The sight of Diego Maradona slaloming through the England team in the 1986 World Cup is a thing of beauty. A tubby but mesmeric knife through stodgy Anglo-Saxon butter.
The resulting goal – arguably the greatest in World Cup history – is suitably ripe for a doting animation and football artwork aficionado Richard Sawbrick has provided it.
You may be acquainted to Sawbrick’s work from The Sun’s football commercials and his stop-motion homage to Gareth Bale’s disembowelling of the Inter Milan defence in Champions League days of yesteryear.
The unique and rather brilliant aspect of this latest piece (complete with apoplectic Argentine commentary) is the fact that all the players are assembled from thousands of pieces of torn up football magazines. Happily, that unusual design doesn’t take away from the realism of the famous sequence – Peter Reid may be made out of Shoot mags here but he still looks like he’s running in treacle.
The animation was used to launch Fantasista – a project led by Sawbrick that celebrates the growing trend for capturing the essence, power and emotion of football through art. Turns out that Photoshop is not just used for sticking Manchester United shirts on Premier League referees.
A Fantasista art exhibition is coming to London in Spring 2013. Fingers crossed for a plaster cast of Mick McCarthy’s head slapped on to the Statue of David.
