Nation, Football, and Critical Discourse Analysis
Scoring a hat tri: Nation, football, and critical discourse analysis Mariza Georgalou Lancaster University* Abstract Media sport constitutes a significant arena within whi discourses about national identities are continually articulated (Blain et al. 1993). is study analyses the football commentaries of the mates in whi the Greek national football team competed during Euro 2004. Its focus is on the discursive means that the sportscasters deployed with a view to constructing a national identity that promoted unification and solidarity amongst the audience. In parallel, it explores how the representatives of this national collectivity, i.e., the footballers, their coa and the fans, were depicted. Adopting a discourse-historical framework (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, Wodak et al. 1999), it becomes evident that the sportscasters show great support for their home team forging points of identification with the audience (Blain et al. 1993). In doing so, they confirm the ideological power that media sport has in generating, reinforcing and disseminating national identities. Keywords: discourse analysis, sports, identity 1 More than a mere game By being placed on the ba page of newspapers or at the end of news coverage, sport seems to belong to a world of its own, away from the seriousness aaed to political maers (Beard 1998). Its strong associations with recreation have led several people to claim that sport is outside the essential ingredients that make up culture. However, this is only partly true as apart from the physical relaxation and sense of escaping from reality offered by sport, its competitive nature is inevitably linked to the complex systems of human behavior, namely society (Beard 1998).
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