What Blogs Should I Read For the World Cup? Part 2: Treasons, Strategems & Spoils

Today I bring you the blogger knows as Roswitha (although I prefer to use the moniker of her web address, the Angry Nun), author of Treasons, Stratagems & Spoils.  It may seem to be a bit scatter shot reading right now, so may I suggest some John Cage prepared piano while looking through the back catalog?  Don't bother with the wikipedia for now, although I would take her taste in soccer books seriously.



There are two main reasons I'm pointing you here, outside of the obvious fact the Angry Nun is among the more formidable readers/writers of the game. The first reason is, as usual during this World Cup, you are going to hear a lot of bollocks about Italy.  It will be everywhere, from the supposedly unbiased studio panelists of whatever broadcaster you're stuck watching, to the Italian fans themselves gesturing at you in bars and going on about Paolo Rossi.  If you listen to these voices, you will be among the hoards of football know-nothings who will continue to say idiotic things about Italy, her league, Serie A, and all the players that country has ever generated.  The Angry Nun, like Elliot, also has the advantage of geographic distance from her subject: she lives in Mumbai.  She has the potential to be one of the country's best English language voices on Italian soccer (mention must be made of here Spangly Princess—English-speaking women seem to be the flag-bearers of judicious writing on calcio at the moment).

I write "has the potential to be", clinging to the Angry Nun's assertion on her 'about' blurb that she "...will probably be blogging the World Cup on my footie blog, Treasons, Stratagems & Spoils."  Which brings me to the second main reason you should come here and come here often over the next month—I hope, and want, this World Cup to make the Angry Nun write more.  A lot more (this is my blog so I'll be as selfish as I like, thanks). Over the years, there have been some fine soccer blogs that have flared up powerfully only to either transmogrify into something else, a resume page, a scattershot collections of writings about cultural artifacts of which football is only one.  Some disappear altogether, like Gramsci's Kingdom.  Perhaps he's still around somewhere, I don't know.  But I still check his blog every week, just in case it has magically floated to life again on the coattails of Mancini's Man City continued Premier League hijinks.

I did a similar thing with T, S & S for a full year, and now because the Angry Nun has recently teased me with essays like this one, a book review of a hitherto unknown collection of soccer novellas by Moti Nandy, I'm not going to just let it go.  I'm dropping the gauntlet.  World Cups change blogs.

Will Cover: Italy, England, US maybe?
Good to Read: In the quiet days and nights after the group stages and in between quarterfinals and semifinals.
Wine:  Conti Sertoli Salis Sassela Valtellina Superiore 2004