Word: englishes
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...Rock had to be nationalized in February after it was caught short of cash when the money markets seized; on Sep. 12, Britain's third largest tour operator XL went bust leaving London club West Ham United without a shirt sponsor; and now insurance giant AIG, shirt sponsor at English and European club champions Manchester United, is teetering on the brink of collapse...
...comes to sports. "A lot of [sponsors] have been involved in football on the basis of someone's hobby," says Simon Chadwick, a professor of Sport Business Strategy and Marketing at Coventry Business School. When the boss of one leading British firm opted to back a poorly performing English cricket team in recent years, "people were asking 'Why?'" Chadwick says. "The fact was [the boss] was a big cricket fan. That was the only reason." At the least, such vanity can leave shareholders pondering how else a firm's profits are being deployed...
...Still, sponsoring a sports team is unlikely to bring a company down on its own. Even in the case of AIG - whose $112 million, four-year tie-up with United is the most expensive ever in English football - "if you look at the overall marketing spend of the companies involved, the shirt sponsorship was tiny," points out Rob Mason, managing director of SBI, a British sponsorship consultancy. Any link between the deal and AIG's current woes, Mason says, is "coincidental...
...talks over a possible takeover of troubled Lehman Brothers last weekend - lavished a similar sum for the naming rights to the New Jersey Nets' planned Brooklyn basketball arena. If that sounds risky, consider its exposure in its home market: the U.K. bank is the proud sponsor of the English Premier League...
...which, one hopes, will spark a fresh reappraisal of the work of the most misunderstood, and very likely best, playwright currently writing in English. That is far from a widespread view. In America, Ayckbourn is still typecast, anachronistically, as a lightweight boulevard farceur (the "British Neil Simon"), or simply as a clever deviser of staging gimmicks: plays that squeeze the action in several rooms into one space, or move backward in time, or fill up the stage with water, or (in his insanely ambitious Intimate Exchanges) have no fewer than 16 dramatic permutations, depending on which alternative action the characters...