Sunday 13th May was a pretty epic day for English football. Sometimes living so far away from home means I can become a bit disconnected from English culture, that is not the case with the Premier League though. You can watch it anywhere and with the invention of the internet you can discuss it with people worldwide on services like Twitter or even stream BBC radio coverage. It was truly wonderful to listen to that last day of the 2011/12 season, I won’t go into the details but I feel that it is best summed up by this tweet from the phenomenon that is Danny Baker.

Football. Fucking football. Imagine not being into it. Those poor, poor half-alive bastards.

— Danny Baker (@prodnose) May 13, 2012

What I had missed out on was actually watching Sergio Aguero’s winning goal. Imagine my delight when a friend sent me a YouTube link to it with commentary that sounded very familiar.

The man you can hear there, making an amazing moment even more sensational, is Juan Manuel Pons. El Bambino, as he is known, is an Argentinian football commentator who works on FOX Sports’ Latin American Premier League coverage. He has built up quite the reputation because of the unusual way he calls goals.

Not content with simply yelling out “GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL” like so many of his Latin contemporaries he often sings a little song too. These odes are pretty amazing and he goes to some lengths to bring them to the public, for the regular goalscorers he will even bring records to sing along to. Although if an unexpected player grabs a goal he does have to think quickly to come up with something.

I remember the first time I watched the Premiership in Colombia. It was a game between Arsenal and Southampton that had a rather unexpected result, Rory Delap had managed to score twice. The first goal was greeted in a normal fashion but by the time Delap had bagged the second El Bambino had thought of something. He repeatedly said “Ro-ry-De-lap” while rubbing the microphone. As you would expect, this grabbed my attention. For the rest of that highlights package I gleefully awaited each goal, if only to see what he would do.

Until I watched the clip above I had half forgotten about that commentator and as a fan of odd goal commentary I was so glad to find him again. I have searched YouTube high and low for examples of his work and I hope you enjoy this playlist as much as I do.

Wise. Fortress. Exception. Promotion. Potted. Upset. Uphill. Sweet. Niche. Outsiders. Flourish. Coveted. Love. Plate. Jobs. Ninja. Quiz. Aid. Stalwart. Flag. Clarified. Heir. Stale. Hammered. Confidence. Blanks. Futile. Super. Target. Retired. History. Stranded. Solid. Unlucky. Break-up. Teamwork. Involved. Consistent. Karate.

No, I’ve not gone crazy, nor are these the words to a Shiina Ringo song. These are the words that the Opta statistician man ends his tweets with. Opta is the organisation that tracks the stats of football competitions around the world. They have a number a twitter accounts, each serving a different league, which tweet random topical stats about things going on in the world of football. I’m not sure about the others but @OptaJoe, the account for the English Premier League, always ends his posts with a random word at the end.

For example, he may tweet:

31 – Fernando Torres’ 2nd goal v Wolves last weekend saw the most passes in the lead up to a PL goal this season.

and will then append “Teamwork” to the end of that.

Another example is that he once put “Bulldog” on the end of:

25% – A quarter of all goals scored in the Premier League this season have been scored by English players.

I love it. Every time I read one of his posts, I imagine it read in the style of Terry-Thomas trying to chat up a girl.

Recently one of my friends got an iPhone app uploaded to the app store and these Opta tweets have given me an idea for an app of my own. It would have a database of all of @optajoe’s tweets with that magical final word removed. The user would then have to guess what word he used from a multiple choice of 4.

A mock-up of my app. It could be called Opta Prose.

I’m sure you will agree with me when I say it will definitely sell like hot cakes.

Note: The title of this post is a pun that requires a little knowledge of Japanese, Katakana and the English translations of Shiina Ringo CD titles. Please ignore it.

One of the best things about Twitter is the way that there isn’t really a wrong way to use it (maybe morally wrong ways but that’s not what I’m getting at). People use it to keep in touch, learn and practice a language, find information and check the news. My favourite Twitter story was that a bakery started tweeting when their bread had just been baked, so people could time their food runs to get the freshest cakes. As a direct result of Twitter I also have given more money to charity than I would have otherwise, something I never would have expected to happen.

In Japan people seem to have developed a way of using Twitter different to their western (English speaking) counterparts. Due to the fact that Japanese is so succinct a lot more information can be squeezed into 140 characters than in English. This has lead to a different use of RTs. Rather than regarding them as retweets people consider that it stands for Reply Tweet and will quote the entire message they are responding to rather than just using an @ reply.

Another thing to consider is how Japanese txt speak has been incorporated. In Japan people love to use emoticons in their texts, to an almost obscene degree, that does not seem to have translated to Twitter. Although the terrible Japanese mobile Twitter site now supports them they still haven’t caught on. I guess that is because most Twitter apps don’t show them properly. I may just be following the wrong people though.

I also love what the Japanese equivalent for LOL is. Obviously an English abbreviation would not make much sense in Japanese so they just use the kanji for laugh, 笑. It caused me a bit of confusion when I first saw that popping up at the end of sentences.

Something else that pops up at the end of sentences that I was quite surprised about was another example of how the Japanese language so enjoys assimilating foreign languages into itself. Rather than use the standard Japanese for ‘now’ they will simply add ‘nau’ onto the end of their sentences.

For example, ‘I’m in Tokyo now’ in standard Japanese is:

今、東京にいる。 (Ima, Tokyo ni iru)

On Twitter that may appear as:

東京なう。(Tokyo nau)

Thus making the tweets even more concise than they would have been before.

I do find it interesting how the same things are used differently by various nationalities or cultures. Does anyone know any other countries that use Twitter differently from the norm (what ever that may be)? Correct me if I’m wrong but I think that Japan is the only country with a dedicated mobile site and maybe that has something to do with it.

Twitter is a wonderful thing, it just has so many uses. You can use it to find interesting news stories you may have missed, practice another language, ask questions or even just to mess around chatting to your friends.

Twitter really has been very successful in Japan, sometimes it seems like everyone is using it. Good knows why though because I’ve discovered something: The Japanese Twitter mobile site (Keitai Web) is rubbish. Sure, it looks pretty enough but the day it went live I thought the old, normal mobile site had been hacked by evil people.

The problems start from the very beginning, I shall walk you through them step by step (with pictures lovingly annotated in red!)

As you can see the first problem is very obvious. The log-in screen does not hide your password, that is a pretty big no no, especially on a mobile device. One well timed look over someone’s shoulder and you have their identity.

Look at the word wrapping for the links. Oh no! You can’t, there isn’t any! In all fairness this is designed to be viewed on a mobile phone so it will just get to the end of the screen and wrap anyway but surely on those newfangled (3 year old!) touch screen phones with zoomable screens this is a big problem. That picture of some clouds looks lovely too, doesn’t it?

Sometimes the ‘もっと (next page)’ button just disappears, as simulated here. This is despite the fact there is plenty more to see.

There are a few other things, it supports emoji (emotocons), which are so popular on Japanese phones, but no other regular twitter client supports them so it’s an instant fail. Lists are also not supported. However since I last used it, it has started supporting retweets and you can upload photos from your phone. There is still no way to easily quote a tweet, which considering the way RTs are used in Japan is surprising.

You maybe have noticed that it says ‘beta’ in the corner of some of the screen shots, I know that but going live without even hiding the password is pretty poor. They haven’t even changed it after a year! All I can say is that I was so happy to buy my mobile internet thingy so I could use an app on my iPod Touch to view Twitter rather than the monstrous thing they created for mobiles. I don’t understand why they didn’t just translate the existing mobile site, it was perfectly functional.

There is one random cool feature on the Japanese Keitai Site though. It generates a QR bar code with a link to follow you. Which is kind of funky.