FP Exclusive: David Winner on Brilliant Orange, Sculpting a Football Culture Book

Srijandeep Das

9th June 2017 | 10:25 PM

Srijandeep Das of Football Paradise interviews David Winner on all things Dutch, football, architecture and how he weaves them all together in Brilliant Orange.

I love the idea of an idea – the concept of it. Synapses and neurons firing tiny electrical charges through the wiring of our mind, like pieces of leaf that are conveyed hundreds of metres in impressive processions, with each leaf cutter ant carrying a piece up to 50 times its own body weight up and down stalks, sustaining an entire Amazonian ecosystem.

What one reads is the compost that the idea grows from; thoughts ferment, and those are the nutrients you draw on for your own writing. The farmers of the insect world, leaf-cutter ants grow their own food in underground fungus gardens, thus serving serves as a lifeline for the rainforest. Sir David Attenborough discovered them while delivering a piece to camera from the top of an ant nest for Trials of Life.

Lofty ideas nourish our mind; our muscles twitch, invisible levers are pulled, zeros turn to one and one to zeroes and characters are placed ahead of a blinking cursor. Or a brightly-coloured football boot attached to the insured leg of a footballer digs underneath the ball to dispatch the palpable jolt of a Panenka in a Euro semi-final; electrons are shifted and history is made – often both happen simultaneously inside a football stadium. An assimilation.

Lofty ideas: Francesco Totti‘s Panenka for Italy against Edwin van der Sar at the Euro 2000 semi-final. The first Panenka was dispatched by Czechoslovakia’s Antonin Panenka vs Germany. The chip past Sepp Maier made them 1976 European Champions. Later Panenka confessed, had he missed, the Czech Communist Party would have thrown him to work in the mills.

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