular, I focus on the centrality of fan footage – shot on smart phones and uploaded to YouTube (in most cases by fans themselves) – in this news coverage. In doing so, I reflect on how sports fans contribute to wider understandings of nationness in the global imagination and how their behaviour is often interpreted (as in the case here) through long-established tropes about people and places. The Media ManifoldTo “depict” something is to represent it in words and pictures. As the contemporary world is largely shaped by and dependent on mass media – and different forms of media have merged (or “converged”) through digital media platforms – mediated forms of depiction have become increasingly important in our lives. On one hand, the constant connectivity made possible in the digital age has made the representation of people and places less controllable, insofar as the information and knowledge about our world circulating through media devices are partly created by ordinary people. On the other hand, traditional broadcast media arguably remain the dominant narrators of people and places worldwide, and their stories, Gerbner reminds us, are largely formula-driven and dramatically charged, and work to “retribalize” modern society. However, a more important point, I suggest, is that so-called new and old media can no longer be thought of as separate and discrete; rather, our attention should focus on the complex interrelations made possible by deep mediatisation (Couldry and Hepp).As an example, consider that the Youtube video of Reese Witherspoon’s recent appearance on the Conan O’Brien chat show – from which the passage at the start of this article is taken – had already been viewed 54,669 times when I first viewed it, a mere 16 hours after it was originally posted. At that point, the televised interview had already been reported on in a variety of international digital news outlets, including rte.ie, independent.ie., nydailynews.com, msn.com, huffingtonpost.com, cote-ivoire.com – and myriad entertainment news sites. In other words, this short interview was consumed synchronously and asynchronously, over a number of different media platforms; it was viewed and reviewed, and critiqued and commented upon, and in turn found itself the subject of news commentary, which fed the ongoing cycle. And yet, it is important to also note that a multiplicity of media interactions does not automatically give rise to oppositional discourse and ideological contestation, as is sometimes assumed. In fact, how ostensibly ‘different’ kinds of media can work to produce a broadly shared construction of a people and place is particularly relevant here. Just as Reese Witherspoon’s interview on the Conan O’Brien show perpetuates a highly stereotypical version of Irishness across a number of platforms, news coverage of Irish fans at Euro 2016 largely conformed to established tropes about Irish people, but this was also fed – to some extent – by Irish fans themselves.Irish Identity, Sport, and the Global ImaginationThere is insufficient space here to describe in any detail the evolving representation of Irish identity, about which a vast literature has developed (nationally and internationally) over the past several decades. As with other varieties of nationness, Irishness has been constructed across a variety of cultural forms, including advertising, art, film, novels, travel brochures, plays and documentaries. Importantly, Irishness has also to a great extent been constructed outside of Ireland (Arrowsmith; Negra).As is well known, the Irish were historically constructed by their colonial masters as a small uncivilised race – as primitive wayward children, prone to “sentimentality, ineffectuality, nervous excitability and unworldliness” (Fanning 33). When pondering the “Celtic nature,” the renowned English poet and cultural critic Mathew Arnold concluded that “sentimental” was the best single term to use (100). This perception pervaded internationally, with early depictions of Irish-Americans in US cinema centring on varieties of negative excess, such as lawlessness, drunkenness and violence (Rains). Against this prevailing image of negative excess, the intellectuals and artists associated with what became known as the Celtic Revival began a conscious effort to “rebrand” Ireland from the nineteenth century onwards, reversing the negatives of the colonial project and celebrating Irish tradition, language and culture (Fanning).At first, only distinctly Irish sports associated with the amateur Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) were co-opted in this very particular nation-building project. Since then, however, sport more generally has acted as a site for the negotiation of a variety of overlapping Irish identities. Cronin, for example, describes how the GAA successfully repackaged itself in the 1990s to reflect the confidence of Celtic Tiger Irishness while also remaining rooted in the counties and parishes across Ireland. Studies of Irish football and rugby have similarly examined how these sports have functioned as representatives of changed or evolving Irish identities (Arrowsmith; Free). And yet, throughout Ireland’s changing economic fortunes – from boom to bust, to the gradual renewal of late – a touristic image of Irishness has remained hegemonic in the global imagination. In popular culture, and especially American popular culture, Ireland is often depicted as a kind of pre-industrial theme park – a place where the effects of modernity are felt less, or are erased altogether (Negra). The Irish are known for their charm and sociability; in Clancy’s words, they are seen internationally as “simple, clever and friendly folk” (98). We can identify a number of representational tropes within this dominant image, but two in particular are apposite here: ‘smallness’ and ‘happy-go-luckiness’.Sporting NewsBefore we consider Euro 2016, it is worth briefly considering how the news industry approaches such events. “News”, Dahlgren reminds us, is not so much “information” as it is a specific kind of cultural discourse. News, in other words, is a particular kind of discursive composition that constructs and narrates stories in particular ways. Approaching sports coverage from this vantage point, Poulton and Roderick (xviii) suggest that “sport offers everything a good story should have: heroes and villains, triumph and disaster, achievement and despair, tension and drama.” Similarly, Jason Tuck observes that the media have long had a tendency to employ the “vocabulary of war” to “hype up sporting events,” a discursive tactic which, he argues, links “the two areas of life where the nation is a primary signifier” (190-191).In short, sport is abundant in news values, and media professionals strive to produce coverage that is attractive, interesting and exciting for audiences. Stead (340) suggests that there are three key characteristics governing the production of “media sports packages”: spectacularisation, dramatisation, and personalisation. These production characteristics ensure that sports coverage is exciting and interesting for viewers, but that it also in some respects conforms to their expectations. “This ‘emergent’ quality of sport in the media helps meet the perpetual audience need for something new and different alongside what is familiar and known” (Rowe 32). The disproportionate attention to Irish fans at Euro 2016 was perhaps new, but the overall depiction of the Irish was rather old, I would argue. The news discourse surrounding Euro 2016 worked to suggest, in the Irish case at least, that the nation was embodied not only in its on-field athletic representatives but more so, perhaps, in its travelling fans.Euro 2016In June 2016 the Euros kicked off in France, with the home team beating Romania 2-1. Despite widespread fears of potential terrorist attacks and disruption, the event passed successfully, with Portugal eventually lifting the Henri Delaunay Trophy. As the competition progressed, the behaviour of Irish fans quickly became a central news story, fuelled in large part by smart phone footage uploaded to the internet by Irish fans themselves. Amongst the many videos uploaded to the internet, several became the focus of news reports, especially those in which the goodwill and childlike playfulness of the Irish were on show. In one such video, Irish fans are seen singing lullabies to a baby on a Bordeaux train. In another video, Irish fans appear to help a French couple change a flat tire. In yet another video, Irish fans sing cheerfully as they clean up beer cans and bottles. (It is noteworthy that as of July 2017, some of these videos have been viewed several million times.)News providers quickly turned their attention to Irish fans, sometimes using these to draw stark contrasts with the behaviour of other fans, notably English and Russian fans. Buzzfeed, followed by ESPN, followed by Sky News, Le Monde, Fox News, the Washington Post and numerous other providers celebrated the exploits of Irish fans, with some such as Sky News and Aljazeera going so far as to produce video montages of the most “memorable moments” involving “the boys in green.” In an article titled ‘Irish fans win admirers at Euro 2016,’ Fox News reported that “social media is full of examples of Irish kindness” and that “that Irish wit has been a fixture at the tournament.” Aljazeera’s AJ+ news channel produced a video montage titled ‘Are Irish fans the champions of Euro 2016?’ which included spliced footage from some of the aforementioned videos. The Daily Mirror (UK edition) praised their “fun loving approach to watching football.” Similarly, a headline for NPR declared, “And as if they could not be adorable enough, in a quiet moment, Irish fans sang on a French train to help lull a baby to sleep.” It is important to note that viewer comments under many of these articles and videos were also generally effusive in their praise. For example, under the video ‘Irish Fans help French couple change flat tire,’ one viewer (Amsterdam 410) commented, ‘Irish people nicest people in world by far. they always happy just amazing people.’ Another (Juan Ardilla) commented, ‘Irish fans restored my faith in humanity.’As the final stages of the tournament approached, the Mayor of Paris announced that she was awarding the Medal of the City of Paris to Irish fans for their sporting goodwill. Back home in Ireland, the behaviour of Irish fans in France was also celebrated, with President Michael D. Higgins commenting that “Ireland could not wish for better ambassadors abroad.” In all of this news coverage, the humble kindness, helpfulness and friendliness of the Irish are depicted as native qualities and crystallise as a kind of ideal national character. Though laudatory, the tropes of smallness and happy-go-luckiness are again evident here, as is the recurrent depiction of Irishness as an ‘innocent identity’ (Negra). The “boys” in green are spirited in a non-threatening way, as children generally are. Notably, Stephan Reich, journalist with German sports magazine 11Freunde wrote: “the qualification of the Irish is a godsend. The Boys in Green can celebrate like no other nation, always peaceful, always sympathetic and emphatic, with an infectious, childlike joy.” Irishness as Antidote? The centrality of the Irish fan footage in the international news coverage of Euro 2016 is significant, I suggest, but interpreting its meaning is not a simple or straightforward task. Fans (like everyone) make choices about how to present themselves, and these choices are partly conscious and partly unconscious, partly spontaneous and partly conditioned. Pope (2008), for example, draws on Emile Durkheim to explain the behaviour of sports fans sociologically. “Sporting events,” Pope tells us, “exemplify the conditions of religious ritual: high rates of group interaction, focus on sacred symbols, and collective ritual behaviour symbolising group membership and strengthening shared beliefs, values, aspirations and emotions” (Pope 85). Pope reminds us, in other words, that what fans do and say, and wear and sing – in short, how they perform – is partly spontaneous and situated, and partly governed by a long-established fandom pedagogy that implies familiarity with a whole range of international football fan styles and embodied performances (Rowe). To this, we must add that fans of a national sports team generally uphold shared understandings of what constitutes desirable and appropriate patriotic behaviour. Finally, in the case reported here, we must also consider that the behaviour of Irish fans was also partly shaped by their awareness of participating in the developing media sport spectacle and, indeed, of their own position as ‘suppliers’ of news content. In effect, Irish fans at Euro 2016 occupied an interesting hybrid position between passive consumption and active production – ‘produser’ fans, as it were.On one hand, therefore, we can consider fan footage as evidence of spontaneous displays of affective unity, captured by fellow participants. The realism or ‘authenticity’ of these supposedly natural and unscripted performances is conveyed by the grainy images, and amateur, shaky camerawork, which ironically work to create an impression of unmediated reality (see Goldman and Papson). On the other hand, Mike Cronin considers them contrived, staged, and knowingly performative, and suggestive of “hyper-aware” Irish fans playing up to the camera.However, regardless of how we might explain or interpret these fan performances, it is the fact that they play a role in making Irishness public that most interests me here. For my purposes, the most important consideration is how the patriotic performances of Irish fans both fed and harmonized with the developing news coverage; the resulting depiction of the Irish was partly an outcome of journalistic conventions and partly a consequence of the self-essentialising performances of Irish fans. In a sense, these fan-centred videos were ready-made or ‘packaged’ for an international news audience: they are short, dramatic and entertaining, and their ideological content is in keeping with established tropes about Irishness. As a consequence, the media-sport discourse surrounding Euro 2016 – itself a mixture of international news values and home-grown essentialism – valorised a largely touristic understanding of Irishness, albeit one that many Irish people wilfully celebrate.Why such a construction of Irishness is internationally appealing is unclear, but it is certainly not new. John Fanning (26) cites a number of writers in highlighting that Ireland has long nurtured a romantic self-image that presents the country as a kind of balm for the complexities of the modern world. For example, he cites New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who observed in 2001 that “people all over the world are looking to Ireland for its reservoir of spirituality hoping to siphon off what they can feed to their souls which have become hungry for something other than consumption and computers.” Similarly, Diane Negra writes that “virtually every form of popular culture has in one way or another, presented Irishness as a moral antidote to contemporary ills ranging from globalisation to post-modern alienation, from crises over the meaning and practice of family values to environmental destruction” (3). Earlier, I described the Arnoldian image of the Irish as a race governed by ‘negative excess’. Arguably, in a time of profound ideological division and resurgent cultural nationalism – a time of polarisation and populism, of Trumpism and Euroscepticism – this ‘excess’ has once again been positively recoded, and now it is the ‘sentimental excess’ of the Irish that is imagined as a salve for the cultural schisms of our time.ConclusionMuch has been made of new media powers to contest official discourses. Sports fans, too, are now considered much less ‘controllable’ on account of their ability to disrupt official messages online (as well as offline). The case of Irish fans at Euro 2016, however, offers a reminder that we must avoid routine assumptions that the “uses” made of “new” and “old” media are necessarily divergent (Rowe, Ruddock and Hutchins). My interest here was less in what any single news item or fan-produced video tells us, but rather in the aggregate construction of Irishness that emerges in the media-sport discourse surrounding this event. Relatedly, in writing about the London Olympics, Wardle observed that most of what appeared on social media concerning the Games did not depart significantly from the celebratory tone of mainstream news media organisations. “In fact the absence of any story that threatened the hegemonic vision of the Games as nation-builder, shows that while social media provided an additional and new form of newsgathering, it had to fit within the traditional news structures, routines and agenda” (Wardle 12).Obviously, it is important to acknowledge the contestability of all media texts, including the news items and fan footage mentioned here, and to recognise that such texts are open to multiple interpretations based on diverse reading positions. And yet, here I have suggested that there is something of a ‘preferred’ reading in the depiction of Irish fans at Euro 2016. The news coverage, and the footage on which it draws, are important because of what they collectively suggest about Irish national identity: here we witness a shift from identity performance to identity writ large, and one means of analysing their international (and intertextual significance), I have suggested, is to view them through the prism of established tropes about Irishness.Travelling sports fans – for better or worse – are ‘carriers’ of places and cultures, and they remind us that “there is also a cultural economy of sport, where information, images, ideas and rhetorics are exchanged, where symbolic value is added, where metaphorical (and sometimes literal, in the case of publicly listed sports clubs) stocks rise and fall” (Rowe 24). There is no question, to borrow Rowe’s term, that Ireland’s ‘stocks’ rose considerably on account of Euro 2016. In news terms, Irish fans provided entertainment value; they were the ‘human interest’ story of the tournament; they were the ‘feel-good’ factor of the event – and importantly, they were the suppliers of much of this content (albeit unofficially). Ultimately, I suggest that we think of the overall depiction of the Irish at Euro 2016 as a co-construction of international news media practices and the self-presentational practices of Irish fans themselves. The result was not simply a depiction of idealised fandom, but more importantly, an idealisation of a people and a place, in which the plucky little people on tour became the global standard bearers of Irish identity.ReferencesArnold, Mathew. Celtic Literature. Carolina: Lulu Press, 2013.Arrowsmith, Aidan. “Plastic Paddies vs. Master Racers: ‘Soccer’ and Irish Identity.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.4 (2004). 25 Mar. 2017 <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1367877904047864>.Boards and Networked Digital Media Sport Communities.” Convergence 16.3 (2010). 25 Mar. 2017 <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354856510367622>.Clancy, Michael. Brand New Ireland: Tourism, Development and National Identity in the Irish Republic. Surrey and Vermont: Ashgate, 2009.Couldry, Nick, and Andreas Hepp. The Mediated Construction of Reality. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.Cronin, Michael. “Is It for the Glamour? Masculinity, Nationhood and Amateurism in Contemporary Projections of the Gaelic Athletic Association.” Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture. Eds. Wanda Balzano, Anne Mulhall, and Moynagh Sullivan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 39–51.Cronin, Mike. “Serenading Nuns: Irish Soccer Fandom as Performance.” Post-Celtic Tiger Irishness Symposium, Trinity College Dublin, 25 Nov. 2016.Dahlgren, Peter. “Beyond Information: TV News as a Cultural Discourse.” The European Journal of Communication Research 12.2 (1986): 125–36.Fanning, John. “Branding and Begorrah: The Importance of Ireland’s Nation Brand Image.” Irish Marketing Review 21.1-2 (2011). 25 Mar. 2017 <https://www.dit.ie/media/newsdocuments/2011/3%20Fanning.pdf>.Free, Marcus. “Diaspora and Rootedness, Amateurism and Professionalism in Media Discourses of Irish Soccer and Rugby in the 1990s and 2000s.” Éire-Ireland 48.1–2 (2013). 25 Mar. 2017 <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/510693/pdf>.Friedman, Thomas. “Foreign Affairs: The Lexus and the Shamrock.” The Opinion Pages. New York Times 3 Aug. 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/03/opinion/foreign-affairs-the-lexus-and-the-shamrock.html>.Gerbner, George. “The Stories We Tell and the Stories We Sell.” Journal of International Communication 18.2 (2012). 25 Mar. 2017 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13216597.2012.709928>.Goldman, Robert, and Stephen Papson. Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising. New York: Guilford Press, 1996.Negra, Diane. The Irish in Us. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.Pope, Whitney. “Emile Durkheim.” Key Sociological Thinkers. 2nd ed. Ed. Rob Stones. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 76-89.Poulton, Emma, and Martin Roderick. Sport in Films. London: Routledge, 2008.Rains, Stephanie. The Irish-American in Popular Culture 1945-2000. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007.Rowe, David, Andy Ruddock, and Brett Hutchins. “Cultures of Complaint: Online Fan Message Boards and Networked Digital Media Sport Communities.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technology 16.3 (2010). 25 Mar. 2017 <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354856510367622>.Rowe, David. Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity. 2nd ed. Berkshire: Open University Press, 2004.Stead, David. “Sport and the Media.” Sport and Society: A Student Introduction. 2nd ed. Ed. Barrie Houlihan. London: Sage, 2008. 328-347.Wardle, Claire. “Social Media, Newsgathering and the Olympics.” Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies 2 (2012). 25 Mar. 2017 <https://publications.cardiffuniversitypress.org/index.php/JOMEC/article/view/304>.

Abstract Locker rooms are full of disease, or at least they feel that way. So it’s no surprise that one of the first times my OCD manifested itself at school involved a locker room. My classmates seemed to like it there. They ran around the room, squirting bottles of cologne at each other, telling tasteless jokes, and pelting each other with dirty clothes like a cotton snowball fight. But I hated that room. The smell of feet, sweat, and body odor was enough to make me gag. Some days, the soccer team brought a sizable chunk of the field inside on their cleats, and the dank smell of earth added to the nauseating odors. I would look down and think about how many people had traveled that dirty floor. No matter how much the janitor cleaned, I was still anxious. To protect myself, I usually wore boots, which became my foot armor.

Computer manufacturer’s are constantly trying to tweek more performance out of their existing products by using the highest performing processors. Typically, manufacturers upgrade the platforms by simply replacing the old processor with the latest speed processor. Like other manufacturers, HP generally follows this practice with the exception ot HP’s innovative mx2 module. This unique module used two Itanium-2 “Madison” processors packaged in the same physical volume as a single Itanium-2 processor. In addition, the module plugs into a standard Itanium-2 motherboard socket and requires no additional power capacity. As a result, the development team was able get 50% more performance [1] from a socket without increasing power by actively managing the power to the two processors. Thus, the performance per watt was substantially improved. This paper will provide an overview of some of the key packaging and power innovations that made the processor module a reality such as: 1) mezzanine power for space savings. The standard Itanium 2 processor has a power converter adjacent to the processor. HP engineers chose to put power on top of the processor which provided more room but made cooling the processors a challenge. 2) high performance mechnical gap filler. One of the biggest issues in the module was to develop a thermal gap filler that absorbed 0.060” of tolerance between the two processors. The thermal resistance of this technology was an order of magnitude better than anything commercially available in the industry. 3) Power Aware Architecture. This newly developed power mangement technology actively controls power to the processors. When system (thermal and power) extremes were exceeded by worst case abnormal code, the performance was throttled down until the worst case scenario had past. The combination of these advancements has delivered an innovative solution for a highly challenging design problem. This module is now shipping as the mx2 processor module in HP’s Integrity Servers and has been viewed as an engineering marvel by HP executives.