Minus the Shooting

Folding up the Wallcharts

2010-07-15T06:00:00.003+01:00

When Mark and I decided to set up a football blog it was only going to be for the duration of South Africa 2010... and here we are.

I've never attempted to blog in time with an event, and one thing I hadn't anticipated was the degree to which each day was a deadline. So the moment for my post reading Chile's formation in the light of Sir Thomas Browne's essay on the quincunx had passed within minutes it seemed of their knockout. A post on World Cup typefaces like this or this went by the way, as did a Stepford Footballers post, positing that one problem people have with the Spain midfield is that they're all physical and tactical clones of each other. I never linked properly to Robin Carmody's spectacular conspiracy theories regarding the CIA and the US team's progress, nor this post at Cold Calling. There was never a proper response to Laurie Penny's anti-World Cup diatribe, nor to the Orwell essay from which (with some ambivalence) we took the title of this blog. Mark did take Terry Eagleton to task at least over at k-punk.

On the other hand, it didn't matter: interesting pieces streamed in daily from the UK, New Zealand, Egypt and Holland. Ninety-five posts in thirty days?! Giovanni has already written about how enjoyable it's been to work collectively, which I absolutely second.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect though has been the quality and quantity of the comments. No trolling; not a mention of the Nazis. The comments were articulate, informed and interesting, and ended up producing not just new posts (DigitalBen and Dan) but new blogs. It's enough to make you think optimistically again about Web 2.0 potential. So, a massive thank you to all who commented.

And thanks also to everyone who linked: hopefully most are noted on the Return Pass sidebar – apologies to anyone whose link I missed.

Just two years until Poland/Ukraine 2012. See you then.

missed narratives

2010-07-14T23:22:00.002+01:00

Normally commentators and pundits are desperate to stitch together any kind of narrative they can from the frequently random events of football history. A player only has to return to a former club for the first time for someone like Clive Tyldesley or Martin Tyler to near-hyperventilate at the prospect of him scoring a revenge goal. Up will go the cry of 'What a story!', as if a new set-piece has been added to some kind of Homeric epic.

To my surprise, a few went relatively unnoticed on Sunday night. Arjen Robben for example ended up on the losing side of club football's biggest game as well as international football's within a matter of weeks. Vicente Del Bosque must now be one of the most successful managers, year-for-year, in the history of the game. In four years at Real Madrid he won two leagues and two European Cups. In two years with Spain he's won the World Cup.

Perhaps most extraordinary of all is Gerard Pique's run of success since the 2007/08 season.

2007/08: with Man Utd – Premier League, Champions League
2008/09: with Barca – Copa del Rey, La Liga, Champions League
2009/10: with Barca – UEFA Super Cup, FIFA Club World Cup, La Liga
with Spain – World Cup

Few players have ever enjoyed such a run – Bixente Lizarazu was, I think a simultaneous Bundesliga, German Cup, European and World champion in 2001 – but at 23, Pique must be among the youngest.

Collapsing The Field

2010-07-14T22:33:00.006+01:00

‘The intense immersion and heightened dissipate instantly once the tension of competition is over. As a World Cup watcher, I usually start to feel this looming anti-climax once the semi-finals come around - by then, the sense that anything can still happen as hardened into a few determinate possibilities, and the glow of festival time starts to give way to the bleak twilight of everyday routine again.’

- Mark.

What’s thrilling about the World Cup is the temporary suspension of the order of things. For four weeks, the international rankings, the routine of qualifying, the familiar sights and locations of football are gone, and a huge space of possibility is opened up. Could North Korea beat Portugal? What would happen if South Africa won their group while Argentina dropped points and didn’t win theirs? Poring over a blank wallchart gives us a brief, demarcated glimpse of infinity - pure potential.

It doesn’t last. Over the tournament, the lines of possibility wink out one by one. Japan/Korea 2002 was full of drama, easily the most unpredictable, ‘world turned upside down’ of a tournament in recent history, but by the time we reached the semi-finals we saw routine 1-0 wins for Brazil and Germany. This year, we had the flat, energy-conserving progress of Holland and Spain. Sooner or later, probability reasserts itself. Like some three-week-delayed version of quantum wave function collapse: once the dizzying snowstorm of possibilities has been observed, the image coalesces into something clear and (all too) familiar. The kaleidoscope stops turning - the new order is revealed.

Whichever final outcome emerges from the chaos is bound to disappoint. When Switzerland beat Spain, we revel in the improbability of it all, and the apparent suspension of the known patterns of football matches. Their victory was a triumph for neutrals insofar as it muddied the waters, made group outcomes harder to predict, and delayed the moment of resolution. Had Switzerland actually advanced in the competition (as they did in 2006) we would have found ourselves bored senseless by their negativity. When unfancied teams progress, we usually hear talk of fairytales - but wishes granted in fairytales generally turn out badly. Any upset, any strange event, will always find a way to let us down - this is because the uncertainty itself is what we find so delicious.

Once the tournament is over, we can turn to various methods to try and relive the glorious weeks and ignore the drab Restoration that has taken place - most notably, recreating the whole tournament in video game form. Turn the kaleidoscope over and over again, in the comfort of your own home - but somehow it never quite satisfies. Repetition after careful repetition may eventually unlock the most desired combination (your country winning the final 3-0 in immaculate style, perhaps), but the joy is short-lived. Maybe because we know how little patterns of data on a memory card are really worth - more likely because resolution never lives up to promise.

We’ve had our four-week holiday in the liminal state. Time to fold up the wallcharts.

Remediations

2010-07-14T08:37:00.004+01:00

I was born in the age of the instant replay, but only just - if it was in fact in 1970 that they started using it, as I seem to recall having heard once. I wasn’t able to confirm that, and still wonder if Hurst’s goal of 1966 was available to the television audience for immediate review, however grainily. I know for a fact the games were broadcast in black and white back then, and that it was only cinemagoers who got to see the highlight packages in colour. At any rate, the first World Cup in my actual memory is the one of 1978 and at that stage you could watch the games live - still only in black and white in our household - and the replays of the goals during the games themselves, but that was it. No possibility to record the game, no Internet to get on to watch the highlights. You had to wait patiently for the news to watch some of the action again. And then the next day you bought the newspaper, in which the game would be described in words. Do journalists even bother to do that these days? Written play-by-play reportage - at least in the Italian papers - has shrunk considerably over the years, due in all likelihood to the saturation of video images, and the assumption that the readers would have seen the action for themselves many times over by then.

There was another thing in some of the papers when I was a child: artists’ renditions of key plays. I was fond in particular of Paolo Samarelli, the artist for La Repubblica, and I recall very vividly his drawing of a Bettega goal against England in the World Cup qualifier of 1976 that I was delighted to find on the Internet.

It’s with equal delight that I discovered that Samarelli still works for La Repubblica. Here’s his panel on the drawn game between Italy and New Zealand.

I say I’m delighted, but I also wonder who would bother with that. I mean you can just get on-line and watch the goals, right? They’re right there on the same Internet where that panel was posted. More puzzlingly, I see that La Gazzetta dello Sport ran a ‘3D theatre’ of all the goals of the tournament, whereby by clicking on each link you would get a stupid and categorically non-3D moving vignette with computer-generated figurines and nothing of Samarelli’s artistry, all for the same effort and the same bandwidth-sapping effect of going to YouTube or the Fifa website and watching the regular game highlights. So I ask myself what the fascination is with all the reinvention and the reinterpretation. And I go chasing for more of these remediations, and find the tournament played at Subbuteo by middle aged men, but also stop-start Lego animations of the games’ highlights, painstaking, near-obsessive labours of love and futility which yet produced one of my images of the World Cup, the despair of Robert Green captured in plastic brick form.

But remediations - as Bolter and Grusin tell us - go both ways. So for instance whilst you get e-books that replicate the aspect and pagination of print books, you also get books that mimic the form of the devices that are supposed to be replacing them. And so, true to their predictions, we find that the Fifa television coverage, the one that is supposed to pursue maximum transparency and transport you there, to the stadium, in the thick of it, does many other things besides. Most notably, it remediates football videogames

A scene from the classic arcade Kick-Off

Look, Mum, I control Kaka!

RPGs

And… religious iconography?

David Villa is the King of Kings

To name but three things. And so it seems to me that the name of the media game is not innovation - for none of the old means of representation, including Samarelli’s drawings, have been abandoned - but rather multiplication, resulting in a hyper-saturation of imagery and images. We saw so much of this World Cup.

This was the first tournament since the widespread adoption of high definition outside of North America. The next one will likely be in actual 3D, at least in some households. (We’re still low-def. Heck, I still use a VCR, although I doubt it will be there in four years’ time.) The super slow-motion will be even slower. And we’ll still be discussing the quality of the football as if it existed outside of all these wrappings, as if it was an objective reality that takes place out there, on the field with the grass, where things happen unmediated.

Tension, shocks, but not much drama

2010-07-12T15:15:00.004+01:00

Sporting events always end with a feeling of anti-climax, even when you've won them. The intense immersion and heightened dissipate instantly once the tension of competition is over. As a World Cup watcher, I usually start to feel this looming anti-climax once the semi-finals come around - by then, the sense that anything can still happen as hardened into a few determinate possibilities, and the glow of festival time starts to give way to the bleak twilight of everyday routine again. The sense of anti-climax is reinforced for the World Cup watcher by the fact that finals haven't often tended to be classics. Last night's game, to say the least, didn't break the pattern - it was a case of the unpalatable in pursuit of the unloveable. The BBC pundits were frantically building the narrative - "Spain were a joy to watch", "it was a victory for football" - and, yes, even my hard heart was glad for Iniesta, less one point of the moveable tiki-taka triangle last night than a tireless force: the will to win personified, the perfect mixture of urgency and patience. Certainly, Spain's win was a triumph over anti-football, but I'm not sure as that is the same as a victory for football. This tournament has made it clear that a certain kind of aficionado-discourse dominates the discussion of football, and nowhere more so than amontst English pundits, who habitually use World Cups to indulge in cultivating the inferiority complex which is the other side of insular arrogance. Admire these passing foreigners, just don't do what's required to be like them. Shearer's censuring of the Dutch really did take some swallowing.

Both Spain and the Netherlands excorcised some of their ghosts last night - Spain by finally winning the World Cup, and Holland by kicking the shit out of theirs. This is the fourth tournament in succession in which the Netherlands have been the team which has committed the most fouls, but the high-profile nature of their spoiling tactics last night and the fact that it is no longer possible to sustain the fantasy that "there is more to come from Holland" might mean that, at last, Netherlands'' image as the team of "total football" falls away. Spain not only vanquished their own spectres of defeat, they also overcame some of their continent's (now Europeans can win outside Europe), and the tournament's (now, it's possible to lose your first game and go on to win the tournament). Two statistics from Opta tell the story of Spain's victory, and indeed of this World Cup: "Spain become the lowest scoring side to win the World Cup with just eight goals to their name". "Spain have now made more successful passes in a World Cup than any team since 1966, surpassing Brazil from 94 (3547)". These statistics bear out what I've argued in comments here: it's hard to see Spain as an attacking side, even if they weren't a counter-attacking or defensive team. We've been confronted with the apparent paradox of this being a low-scoring tournament, in which, at the same time, there were no outstanding defences or goalkeeper. But the paradox is nothing of the sort - defence starts far upfield now. It's a game dominated by midfield.

The midfield quagmire has contributed to a World Cup in which there were shocks - the defeats and early exits of France and Italy; the scale of Germany's wins over England and Argentina - but precious little drama. The Italy-Slovakia and the Ghana-Uruguay matches provided rare moments of theatre, but, for the most part, there was tension without drama. The team that took the lead tended to win. There were no daring fightbacks, or none that were successful. Even in the high-scoring games, many goals went in when the contest was effectively over.

Still, the dominance of midfielders can't fully account for the failure of strikers, which verged on the uncanny. It wasn't just that the forwards weren't getting chances - Torres and Messi had plenty, Rooney more than enough. And, in some respects, the game last night was really decided by two clear-cut misses by Robben. Fine margins ... Spain's success throughout the tournament depended on the opposition fluffing chances at crucial moments. As Ben has pointed out, it is only from a post-hoc perspective that their tactics can be conceived of as some sort of surefire masterplan. When the plan went wrong against Switzerland, Spain were unable to adjust. The biggest what-if of the tournament turned out to be: what would happen to Spain if they went behind again? But this question was destined never to be answered. Even so, the precarious of Spain's wins never dispelled the sense of inevitablity that became increasingly evident as Spain's performances in the knock-out games went to a script that barely deviated. 1-0. 1-0. 1-0. 1-0 (after extra time). All of the goals scored late. Spain's admirers might blame the defensiveness of their opponents, or - last night especially - their fouling, but all great teams have faced these difficulties. Last night's fouling would have been standard at many tournaments in the past. (However, in a tournament when referees were scarcely reluctant to caution or dismiss players, Mark van Bommel's not being sent off was some sort of a miracle. Klose was sent off; van Bommel wasn't. There's a parable about the officiating in this tournament there, surely.) Yet, in many of Spain's games, it wasn't clear whether they were being stifled, or if they were doing the stifling.

Football styles are the same as any other styles - they change. There's already a feeling that Spain are past the peak that they reached in the 2008 Euopean championships. As any of the regular readers here will by now be well aware, I for one look forward to a different kind of style becoming dominant in international football soon.

It’s Not Over: The World Cup Dromenon

2010-07-12T13:18:00.013+01:00

Philosopher Robert Pfaller suggested that the anxiety displayed by onlookers of a football match (agitated, aggressive, mumbling, shouting commands as if ‘“they” can hear him etc.) is due to an interpassive phenomenon. He refers to the term "dromenon" as used by the Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga in his ‘proeve’ of 1938. Dromenon connotates an action, ‘something that is being done’ or more succinctly the ‘thing-done’ and is used by Huizinga to explain the gamic or ludic element within rituals or rites, in particular their ‘seriousness’, what Huizinga calls ‘sacred seriousness’. What differentiates a rite from a common everyday action is that when we perform a rite we are not simply mimetically copying some remotely enacted action. Instead, according to Huizinga, we are ‘helping-out’ the action by performing the rite. ‘They do no know it, but they are doing it’, wrote Marx and the same goes for our football watcher. By partaking in the ritual, the dromenon, the participant finds a way to enter into the action; a way to ‘help’ out. Or so he believes.

In any case, in our contemporary society of the spectacle the substitution of course has become foregrounded. In the original Spring Dromenon or Festival of Ancient Greece, a recurring ritualistic event, there were no spectators. Everyone participated in the "orkestra" (i.e a dancing-place). When the festival moved from the orchestra towards the theatre the ‘thing-done’ becomes drama; i.e. it is still something-done but not by you as participant, it is something-done by something or someone else. However the basic need to participate remains. Just like that other element of the Dionysian rite, what Pfaller calls Selbstvergessenheit. The dromenon takes care of the action for us, it is a medium/device (a television, screen, prayer wheel etc) through which we, the onlookers, can forget that we are enacting an ‘identification compensatrice’ (Huizinga’s term), that is, that we are compensating our lack of real participation by fetishistically identifying with the dromenon. This is what Selbstvergessenheit means: to forget one’s self by temporarily replacing it, in this case by the dromenon.

Last night we witnessed the Mother of All Anxiety Generating Dromena: the final battle between Spain and the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, Museumplein was transformed into an Ancient Greek theatre of some sort. Thousands of people gathered. In order for all of them to be shielded from the true source of their anxiety, the dromenon supplied must be huge. And for sure, the screens in Amsterdam and Madrid, gathering onto them the collective anxiety of at least two generations of football supporters - one half traumatized by Munich 1974, the other by Madrid 1982 - certainly were massive.

Whichever side we take, either the side of those who believe the above is a fetishistic disavowal or those who believe we are dealing with a methectic participation (i.e. affective-somatically and kinetically helping the action out) as Huizinga did, the real battle did not take place in Soccer City. That battle took place in the streets of Madrid and Amsterdam. Those who were able to attach themselves in the most fluent way to the dromenon, those who became the most ‘dromonautic’, won. Only they were able to properly work through the trauma, to forget their selves most adequately. Fortunately (or not), a dromenon and thus the Worldcup is a recurring event, and in this way a "perpetuum mobile": the Dutch will have their chance again. For now though, the best fetishist won. Kudos Spain, well done.

The Golden Balls Of Diego

2010-07-12T09:43:00.004+01:00

Well, after a comment here and now that Forlan has (deservedly, I think) won the Golden Ball, I'd better make my position clear...

When I said: "If he'd scored a few for Man U he'd be a real star now, I think."

I meant this not as a part of my "Bloody typical English delusion" (though I do have plenty of typical English delusions and I'm trying my best to deal with them - the English Optimists Support Group are still awaiting my adoption of a power animal so that my membership can be complete) but as a comment on the devastating capital power of the Premiership. Forlan was a good player at Manchester United, very unlucky (I seem to remember he hit the woodwork a lot) and would no doubt eventually have done really well... if those shots had gone in (the striker really must score goals) he'd have been seamlessly assimilated into the Man U megadeath narrative and would have thus become a Global star. He'd be on the Nike adverts. As it is, even despite crushing English club hopes in Europe and generally slamming in goals all through the last two or three seasons, he was still regarded as somehow below the top tier, as a club player, as an almost star.

The notional status of star, of Golden Balls, is only marginally related to actual ability and it's the margins that work wonders. It's not just scoring that counts but when and how and where and who against. Goals in the 'big three' leagues are more than goals; they are immense cultural artefacts and thus expert pitches to advertisers. And goals in the Premiership are arguably the biggest pitches of all.

There are no stars in the other leagues? Well, perhaps. Certainly, we never notice how individually brilliant some of the Bundesliga playing Germans are until they turn up at the World Cup and then we look surprised that they're doing so well. Idiotic perhaps, but a consequence of the star system that we need to shake.

And yes, Anon, you're right: the Premiership has been largely irrelevant during this World Cup and this is it's real narrative arc - the stars have gone out, the team has prospered. Even Spain's collection of stars are arguably more about the way the team play than the players per se. This has proved mesmerising to the TV pundits - "they keep making substitutes and you can't tell..."

Somewhere, not far into the future, the Premiership is shuddering; could the days of the star be numbered? Is it even appropriate to try and build a team of individuals, rather than focus on the collective whole? Let Man City decide.

For that reason, Forlan is a worthy winner. He was bigger than his team, played bigger but still remained a part of Uruguay's team-spirit. Every look was a stare into the abyss. He could see the stars collapsing and he knew his team's place in that collapse. Forlan was elemental at times but grounded. You can see him on a mountain top in a Caspar David Friedrich Painting, apart from and immersed into the Uruguayan Nature. And he was playing his heart out on the most difficult stage of all.

The only other individual performer in the running (but not in the running) would have been perhaps Muller who showed his worth by his presence (and more importantly by his absence) in a Germany team that was perhaps only bettered by Spain at the level of substitutes. I'm glad he got the Golden Boot. He's also not a star. He was much better than that.

A final thought on where all the stars went:

The World Cup has it's critics. They argue that the Champions League is where the true class football resides. Hiding inside the moneypits, where it's really difficult for the stars to get dwarfed before the knockout stage. But The World Cup is an especially pressurised (and thus dificult to win) tournament - it's football upscaled, as near as we're ever going to get to a universal fixture, a match that everyone watches. The pressure of your fans' expectations must be immense (it's killing Liverpool, for example ) but it's less than the pressure of the Nation's expectations, or even in Ghana's case, the Continent's.

It's in this (occasionally literal) furnace that stars falter and new ones are born. Has there ever been a World Cup where this has been more apparent?

A Complicated Game Simplified By Fools

2010-07-10T09:19:00.004+01:00

Mark's recent post on technique raises lots of interesting questions, not least why the England team's is so poor. Is England's 'problem' then an inability to conceive of the game as anything other than essentially simple, not an absence of technique so much as too narrow a definition of what it involves?

England's basic inability to keep possession is routinely cited, for sure, (not least by the players themselves) as is limited time spent training together and therefore their lack of mutual tactical understanding. But the analysis of their technical deficiencies is still conducted within the confined tactical space of the English game, with no sense of the more complex spatial, tactical, geometric movements of players, of bodies in space, and how this relates to the ineffable qualities that make a great football team.

Does an overiding sense of pragmatism, of wanting to call a spade a spade, drive the team to conflate technique into a simplistic idea of 'skill', of being able to play keep ball, or that bending a free kick is the very height of technical sophistication?

Fine Margins

2010-07-09T23:30:00.001+01:00

When I said that Frank Lampard's disallowed goal against Germany was irrelevant, I didn't mean that it wouldn't have changed the game. I think that there's little doubt that it would have fundamentally altered the dynamics of the match. I said it was an irrelevance because England's subsequent performance was so poor that it retrospectively invalidated this perfectly plausible alternative reality. (Contrast this with something like Chris Waddle hitting the post against West Germany in 1990 - the alternate reality is all the more painfully palpable because, unlike against Germany this year, England deserved something from that game.)

Now Lampard already seems like a figure from a long-ago age. As an England footballer at least; I've not doubt that he'll be as cold-eyed ruthless as ever for Chelsea next season. But as an Enland footballer he will always be the man who went to a series of tournaments and didn't score. (Even though, against Germany he did.) That's what is so dramatic about these moments -the finest margin becomes a chasm that separates contingency from necessity.(With Lampard's shot, of course, the shock was that the margin wasn't that fine). Other examples of these cusp moments in this tournament are Italy's disallowed goal against Slovakia, Gyan's penalty miss against Uruguay, and perhaps Puyol's foul on Oezil last night. But after (what turned out to be) these pivotal moments, we no longer know how much was happenstance and how much could only ever have ended that way. This is why the post-hoc "wisdom" that Giovanni has referred to always has a bogus quality to it - who knows whether the factors that it isolates as decisive actually were? By the end of the Germany game, England's flaws were frozen into a narrative that was always going to end in defeat and humiliation. By the end of the Italy-Slovakia game, Italy were definitively "too old". By the end of the Spain-Germany final, Germany could only win well against teams that defended recklessly. But did any of these things have to be true?

Golden Balls: Lionel Messi - really?

2010-07-09T19:32:00.004+01:00

The sinister FIFA Technical Study Group (sounds like something out of one of CS Lewis's alien paranoia novels) has come up with the Golden Ball nominees for this World Cup (we must therefore assume that the best player will not emerge because of the final).

All attacking players.

Let's see:

Diego Forlan - Got to be in with a shout if just for the steely blue eyed (thousand yard) stares. If he'd scored a few for Man U he'd be a real star now, I think.

Asamoah Gyan - Work rate, flashes of skill, a face like a beautiful Battersea Dog.

Andres Iniesta - heartbeat, indistinguishable from the even more metronomic Xavi, also nominated. Hobbits with attitude.

Lionel Messi - er, really? Only if you've been watching the adverts and not the games.

Mesut Oezil - played in odd, lost spaces; found passes, scored a cracker. Best player until the Semi, I think.

Arjen Robben - giving it to someone with only one foot seems like positive discrimination; falls over air.

Bastian Schweinsteiger - the heartbeat of Germany; passed like a Spaniard.

Wesley Sneijder - a good final and he's in with a shout; seems like a lucky player and luck is the best skill you can have.

David Villa - fox in (and out) of the box. Spain would still be passing it, if he didn't occasionally swing a leg.

I guess this hasn't been a World Cup for individuals; teams have made all the brilliant displays, shared the joy and the burden. I guess this also explains why there are no defenders here; the good defenders have defended as a unit, only occasionally leaked. A triumph of organisation.

Still, Lionel Messi - really?

Technique

2010-07-09T17:42:00.003+01:00

Long, long ago in the tournament - when England were still in, that long ago - Giovanni and I had a little disagreement about "technique". I was arguing that the problem with the England team is not technique - that the issues are "psychological" in some sense. Partly my evidence for this would be that England players seem perfectly capable of trapping and passing a ball when they play for their clubs, but these basic competences desert them when they play for the national team. (As we saw most spectacularly with Rooney in this World Cup.) But, to ask an apparently naive question, is technique as straightforward a concept as it appears to be? After all, conceived of as a purely physical act (is that what technique means?), then passing isn't that difficult. Surely any international footballer has the "skill" necessary to play short passes to team-mates (and my impression is that there hasn't been much long passing in this tournament - Gerrard apart, but you can hardly class his wild punts as "passes" really). Don't misunderstand me. I'm not seeing keeping possession is easy - one thing I can unequivocally agree with Zone about is that the way Spain play is intensely difficult and demanding. What I'm saying is that the difficulties are more to do with the speed of thought, anticipation and awareness of team-mates' and opponents' positioning that a passing game entails - which is why Zone rightly invokes precognition when writing about Spain's passing. Is this still technique or is it something else?

Thank God for Jonathan Wilson

2010-07-09T13:32:00.002+01:00

Jonathan Wilson's tactical survey of the World Cup focusses on Spain, while also reassuring me over my own sanity:

There are those who protest at [Spain's] lack of goals (no side has reached the final scoring fewer) but they are a classic example of a team that prefers to control the game than to become obsessed by creating chances. Perhaps they at times become mesmerised by their passing, perhaps there is even something attritional about it, wearing opponents down until they make the mistake, but it is beautiful attrition. Those who have protested at the modern Holland, and their supposed betrayal of the heritage of Total Football, which is being painted as the ne plus ultra of attacking football, should perhaps look back at the European Cup finals of 1971-73 when Ajax expressed their mastery by holding the ball for long periods. Frankly, if they ever faced a side who took them on rather than sitting eight men behind the ball, we may see a more overtly attacking Spain.
Which brings us to Germany. They too play a 4-2-3-1 and, although Philipp Lahm breaks forward occasionally, theirs is essentially a defensive set-up. Here again goals are the great betrayers; it was bewildering how much praise was heaped on their supposedly fresh, open approach just because they scored four goals in three games. This Germany was superb on the counter-attack, and the interaction of the front four of Miroslav Klose, Thomas Müller, Lukas Podolski and Mesut Ozil was at times breathtaking. But this was reactive football.
In three games, Germany scored an early first goal – against Argentina and England, it was essentially handed to them – and in those games they ruthlessly took advantage of the space opponents left behind them as they chased an equaliser. England, Argentina and Australia all defended idiotically against them, and were severely punished. In the other three games, teams defended decently against them and the early goal didn't arrive surrounded by watercress on a silver salver. In those games Germany managed one goal, and that a wonder-strike from Ozil. Against Spain their poverty of ideas was such they ended up sending the lumbering centre-back Per Mertesacker forward as an auxiliary striker, an idea so bereft of subtlety that the only time I remember it working was when Dennis Smith once sent Gary Bennett forward for Sunderland against Oxford in 1990.

Although incredibly, Wilson's famously encyclopaedic brain has forgotten that putting a centreback upfront almost saw Barcelona through to the European Cup final this year:

Myths Of The Near Past

2010-07-08T20:26:00.004+01:00

I’m loathe to mention him here, particularly in a vaguely positive light, but Nick Hornby once said something interesting about football. It was in Fever Pitch, if I remember rightly, and it was to do with the way that supporters tend to use players as a mirror of their own values. So, a certain kind of middle class, thinking man’s fan will praise players for their intelligence and their artistry, particularly ones with a “cultured left foot”.

This language is highly revealing, more a checklist of cultural aspiration than an observation of footballing aptitude. It’s the reason that Arsene Wenger remains the darling of Arsenal, even if they don’t win anything. At least they lose in the right way. Similarly, tabloid sports pages typically praise workrate, commitment, bravery and strength in players and have no time for left feet, cultured or otherwise.

In English domestic football, there is clearly a class basis to these differences. Oddly, this only becomes more accentuated in international competition where a whole ragbag of other prejudices are brought into play including post-colonial guilt, cultural genuflection and recent geo-politics.

Of course, tedious national stereotypes count for a lot. It is impossible, for instance, for Brazil to play a game without the camera trawling the stands for beautiful ladeez while Clive Tyldesley makes endless references to Samba football. The interesting thing – and I’m far from alone in pointing this out here – is that Brazil could turn up and kick seven shades of shit out of the opposition whilst eaking out a nil-nil draw and they would still come away with their reputation intact.

National football reputations tend to be forged in some primordial sludge, out of which teams emerge fully formed, ready to fill out their pre-determined destiny. Nothing that actually happens to them during the course of the tournament will disrupt assumptions about the essential quality and character of their football.

Take Holland, for example, the perennial darlings of the more aesthetically inclined football fan. Every World Cup the same epithets are wheeled out. They are the aristocrats of Europe, solitary exponents of Total Football and, officially, the Best Team Never To Win A World Cup. Well, all that was true in 1974 (and ’78 although they were already by then without the talismanic Johan Cruyff) but since then they have, by and large, done little to justify the hype.

There is, as Zone Styx has pointed out, a sort of cognitive dissonance at work when people watch football. Regardless of what is actually happening on the pitch, they use the game to reinforce basic prejudices. A poor performance will merely elicit a series of questions as to why the team, say Holland, have not fulfilled their potential, or suggestions that they will really turn it on in the next game.

Like most forms of irrational belief, footballing prejudice is a self-fulfilling prophecy. All events reinforce the basic underlying assumption, however illogical. For some people, there are no German flair players, simply because they refuse to recognise them when they appear. As the current generation’s players are written off as workmanlike and predictable, so the myth is perpetuated. This is how Germany play, and this is how they will always play. Bastian Schweinsteiger, as sophisticated and subtle a player as you're ever likely to watch, was always battling against such popular misconceptions.

Spain have a similar but opposite affect, evoking weak-kneed wonder at their every move, even if it doesn’t get them anywhere or is boring to watch. They are poised forever before a moment of magic. Spain are a form of endlessly deferred wish-fulfillment, carriers of the flame for fans of sophisticated European culture (and a great nightlife) everywhere.

The fact that they have won most of their games one nil (with the goal, as Mark has pointed out, usually scored in the last 15 minutes of play after the opposition has become exhausted) never seems to puncture the myth. Last night’s match was a case in point, a game where Germany looked increasingly shagged out, not so much outplayed as outlasted. OK, so that’s unfair. Spain won because they kept possession superbly and (eventually) scored. But the goal, when it came, was not a thing of beauty, more the exception to their style of play rather than the rule.

Having said all that, a Holland versus Spain final is still a pretty fine outcome. A guaranteed new name on the cup is intrinsically a good thing. It could also put paid to some of the more irritatingly clichés of the international game. If Holland win, they will no longer be The Best Team Never To Win The World Cup. And, whatever happens, Spain can no longer be described as the perennial under-achievers of Europe. Two myths can be buried in one afternoon. Result.

Ghana's Double-Bind

2010-07-08T18:38:00.004+01:00

Haven't been able to comment on the various ghost posts below because I can't figure out how to do it on my phone but here's a few thoughts:

Undeniably Brazil and the Netherlands are haunted by those (losing) teams of the past: 82, 74, 78. It's a burden that forced terrible changes to their formations and attitudes and now makes me sort of hate watching them. Spain are one of the only teams in the World Cup that don't seem haunted (and that's annoying too, isn't it?); they've kept on with their previously losing strategies and absolutely not caved in to the Hoodoo.

And then there's Ghana. Ghana seemed haunted by a combination of the beautifully erratic and brilliantly watchable African failures of the past, the kind that made Pele say what he said, the kind that we all wanted to see come good. Nigeria circa Jay Jay Okocha, Cameroon, even the much patronised Zaire, forever abbreviated to that guy kicking away the ball at the free kick.

The commentators were obsessed with Ghana's organisation and patience, as if such a thing from an African side was almost impossible to imagine. I vaguely remember a comment on TV saying something like: "It must be their European coaches..." Hardly racism but indicative of a creeping nostalgia for the old Africans, the ones you might find in old Geography textbooks, the ones with no size constancy scaling, who weren't tricked by the Muller Lyer Illusion, the ones who didn't play like we play, who had real freedom...

I guess this effect has been amplified by South Africa itself. The country and the team. It's a burden I think many of the African teams felt. To be African and not be African. A terrible double-bind. Laing and Girard and Bateson would be proud.

Hakim Bey: We've learned to distrust the verb to be, the word is...

Brazil certainly want/don't want to be Samba. England want/don't want to be Plucky Losers. The Dutch want/don't want to play Total Football. Ghana want/don't want to be Africa's Only Representatives in a relentlessly organised, eurocentric world.

What If Muller Was Suspended?

2010-07-08T17:15:00.004+01:00

Only just watched the Spain/Germany Quarter Final, the highlights anyway. Must have been a difficult match to edit. Ought to be some kind of exemplar.

I heard bits of it on the night as I was eating in a hotel restaurant with all my colleagues; saw odd glimpses here and there on iPhones and, as it got darker, the occasional reflection in the windows. These parts signified the whole I thought; hypnotic (maybe boring), a very untense intensity.

I think someone on Twitter evoked Satriani as the guitar equivalent of Spain's technical, virtuous/virtuoso style of football and this reminded me of discussing Hendrix years ago when a friend turned off Electric Ladyland and said: "I can't listen to this. All the notes are in the right place. No flaws; it's not music anymore." And as we talked about this, it turned out that both of us liked only the bits of Hendrix that sounded a bit wrong, a little duff and that, in fact, this wasn't our unique indie-boy spin on Hendrix but these were the bits that most people liked.

Xavi, Iniesta et al are unlovable because of their virtuosity, that kind of thing is often annoying unless you happen to like Clapton. It's why the Sex Pistols sacked Glen Matlock and brought in Sid Vicious. It's why Usain Bolt has to try hard to develop a couldn't care less appearance. It's why we liked it that Socrates of Brazil and Johan Cruyff (even Gazza) smoked fifty thousand cigarettes a day.

It might be why we hate some of our colleagues. Why people find Martin Amis difficult. Why we need Mozart and Beethoven to be a bit mental. Why Jonathan Meades gets up people's noses with all his technically proficient, brilliantly conceived artistic smut.

Spain's game is unlovable because it's not a risky game to play but it's a difficult game to play. And exhausting; the pace (of the ball) might be missing but they need a massive physical effort to force those tight triangles. The style of play makes it essential that their players are in the right places at the right times (and that others are in equally dangerous but unused positions). I'd be interested to know what the distance travelled stats for Spain are: I'd imagine most of them cover a lot of ground before the passes are made.

And therein lies the problem. If people knew they were running hard, us English would like them more I think. We like a plucky trier. We like people to look like they're putting the effort in; it's why bankers have to stay in the office 'til 8 even though they're not doing anything. The Spanish make it look easy and that's not fair.

I heard that Spain had scored via a Spanish colleague dancing a mini-flamenco while a German colleague rolled her eyes. Everyone went dead. There was a brief longeur as everyone stopped eating and expected the old spectre: "Yeah but you can't ever rule out the Germans."

But no one said anything. It was a weird moment. No one believed that Germany would draw level. We hadn't discussed this but we didn't need to: it didn't seem possible.

A bit later, I thought about this, trying to figure out why people were reacting to the German team in such a way. This was the Germans, after all. And then it hit me: no one believes that Germany will pull one back because no one really believes that this is Germany. This German team seemed altogether less methodical and efficient (despite those terms still being applied by plenty of the TV Commentary teams), playing faster and looser and with various associated flaws. England and Argentina weren't comprehensively outplayed by Germany; they were sucker punched and then awe-struck. The Germans looked vulnerable at the back and suffered a lack of quality, game-changing, substitutes. In this way, the Germans were like England and Argentina; very beatable, only potentially wondrous. What if a team does stop Ozil? What if Schweinsteiger can't control the game? What if Muller was suspended? Well, you see where I'm going with this.

The Germans are an interestingly, excitingly flawed team; the team we love to love. The plucky (skillful) triers. This German team is part of a reinvention of German football that began, I think, at the last World Cup, where a less skillful team of plucky triers did well in spite of (because of?) their lack of star talent. Maybe they've always been plucky triers and we've only just noticed. Some awful collective amnesia has only made us think they were ever this ruthless, mechanised Will to win because... well, you know, I shouldn't have to spell it out... because of the...

In other words, could the Samba ever not have come from Brazil?

Anyway, it's these imperfections that we love and hate, in equal measure. Germans kick and rush, Mr Beckenbauer. All the teams we like do, a little. The rush bit is essential to our positive feelings. If only we could look at Spain and see the rush... But we can't. We're following the ball. And it seems to be moving so slowly...

The tick tock of Spain's passing, the grinding boot of The Netherlands +5% style are coming at us, taking over... Mark is right when he said on Twitter that the final, "looks so boring on paper that it might turn out to be a good match..."

Delayed Twitter Coverage of Spain v. Germany - Now in Blogvision

2010-07-08T04:26:00.005+01:00

So I didn’t get up this morning for the Spain v. Germany semifinal. A series of very late nights at work counselled against getting up even at the relatively late time of 6.30am, New Zealand time. I just couldn’t do it. And so I recorded the game, and had to watch it sitting at my computer so I could monitor my email and work.

(Yeah, I know: poor dear.)

I wrote already about the dissonance of the delayed coverage, the having to go off the grid because information is everywhere, it’s in the very air we breathe. But try to follow in that manner a game in which nothing happens. It turned out to be a saving grace that this time, half to wallow further in the dissonance, half in preparation of something I might write next week about the World Cup and remediation, I decided to record my impressions of the game on Twitter.

I was surprised to discover after the game was over that this redundant coverage had found an audience, including some of my colleagues here at Minus the Shooting. And so it’s not solely (but let’s face it: mostly) in the spirit of extreme self-indulgence that I reproduce it below.

(At one point of the proceedings, Mark wrote: “reading @gtiso's delayed tweeting on the #ger -#esp game reminds me of the famous quote about Waiting for Godot: nothing happens twice”. Make it three times then.)

Stand by for delayed livetweeting of the Germany v. Spain game

One of the children paired up with the Germans at the anthem towers over Trochowski.

2 min The commentator just revealed the score of the other semifinal. What happened to spoilers?

(The Netherlands won, by the way. Apparently.)

8 min Spain appear to want to do it by walking. Saving themselves for late night post game fun run?

10 min Like watching paint dry so far. Winner meets Pearl Lusta in the final.

15 min Spain brought the ball and they're not letting the German children play. That's bad sharing.

(Also, wait until Adidas hears about this.)

22 min "It's one for the purists here tonight". Translation: the game blows.

30 min Spain shows how you play against Germany. They're young, susceptible to being bored to death.

34 min Boy, they left Villa open with a lifestyle block's worth of space there, pass nowhere near him.

45 min "Gradually, the game began to be something rather more than a mosaic of ill will and sullen fouling." Somebody wrote this about Germany v. Italy of 1982

45 min Gradually, this game is doing no such thing. End of first half. If we had video technology, they'd ask them to replay it.

Spain had never been to a semifinal before. They decided to stick with tradition and not be in one this time either.

Tragic news: the guy who was supposed to put together the first half highlights killed himself. Our thoughts are with his family.

47 min The second half has started. Allegedly.

50 min Xabi Alonso takes a shot and is booked.

51 min "Capdevila always makes himself available". Yeah, not unlike his sister. This game is so boring it's making me sexist.

55 min Commentator guy claims Germany is succeeding in stifling Spain. I would have thought it's the opposite and that Germany came in as heavy favourites

Then again, what the hell do I know?

58 min Oh my God. An actual chance! Villa doesn't connect by a gnat's crotchet. Okay, on replay, maybe two.

63 min What the hell was Podolski doing marking Sergio Ramos? He was lucky not to concede a penalty there.

66 min And we're back to walking. The pace suits Puyol, who's having his portrait painted by a Renaissance master at the back.

69 min Podolski! That was close, the Spanish defence had got its coverage all wrong.

71 min I think I just spotted Samuel Beckett in the crowd.

73 min And just like that Puyol scores! The ball didn't hit his skull at all, just the hair.

75 min I'm going to bore myself just writing it, but Spain has played a game of supreme tactical intelligence so far.

80 min Del Bosque so confident he reckons he can do it with ten men. Torres comes on.

82 min Pedro heard me! He tried to walk it in rather than passing to the wide open Torres. Harsh.

84 min Pedro is taken off and, I must assume, whacked with a ruler by Del Bosque. That was a howler before.

89 min One minute to go. Time added on by my reckoning should be about 80 minutes.

90 min The ref signals just three because he has someplace else to be. I see no other explanation.

93 min Spain has done it! Germany made to look very average. Take a bow, Del Bosque. Take notes, Maradona and Capello. Superb possession football.

Don't get me wrong, still very boring, eh? Tapes of the game to be used as a natural alternative to induce anaesthesia before surgery. But.

Podolski still on the field looking like he's discussing with his mates what just happened. Quite an endearing scene. They'll be back.

It's just like watching Brazil

2010-07-07T23:21:00.004+01:00

When I was a postgraduate student at Warwick, James Williams gave a paper on Spinoza and Henry Miller. I don't remember the main point of the paper, but an offhand remark Williams made has stuck with me ever since: Spinoza wouldn't like sport. Williams was referring to Spinoza's rejection of both hope and fear as irrational passions. Since, Williams reasoned, the enjoyment of sport depends upon hope and fear, then Spinoza would find little to commend sport. I actually think this is incorrect - a dispassionate enjoyment of sport is possible. Non-partisan spectators can and do enjoy the aesthetic features of a match when they watch it replayed, the outcome already known. However, if one solely pursues this aesthetic model, then some dimension of the sporting experience is lost, the very things, yes, that Spinoza wants to overcome: suffering, pain, jouissance.

What I'm leading up to is a response to Zone's pondering about why there's so little enthusiasm for Spain here. He has some of the answers himself - the "cognitive dissonance" of watching Spain limp and press their way through games while the media bill and coo over their "scintillating sublimity" (two words, astonishingly, used by Alan Hansen tonight - you see, the emperor is not only clothed, he is wearing the finest imaginable clothes!; the smugonaut connoisseurship (which I resent in part because these people of taste will feel no pain if/when Spain lose). Then there's the sense of inevitability that Ben has talked of - a sense of inevitablity that has grown the more that Spain have progressed through the tournament. Spain have been sold to us as the heirs of Brazil 1970, but they have more closely resembled Brazil 1994. It's as if they've learned in the space of the three and a half weeks of the tournament what it took Brazil twenty-four years to discover. Spain's identikit victories over Portugal, Paraguay and Germany - airless games, devoid of theatre and settled by late opportunistic goals - have recalled the implacable drabness of Liverpool's triumphs in the 80s. All of which is fine; Spain have been grimly effective, no mean feat for a team that has so often disappointed in the past, and, let's be clear: Spain's achievement in reaching the final is massive, especially when you remember that, since 1970, only six teams have managed to do this. What I object to is being required to sit up and revere their play. Raphael Honigstein imperiously declared on twitter that "if you find that boring, you don't understand football" - but the defensiveness tells its own story. For me, great football is about drama, and Spain's combination of well-drilled defenders, a packed midfield playing hyper-aestheticised keepball and late goals is a formula practically guaranteed to eliminate all drama from the game. Spain have been compared with Arsenal, but I actually think that's unfair on Arsenal - sure, Arsenal might be similarly reluctant to debase themselves by, like, actually scoring, but matches involving Arsenal are rarely boring, in part because they can lose. All of Spain's games in this World Cup have been dreary - except the Switzerland match, which was dramatic by virtue of the fact that, for once, the inevitable didn't happen. But it has happened ever since. The dreariness is not all Spain's fault - it's a consequence of their opponents trying to squeeze and press them. But a team as great, and as aesthetically fine, as Spain are supposed to be could surely have found a more enthralling or inventive way through.

Partisanship is the key. It isn't those who were "better educated" about football who found tonight's game engaging, it's those who wanted Spain to win. For them, Spain's passing was indeed sublime artistry. But for those of us who didn't want Spain to win, or who wanted something to happen, their possession game was tedious. Yes, it might be difficult to do, but so is olympic gymnastics. As with olympic gymnastics, I might admire it; just don't ask me to enjoy it.

linking play

2010-07-07T16:54:00.005+01:00

While the links have been quietly accumulating in the sidebar, I'd like to mention one site in particular, whose unflashy name, Must Read Soccer, belies how interesting it is. Essentially a clearing house for anything written on football that catches its author's eye, even a cursory check throws up:

Andrew Guest's On the Invention of Tradition - referencing Terence Ranger and suggesting an alternative motivation for Sepp Blatter's defence of the vuvuzela (although it also suggested to me a possible counter-narrative in which the vuvuzela is a kind of sod-casting, a Deleuzian territorialization of the space of the stadium and the space of fandom).

Jonathan Wilson on Uruguay's garra

Tim Vickery on the emotional immaturity of Maradona and (less predictably) Dunga

...and the World Cup read through Moby Dick

Spain is dead, long live Spain

2010-07-07T16:18:00.002+01:00

I've been surprised to find so little support for Spain among the rest of the Minus contributors and other friends.

Partly this comes down to them being, as Mark put it, one of the smugonauts' choices – one of those teams that a certain kind of post-Hornby football fan will rave about as part of a leverage system to put them above the drudgery of supporting England. And as with Messi, as with Cristiano Ronaldo, as with Kaka and the entire Brazil squad, Spain have ended up introducing a kind of cognitive dissonance into the experience of watching the tournament. Whatever the evidence before them to the contrary might be, commentators and pundits simply cannot conceive of departing from the logic which sees the World Cup as the culmination of the season, and the inevitable stage for the reiteration of Messi, Ronaldo and Brazil as incantations of the Footballing Sublime – they know their appointed roles as cheerleaders and hype-merchants too well. Like Messi and Kaka, Spain have never quite clicked. They've still not shaken off that defeat to Switzerland. Torres is a shadow of himself. It's also true that at times they occasionally betray a sense of entitlement: Xavi, say, seems a little too convinced of the aesthetic and thus *moral* superiority of Spain's football.

But why wouldn't they? Contrary to M. Toledo, the commenter here who wonders if nostalgia has got stuck, unable to move beyond the 70s, I think this Spain team will be remembered as a highpoint in football history to file alongside Brazil 70 and Holland 74. It may only be when they're retired that we fully appreciate again the practically precognitive short passing of this Spain midfield. Why precognitive? Because the spectator may be able to see the pass a player should make, but they lack the skill to execute it. Good players can see it and execute it. At their best, such is the speed of Spain's one-touch passing that they're creating and exploiting situations before the average viewer can even take them in.

And I say this regardless of the outcome tonight. Because if Spain win, and then beat Holland, they will have confirmed their greatness in terms of the historical record: reigning World and European champions. This would tear up some of the seemingly immutable narratives discussed by DigitalBen here. But even if they lose, their unshakeable commitment to constant short-passing will only come to be seen as quixotic failure, exactly like Holland 74, and there is surely a windmill/Cervantes connection in there which only proves its profound cosmic rightness.

Maybe after the last few years of press gushing and international dominance many would love to see Spain toppled, but I remember the years and years of unsuccessfully tipping Spain as dark horses (not to mention the Czech Republic). This was a team as morbidly resigned to failure as any England team. Before Euro 08 they had only Euro 64 (on home soil) in the trophy cabinet. Spain should be cherished by anyone with even a glimmer of hope that England can overcome its own footballing fatalism.

Hoodoo Death

2010-07-06T22:11:00.002+01:00

When I've talked to people about the World Cup, they often object to is the idea that the repeating patterns in the tournament mean anything. So what, for instance, if there haven't been any new winners who weren't hosts since 1958? Yet even if this sequence is ended on Sunday - and after today's result there's now a two in three chance that it will be - it doesn't invalidate the remarkable consistency up until now, over thirteen tournaments and 52 years. (One pattern has definitely been ended this World Cup: for the first time there will be a European winner outside Europe.) Even now, in a comparatively anomalous World Cup - which, however, could still be won by Germany of course - the semi-finalists included two former winners and one two-time finalist. If Spain make the final, they will be the first new non-host finalist since Holland first made it in 1974.

We've talked here a great deal about the importance of "belief". But the kind of "belief" that must be involved is of an uncanny type; it isn't a question of individual psychology, nor even of collective psychology in any simple way - we're not dealing with something like crowd behaviour, after all, where spatial and temporal proximity can account for influence. No: what we have to account for are persistences over long periods of time, in conditions where the causal mechanisms are obscure.

Tabloid-vernacular discussion of football will often invoke "ghosts", "hoodoos" and "bogey teams". Now, commonsense might want to dismiss such phenomena as mere happenstance (it just so happens that, year in, year out, Team X loses to Team Y), yet - as is often the case with commonsense - such a dismissal risks being far more absurd than trying to explain how they have happened.

One dimension here must be self-fulfilling prophecy, which Ben has discussed most recently in terms of Brazil. In his crucial 1942 essay "Voodoo Death", Walter Cannon showed how self-fulfilling beliefs can literally kill. Cannon studied victims of shock and of voodoo sorcery, discovering that, in both cases, the victims were caused to panic themselves to death. One of the values of Cannon's work is that, far from being some vacuous New Age nonsense about the "power of the mind", it goes into precise detail about the physiology of belief, the way beliefs are instantiated in the autonomic nervous system. At the same time, these self-destructive states cannot be triggered unless the individual in question already has certain background beliefs - it is only someone who believes in the power of sorcery who will die when a sorcerer points a bone at them, for instance. But it's not possible not to "believe" in Brazil's success ; it's a matter of brute factual record. And this history of success is not some neutral record which can be consigned into the past once the match starts - it forms part of the "psychological" texture of the match itself.

If it's a final between Spain and Holland then there are ghosts on both sides. But Spain might feel that, having gone two rounds further than they've previously managed, they've already laid the ghosts of their past failings, and now all bets are off. Holland's spectres, meanwhile, can only be confronted in the final. Holland's grinding progress through the tournament recalls that of Brazil in 94. As Loki pointed out on twitter, that Brazil team was "haunted by ghosts of a brillliantly skillful, but ultimately failed past", the 82 side, just as this Dutch side is stalked by the spectres of 1974. Will the Dutch exorcise that ghost even if they win the tournament?(One thing that occurred to me tonight: is football nostalgia like music nostalgia, forever stalled in the 60s and 70s? Beyond their own team's fans, there doesn't seem to be much nostalgia for any of the World Cup winners of the 80s or 90s, and except, perhaps, for the France of 98, it's hard to imagine such nostalgia developing in the future.)

Relevant and Irrelevant Histories

2010-07-06T19:08:00.003+01:00

An interesting thought as we approach the end of this World Cup: although Uruguay have won World Cups in the past, and Spain and the Netherlands have not, Uruguay winning this year would be a 'newer' thing - more of an Event.

Spain finally lifting the trophy is a narrative that already carries a sense of inevitability - it's a triumph that has already been written, and held back from general release for two years. Now that Brazil have no longer already won the tournament, there's a case for saying that Spain have already won it. The same narrative can be quickly adapted and refitted for the Dutch - 'the long wait is finally over'. There is no comparably comfortable frame in which to fit a Uruguayan victory.

Granted, Uruguay's glories were a long time ago. But when has that ever been relevant to the expectations placed on football teams? Brazilian players are still being feted for what their team did forty years ago; England are judged (and judge themselves) every four years by the standards of 1966; African teams are still labelled as naive and impetuous based on the performance of Zaire in 1970. German teams and Spanish teams are just about still viewed in the context of their past representatives as villainous mecha-men and talented bottlers respectively, although these two seem to be finally losing their grip this summer. In the group stages, the BBC wheeled out an excruciating montage showing clips of past German triumphs interspersed with footage of pistons and machinery - but even they have since realised that this German team represents something different. These three-time World Cup winners would be fresher faces on the podium than the Spanish or Dutch.

Putting aside the two unfolding exceptions above - and progress on these fronts will be immediately undone if either team reverts back to historical type for even one game - these images seem impervious to the passage of time, and are held to remain true no matter how much contradictory evidence amasses. The fact that Uruguay have underachieved since 1950 doesn't explain the strange discrepancy about them; they are the only World Cup winners whose achievements have been definitively consigned to the history books, and deemed not relevant to modern analysis. You can never write off the Germans because of their past wins - but I don't believe I've ever heard a pundit say 'Well, I'll tell you what... I think Uruguay might be dark horses to win back their title this year. End the sixty years of hurt.'

In this country, the cutoff point for the relevance of sporting historical precedent is 1966. To us, tournaments before that period are quaint, sepia-tinted, and faintly comical. Two reasons - firstly because the World Cup only became a serious matter after we validated the tournament by going out and winning it. Secondly, the images teams made for themselves in the sixties and seventies have endured because those were the formative years of the people who have run, broadcasted, and commented on football in this country, certainly since the late eighties. Their ideas have bled into the minds of the population through sheer unchallenged repetition (and, lately, nostalgic replaying of said repetition - twice removed from new thought). Uruguay themselves are represented by a construction of this period - as temperamental foulers and cynics - and this seems to have replaced their earlier status as heroic two-time champions, leaving no trace of the older idea behind.

The relevant half-life of historical events must vary between countries. Uruguayan players surely don't go to tournaments still feeling burdened by the achievements of their predecessors, but Brazilian football fans still believe in a Uruguay hoodoo that dates back to 1950. Speaking to a Bosnian friend recently, I tried to draw out his opinion of the Stojkovic-inspired Yugoslavia team of 1990, but he was far more keen on regaling me with his admiration for the overachieving all-Serbian team at the first World Cup in 1930...

...who, it turns out, have been the subject of a recent film.

I doubt that a hypothetical English team sent upriver in 1930 would be the subject of such strong, enduring identification.

'Underdogs don't play'

2010-07-04T16:31:00.005+01:00

I wrote this piece before Brazil crashed out of the World Cup in a generally similar manner to a bunch of staggering, indignant drunks being thrown out of a pub at closing time.

There wasn't exactly a World Cup Final in 1950, but the final pool game between Brazil and Uruguay effectively amounted to one. Uruguay only needed a draw - Brazil had to win the match to finish top. Waiting in the dressing room underneath the Maracanã, hearing the noise made by some 200,000 Brazil supporters, Uruguay manager Juan López Fontana called his team together and gave a speech along the lines of "Okay, lads, we're the underdogs here, we're playing away, so let's keep it tight and try to hold on for a draw." After Fontana had left, captain Obdulio Varela addressed his team-mates in a rather different tone: "Underdogs? Pfah. Underdogs don't play. Let's put on a show."

I've taken liberties with the wording and the whole story may be apocryphal - but as with all good stories, being fictitious wouldn't make it any less true. Varela was more right than he could have realised. The record of World Cups since that day in 1950 has shown that underdogs don't play - at least, not against Brazil. They seem to have the unique ability to intimidate smaller teams into all but eliminating themselves.

Brazil - great teams, average teams, desperately dull teams, it doesn't seem to matter - have finished top of their first round group in every World Cup since 1982. In six of those eight groups, they kept a perfect three-wins record. The only times they dropped points were in drawing with Sweden in 1994 and losing to Norway (thanks to a last minute penalty) in 1998. Even that isolated defeat didn't seem to break their stride: they still won the group and strolled past Chile in a routine second round game.

The list of teams who've actually knocked Brazil out of World Cups contains Hungary in 1954, Portugal in 1966, Italy in 1982, Holland and Argentina at various times, and France in two recent tournaments. There are no less illustrious names. For Brazil, there is no equivalent of Senegal-France, Croatia-Germany, USA-England. Or even Slovakia-Italy.
Looking past the calamitous defeats, the other major footballing nations have all struggled to beat theoretically weaker teams in difficult campaigns. Brazil seem uniquely able to cruise through World Cups without breaking sweat . A banana-skin exit at the hands of lesser opposition would be as unthinkable to them as failing to qualify.

What these statistics cannot convey is just how perfunctory the Brazilians' runouts against less illustrious opponents appear to the viewer. Mark has written about this before: it's almost as if, at some point after the playing of the national anthems, the opposition collectively realise that they cannot win, they're only playing for pride, and that the best they can hope for is an honourably narrow defeat with perhaps a consolation goal. The actual relative quality of the two teams becomes an irrelevance. The underdogs huff and puff, but believe that the game is over. And the mass hypnosis that affects the players seeps through to the broadcast team, who present the match in the same terms. "Chile almost deserve a goal, for their pluck," commented Clive Tyldeseley in the closing stages of Monday's game - at least he didn't call it "their World Cup final".

Recent victims of this self-fulfilling acceptance of defeat include Belgium (and arguably England) in 2002, Ghana in 2006, Chile in 1998 and 2010, the US on their own turf in 1994... many of these were talented teams, examined in isolation, and stood a decent chance in theory - but that was of no relevance once the Brazil-determinism of the knockout stages swung into effect.

Mark ended his Brazil post by asking who could possibly stop them this time round. Well - the one team who seem to unsettle Brazil, and who are able to turn the historical record against them, are Uruguay. They may not be among the tournament favourites, but it would be nicely fitting if they held on to their fortitude and turned the psychological pressure on the seleção.

With hindsight, I'd add that the bewildered way Brazil reacted to being behind and under pressure against the Dutch showed just how much even they rely on this 'self-fulfilling defeatism'. When the script doesn't go as expected, Brazil don't seem to have any additional sources of mental strength - they simply fold. For the amateur-hour defending and petulant tantrums in the second half against Holland, read the dazed performance by the whole team against France in 1998.

I agree with various contributors here that the power of belief in football is a subject that deserves to be explored in more depth.

The Good Soldier Suarez

2010-07-03T22:45:00.008+01:00

"Luis Suarez - hero or villain?" - it's an obvious question to ask after last night's events in Johannesburg. But maybe we need to look beyond the "unadulterated fist-pumping joy" of Suarez, after he "saved" Uraguay's World Cup dreams against Ghana, to see another dimension of the piece, a dimension that comes most starkly into view when we (quite naturally) compare it to that other infamous handball. So, tongue ever so slightly in Zizekian cheek, I would like to suggest that, in comparison to Diego Maradona's 'perverse' Hand of God, Senor Suarez's intervention was a far more radical and destabilising act....

Maradona's gesture was, properly speaking, 'perverse' in that it was a direct - obscene - transgression of the rules which effectively re-inforced the status of the law: after the event "Maradona" could indeed be accorded a simple, binary, symbolic significance - as hero or villain, redeemer or cheat - whose actions merely proved the necessity of regulation. He got away with it (much like every pilled-up hedonist "gets away with it" every weekend) and there was considerable collective jouissance to be had as a result (especially given the Falklands and all that). And what was it that he and his hombres were really glorifying in if not the perverse pleasure of successful naughtiness, the 'obscene superego supplement'? His was an act of symbolic transgression; an attempt to prove that he was 'above' the law - thereby revealing his implicit reliance on the law as the constitutive ground for his own megalomaniacal ego - and one that the law, for its part, was quite happy to go along with, knowing its authority was in no real way being challenged.*

In contrast, the Suarez event is more radical, more real, more disturbing, for it all happened within - the gaze of - the law. The law was not transgressed, it was followed to the letter, and thereby its failure - its groundlessness and absurdity - was revealed, its ultimate impotence laid bare for all to see.** As an arbitrary and violent imposition of order onto contingency the law makes the game (all games) possible but we need to be reminded of its all too human origins, that it is not all-powerful (is 'non-all') and cannot legislate for all eventualities. This opens up the possibility of our taking some minimal distance from it, appreciating once more that we, and not the gods, are responsible for the law, and that, at the end of the day, while "you've gotta take each game as it comes", you mustn't let that blind you to the fact that it is a game and as such reliant on an ineliminable element of chance (not to mention violence - as many Ghana fans would no doubt testify today).

Ergo, the Good Soldier Suarez is a radical hero!

* "Maradona lifted the World Cup trophy, ensuring that he would be remembered as one of the greatest names in football history. In a tribute to him, the Azteca Stadium authorities built a statue of him scoring the "goal of the century" and placed it at the entrance of the stadium" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maradona#1986_World_Cup) - in granting the official Genius of his other goal, the "authorities" were clearly quite happy to turn a blind eye to his act of transgression....

** similar arguments could be made about the Lampard and Tevez "goals" last weekend perhaps....?

The rearview mirror, the big Other, and the persistence of the past

2010-07-03T17:23:00.006+01:00

When will Lionel Messi have had a mediocre tournament? One of the most irritating things about commentariat "common sense" is the way that judgements that are presented as universally accepted are silently reversed. All of Messi's touches have been greated with expectant rhapsodies of awe, even though he has never exploded into anything like the form of which is he is capable. And in the last couple of games, especially today, he has for large parts of the match been a flickering shadow; not as bad as Rooney, for sure, but certainly no better than Lampard against Germany, who did at least hit a shot across the line. Note: I am not, ludicrously, saying that Messi is overrated. But, with its usual bout of self-loathing sado-masochism, English media have been very quick to conclude that Rooney's desperately poor showing here means that he is overrated, often comparing him unflatteringly to Messi. Messi had the advantage of playing in a side that - until today - was winning easily; Rooney was playing in a team that was labouring. Note also: I am not saying either that Rooney is as good a player as Messi, only that Messi has been given the benefit of the doubt far more than Rooney was.

Partly, what I'm describing is due to what McLuhan called rearview mirror thinking. Commentators and pundits filter what they are seeing according to models rooted in the past, bending their perception to fit their expectations rather than adjusting their expectations in line with the facts. This syndrome used to be screamingly evident in the treatment of Brazil, and, twenty years after they converted to dour pragmatism augmented by occasional flair and predatory goalscoring, their reputation for playing Samba football remains astonishingly resilient - even if only the most selective of viewers could eulogise their organisation, backfiring backheels and packed defence this tournament.

Partly, it's a matter of what the big Other is held to acknowledge. With Brazil, the big Other was only supposed to notice their flicks and flamboyance. With Messi this tournament, the commentariat have been like courtiers trying to conceal shoddy workmanship from a monarch, as they sought desperately to keep Messi''s many patches of indifferent and ineffective play from the big Other's gaze. But the defeats of Brazil and Argentina over the last couple of days have been shock moments which have a retrospective impact, shattering the official narrative, and allowing what was always in fact the case to be recognised as such. When I suggested that "Brazil have already won the World Cup" I wasn't saying that they would win it, rather that if they did win, the victory would have been inevitable. Nothing would have happened. The officially constituted (and Nike sponsored) reality would have confirmed itself. But as soon as they hadn't already won it, they couldn't do enough to earn the win.

This brings us back to the role of belief and expectations. Germany started today's game with the evident conviction could beat Argentina, which already sapped the Argentines of much of their power. The same thing happened in the second half of the Netherlands-Brazil game, when Brazil's invincibility crumbled like Ceauşescu's tyranny; there was no gradual transition from inevitability of victory to defeat, just a sudden and total disintegration. But Ghana yesterday and Paraguay today palpably lacked that belief; like many of the less fancied teams, their strikers came up against what was in effect an invisible forcefield when they closed in on the opponents' goal, shooting wildly over the bar or uselessly into the keeper's body. It's no accident that both Paraguay and Ghana went out because they failed to convert penalties. In the penalty shoot-out against Japan, the Paraguay players looked like they could have scored penalties all night - but today Cardoso, like Gyan last night, seemed so paralysed by nerves that it was impossible to imagine him scoring. They had come up against the belief barrier.

Argentina's defeat today was comprehensive by any standards. They probed lislessly without really pressing, and, besides the clearly and indisputably offside goal, they created far fewer clear goalscoring opportunities against Germany than England did. Must we now conclude that there is a "gulf in class" between Argentina and Germany? The one thing that this World Cup has definitively proven is that this "gulf in class" does not exist; there are not South American and Spanish Deities on another technical plane to other teams. What Germany had over England and Argentina was not a technical advantage, but a manifest superiority in pace and discipline. As Zone argued, Germany's destruction of England was a consequence of Germany literally beating England at their own game - and that "English-style" football requires a pace and energy that was physically and mentally far beyond the England players, who, in a horrible vicious circle, tried to compensate for indiscipline and disorganisation with the very bluster that produced the organisational collapse in the first place. Argentina, meanwhile, found it impossible to run the game at their tempo, and, like Brazil, they were unable to adjust to being behind in a game. Spain have survived this far in the competition not because of their vaunted passing game, which has sparked only sporadically in the last couple of games, but because of their tenacity and Villa's opportunism. I'm not sneering at these things - they are exactly the qualities Spain needed to develop in order to face down the very daunting ghosts of their past under-achievement. Ominously for Germany - who by any metric are far and away the most exciting team this tournament - Spain are now playing badly enough to win the World Cup. However, Spain still have massive hauntological obstacles to overcome - not least the fact that Germany have never gone more than twenty years between World Cup wins since they first won in 1954. As I've already pointed out, Spain would be the first new winner of the World Cup who wasn't the host since 1958; they would be the first reigning European Champions to win the competition since West Germany's victory on home soil in 1974 (which was in fact the only occasion so far on which the winners of the European championships have gone on to win the World Cup); and they would be the only team ever to lose their first game and end up winning the tournament (this last fact makes them more closely resemble Argentina in 1990 - who lost to Cameroon in their opening game - and West Germany in 1982, who lost to Algeria in their first game: what do these teams have in common? They ended up losing in the final. Remember also that Holland in 1978 might not have lost their opening game, but they did suffer a shock defeat in the first round - to Scotland - and they too ended up losing in the final.) Spain would also be the first European team to win outside Europe. The Netherlands run up against many of the same precedents, these eerily repeating patterns. As for Uruguay - well, even though they seem to be the underdog of the four remaining teams, they are not similarly ill-starred. And, unlike Spain and Holland, they have won the World Cup before, twice in fact.

The Art Of The Non Spectator

2010-07-02T20:54:00.001+01:00

An Imaginary Art Installation

The World Cup final. At the whistle, the crowd fall silent. Sit for ten minutes in complete silence, each feigning a different form of shock and awe. Then, row by row, still in silence, everyone files out the ground. By half time, the stadium is empty. The players have to come back out for the second half to an empty stadium. 5 mins into the second half, all the spectators run back into the stadium mouthing wordless obscenities and doing an odd dance like they've developed a 24hr strain of autism. Sit down and watch in silence for the rest of the game.

The Goalkeeper's Fear Of The Penalty

2010-07-02T13:19:00.003+01:00

As the World Cup circles get tighter and tighter then the question of penalties raises its head. Quarter Finals now and who would bet against them occurring somewhere...

Now that England are out and the autosuggested fear of missing becomes less of an issue (though of course the Dutch are still in the competition), attention has switched to the fears of the goalkeeper, who is often assumed to be the only one in a penalty shootout with nothing to lose.

Not so, or so this article suggests.

Ofer Azar, a Behavioural Economist, argues that the goalkeepers have a very real fear during a penalty which can be roughly (perhaps wrongly) translated as the fear of being seen to do nothing. Although it's statistically better for them to stay in the middle of the goal, they tend to feel the need to dive spectacularly one way or another even if they know this is a strategy doomed to failure.

This is a kind of inverse Omission Bias (the tendency to judge harmful actions as worse than equally harmful omissions or inactions) which could be argued as an emotional flaw in logic which dogged England, France et al at this World Cup - the fear of being seen as inactive (i.e. uncaring, lacking in passion) led to players overdoing things (think of all those long raking aimless balls from Gerrard, the bizarre crossfield dribbling of Ribery).

The Game Never Ends

2010-07-02T09:21:00.013+01:00

I've enjoyed the last couple of game-less days. The plan to watch all of the fixtures was a fine one in principle, but it had begun to seem a bit of a chore to be honest. Not that I'm complaining about the level of play: I think it's been a good tournament so far. At the time of writing the two most exciting attacking teams - Spain and Argentina - are still in it, whilst Germany, Brazil and the Netherlands are playing with less obvious flair but still quite entertainingly. It's great to have Ghana in there and the two Guays are adding a bit of dark horse vivacity to the whole thing. So I won't complain. Still, there's only so much football you can take before a certain element of drudgery creeps in, to coincide with what is pointedly referred to as the 'business end' of the competition. None of the teams that are left in the tournament are in it to entertain at this point, if they ever did. Not even Argentina. They're all in it for the bottom line, and that is to win or, in the case of the lower-ranked three, to make a historic semifinal at least.

Success and failure. One of the side stories of South Africa 2010 has been the early exit of most of the Nike stars, the chaps who were supposed to write the future. I actually didn't think that the campaign was has bad as it has been made out to be. There was more than a little cheek in Ronaldo's dream of a colossal bronze statue to match the size of his ego and the sculpted iconicity of his Mussolinesque pout, and you wouldn't put it past that character to spit at a cameraman on his way out of the tournament if things didn't go to plan. It was always going to be either the triumph of the will or the fall of the ungracious.

The ad starring Cannavaro was genuinely funny, chiefly thanks to the brilliantly cast Bobby Solo, but I was intrigued by the extended version of Rooney's story, the only one to write in the prospect of failure. In this one the two alternative finales - with Roo either ending up living in a trailer park or bear-hugging the Queen and having all male boys of the realm named after him - was refreshingly open to the possibility that the future would be written by the non-Nike-wearing anonymous player mob. I felt that you could do something with that, that it wasn't as tightly controlled and depressingly closed a text as most sports ads are at this level.

I'd also caution against sneering at the Nike campaign because they might get the last laugh yet - ~~Luis Fabiano~~ Robinho is still in it, and you have to like his chances. They might yet get their ROI, if they haven't already.

But by far the more emblematic tagline of the tournament to my mind belongs to this commercial.

There it is, the drudgery, in a formulation that is a concise as it is soul-crushing: The Game Never Ends. And: Keep Playing. Moreover, it applies not only to professional footballers, but to the rest of us as well, who are left with no choice but to embrace that philosophy of sacrifice, that commitment to the ultimate effort, even in our streets, in our parks, on our beaches. No more of that old “that’s it for me, I think I’ll be heading home” business. The game never ends.

In panning cleverly from one country and one culture to the next, the Powerade commercial paints a vivid picture of global joylessness. It is not so much the other side of top sporting events as it is integral, central to it; it is the very serious business of winning, which is the thing that sport has in common not just with the military but also with corporations. Obvious as it is to remark, that’s why you’ll find motivational management strategies used in sports teams, and ‘team-building’ exercises and a whole host of sports metaphors, gestures and tics featuring prominently in the workplace. And for capitalism to reach maximum efficiency, it is necessary that leisure and work be as indistinguishable as the transition between the two is seamless. Work is play, and play is work.

I wrote that Argentina is as much in it to win it as the others, but I must also note Maradona’s very careful strategy to project the image of a team that is capable of having fun. It’s as if he has chosen to be the anti-Dunga, and for Argentina to be the antagonist of the reality principle that is Brazil, encouraging us to read this new and in some respects surprising chapter of the great South American rivalry as a struggle for the very soul of football. That’s the narrative that the shrewd Maradona is offering to us, at any rate. And it is a fiction, to be sure, but a useful one, if only to combat the feeling that what we’re about to do in the next ten days or so - when the game will end - is not to so much to enjoy a series of games as to conduct a review: without enjoyment, without passion, writing a future that is pre-determined by the objective and measurable superiority of the winning team.

You can watch the Powerade commercial in its full, exhausting four-minute length here.

Peter Lorre On Legs

2010-07-02T08:05:00.004+01:00

England should immediately disband all Under 21 matches. This team should be the full England team, with maybe a few old heads, willing to stay in the side as the Gary McAllister figure(s). Maybe these 'old' guys might even have a few final hurrahs like McAllister did for Liverpool - Houllier described him as his "most inspirational signing" and you can hardly disagree.

Which old heads? You'd have to ask them; "Hands up, who wants to be the fading star? It really is a better role than you seem to think..."

Or: "Who wants to be the Schweinsteiger?" - they don't have to be literally old.

Next, we should ditch all expectations for at least 2 years. Don't worry about winning. Winning doesn't really seem to help (reference our World Cup qualifying campaign). Forget winning. Winning is overrated.

Insert Karl Popper here.

In retrospect the verification bias after the Croatia matches sent us spinning; sent Capello into an odd mysticism, gave him more self-belief than was required. He knew this at some deep unconscious level, tried admirably to deal with it himself by ditching Walcott at the last minute.

It was just Croatia. It was just Croatia...

Capello saw this coming. He's a good manager. He saw this. But the expectation of England is differently intense to the expectation of Italy or Madrid or whoever. It's expectation tinged with no expectation. We're the best apart from the best.

We're still worrying about never being Brazil even when Brazil don't care about being Brazil.

So...

Let the young uns get thumped a little by the older, more experienced sides (I'm not convinced that experience is that much of a factor anyway at International Level because there's just not enough planning time to get the team together). Let us even fail to qualify for the Euros. Let's instead work on figuring out a way to play before the next World Cup.

Let them find their way around the pitch a little. See who emerges. See where they emerge. Let them make some mistakes (could they make more than the seniors?).

I know our U-21s got fairly roundly beaten by the, er, Germans in the 2009 U-21s final but, hey, who was man of the match?

Yep. Ozil. Petter Lorre on legs.

I think there's something to be learned.

tipping point in America

2010-07-01T20:09:00.000+01:00

I'm fairly certain that, despite the USA's missed opportunity against Ghana, the 2010 World Cup was *finally* the tipping point for soccer in America. It's a major sport for us now.

No further evidence is needed than today's column at ESPN by Bill Simmons, probably America's liveliest sportswriter in recent years (and also a Tottenham Hotspur fanatic, which is no longer an Anglophiliac affectation in the USA of 2010 as it might have been even 5 years ago). As his remarks indicate, part of the problem is that we are simply sick and tired of American sports. I certainly am, and it was my primary personal recreation from about 1975-2000 before moving to Egypt.I agree with every word of the following, for instance:

"I love the Cup because it stripped away all the things about professional sports that I've come to despise. No sideline reporters. No JumboTron. No TV timeouts. No onslaught of replays after every half-decent play. No gimmicky team names like the 'Heat' or the 'Thunder.' (You know what the announcers call Germany? The Germans. I love this.) No announcers breathlessly overhyping everything or saying crazy things to get noticed. We don't have to watch 82 mostly half-assed games to get to the playoffs. We don't have 10 graphics on the screen at all times. We don't have to sit there for four hours waiting for a winner because pitchers are taking 25 seconds to deliver a baseball."

Anyway, here's the link to the whole article:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/100701

The Compulsion to Repeat

2010-07-01T11:11:00.006+01:00

Danny Baker has talked about English fans and experts being "too quick to call an autopsy without a body". It's hard to disagree. But while our patient isn't dead, he is starting to exhibit some very strange symptoms...

The betting market for the next England manager is throwing out some uncannily familiar names. Almost every single one of our past managers is quoted. This isn't new - every time we look for a new manager, we seem to be consumed with nostalgia for one or more previous incumbents. So go on, take a punt on Kevin Keegan at the numerically significant price of 66-1. How about Terry Venables, who's been in the running every time since 1996? Or even... Steve McClaren, who's as short as 20-1 at one place? He seems to be going through levels of hurried reappraisal as quickly as the newspapers can put out new editions.

Why would there be any kind of call for McClaren to retake the job, only two years after he was laughed out of it? It would nice to think that this phenomenon was due to a sincere reappraisal of his worth following his success in the Eredivisie. But the press, who had fun at his expense for so long (how they crowed at his adopted Dutch accent), have never been ones to revise their opinions so quickly. When Twente took their first steps toward the title, it was reported (generally in thumbnail-sized articles in the inside pages) with a kind of detached amazement/amusement, with the implication that the progress said more about the Dutch league than about the manager's skill. The serious reconsideration of McClaren is a phenomenon that only dates back to the trauma of the last week.

The logic being used to build the man up by the same people who relished knocking him down is tortuous. The pundits are spinning a narrative of how quickly he has learned the ropes, and how the England job came 'just a couple of years too soon for him' - but managers don't go from imbecilic to ingenious in the space of twenty-four months. The fact that McClaren and even Kevin Keegan are now considered as serious - albeit outside - candidates to return to the England job calls for some kind of deeper explanation. This isn't just rose-tinted nostalgia - this is the desire for repetition.

We can turn to Freud, who identified one of our most powerful and overriding desires - the compulsion to repeat. We unconsciously re-enact earlier events in an impossible attempt to be able to go back and change them - and we feel compelled to do this even when the experience will be painful and cannot possibly affect the original, traumatic event. Repetition does not even help us deal with the trauma - it simply extends it. Freud could find no self-interested explanation for this behaviour, and reluctantly classed it as one of the few motivations that could override the otherwise dominant pleasure principle. We repeat even we know it will cause us pain.

We want McClaren back in charge because, hey, he's turned out not to be a laughable mug after all, and we aren't sure how a man like that failed with our Golden Generation. We want Terry Venables back in charge because we aren't entirely sure how we failed to win Euro '96, when things seemed to be going so well - surely, if we repeated it all, everything would come good? We want Glenn Hoddle back in charge because we aren't sure when, or how, he lost his good relationship with the players (close to them in age, respected by them for his enduring ability on the training pitch) and became an unpopular laughing stock in the dressing room. Surely it should have ended better? Surely it would end better a second time?

But acting out traumatic events in this way precludes remembering them. The more we become caught up in repetition, the further we get from being able to analyse and learn from the events of the past. English football isn't a corpse on the autopsy table, but it might help to think of it as a patient on a psychiatrist's couch - and re-enacting the past isn't going to help him get over his problems.

"Maybe... just maybe."

England: Not Anarchist Enough

2010-06-30T19:20:00.006+01:00

After John Barnes' extraordinary claim that England's footballers don't have enough of a socialist mentality comes Germany's two-goal hero Thomas Müller, who makes a similar point (minus the political metaphor)- arguing that England have 'too many chiefs and not enough Indians'.

pic: Toby Price

Both, I feel, are on to something. Perhaps the most prominent example of what they're getting at was Steven Gerrard's incessantly hopeless long-range shooting: a marked feature of England's World Cup campaign (and noted in this post of Mark's). He frequently persisted with it even when there were better placed teammates, so it's easy to support Barnes and Müller and note that a rather more 'collective' mentality might have served England a little better.

Yet to my mind this analysis rests on a troublesome dichotomy: that of the individual versus the collective. To overcome this- and think how a football team should match individual 'talent' with collective strength- we might turn again to political theory, appealing this time to anarchism rather than socialism.

For 'classical' anarchists, there is no inherent tension between the individual and their society; the relationship is one of mutuality in which the interests of the individual are best served by working as part of a collective. Kropotkin's Mutual Aid is perhaps the best known proponent of this work arguing for this, portraying a convergence of the interests of the one and the many:

'On our mutual relations every one of us has his moments of revolt against the fashionable individualistic creed of the day, and actions in which men are guided by their mutual aid inclinations constitute so great a part of our daily intercourse that if a stop to such actions could be put all further ethical progress would be stopped at once. Human society itself could not be maintained for even so much as the lifetime of one generation'.

George Woodcock, meanwhile, argues that anarchism is to be distinguished from Marxism in its insistence that collectivity is not privileged over the individual: anarchist but survive because each individual retains their freedom, but sees that it is in their interests to keep the bonds strong.

Of particular interest to me, though, is the 'post-left' guise of anarchism: a strongly individualist current which flows through Nietzsche and Stirner through Deleuze (& Guattari) and on to thinkers like Alfredo M. Bonnano and Hakim Bey. It is a strand of thought with which I have a number of problems (particularly in the anti-civilisational guise of John Zerzan), but there's much I find to admire in its urgent calls for individual liberty*.

Suspicious of the essentialism inherent in Kropotkin's appeal to the 'laws of nature', post-left anarchism further muddies the boundary between the individual and the collective: individuals are both 'fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it', as Deleuze and Guattari would have it. It is not possible to say that 'the interests of the individual tally with the interests of the collective', because it is not possible to discern where the interests of the individual and the interests of the collective begin and end. As Hakim Bey puts it, 'Individual vs Group- Self vs. Other [is] a false dichotomy propagated through the Media of Control...Self and Other complement and complete one another.'

To me, this speaks loudly to the needs of a football team. Supremely disciplined collective play can be successful (and, in its own way, fascinating)- Greece's Euro 2004 triumph and Inter Milan's success this season just finished are testament to that- but all too often well-drilled, disciplined teams are too predictable in attack and struggle when the onus is on them to make something happen (Greece v Argentina and Portugal v Spain would be prime examples at this World Cup). To answer this problem- and the problem of England's lack of solidarity- I would argue for a form of anarchist football in which attacking players are allowed to express their creativity in full (of course, defensive players need to be somewhat more disciplined and team-spirited- curbing any attacking urges to prevent the opposition from exploiting space they leave unoccupied). Revelling in their freedom, attackers see no need to try the ridiculous in order to prove themselves or give themselves a feeling of legitimacy (this echoes Max Stirner's account of the 'union of egoists' in The Ego and Its Own).

The point for a manager, then, is not to deny their attacking players their egos- but to get players' egos to co-operate; to pull in the same direction. There must be no competition between the attackers in a team; each member must be happy for his teammates to retain their individuality and happy that their own individuality is respected. There is no need to shoot from ridiculous angles and distances merely to show (to themselves as much as anyone) that they can do it. Gerrard and Lampard no longer need to compete to show who is most worthy of playing; Rooney does not need to prove to himself how good he is.

Manchester United's triumvarate of Rooney, Tevez and Ronaldo was perhaps the ultimate expression of this form of football: the three of them swarming forward and retaining their individual flair but acting as a devestating unit. You cannot tell me that any of them tempered their egos- rather they followed them through to the full and strengthened their bonds as they did. They were fully a part of the team and yet fully outside any notion of 'collectivity': there is nothing 'collective' about a sharp turn of pace, a stepover, an improvised chip into the corner**. As I discuss here, Carlos Alberto Parriera's claim that the formation of the future is 4-6-0 resonates strongly with this form of 'anarchist' football.

The problem for England is not that they have too many chiefs and not enough Indians, but that they have too many players who want to be chief and rule over the other Indians. They're worried about their place in the team; scared of each other; fearful of not being as good as they could be. It's a problem of Nietzschean ressentiment- a 'slave mentality'. Rather than having more Indians, England needs more Chiefs. Rather than being socialist, England need to be more anarchist.

*though I do quite like Colin Ward's scathing riposte (in Talking Anarchy, with David Goodaway) that he'd known a good few 'individualist' anarchists and found them all to be startlingly boring people.

**I once saw an interview with a footballing legend- it may well have been George Best- and he said he didn't really care whether his team won; he just wanted to play beautiful football. But of course him playing beautiful football would make it more likely that his team would win, and his team winning would make it more likely he would have the time and space to play beautiful football.

Patterning (or Why Ronaldo spits)

2010-06-30T17:59:00.004+01:00

Ronaldo spitting, his (adams) apple bobbing; Gerrard's thousand yard stare; Rooney's simian growl; Torres's odd gait, like an adolescent whose body is growing too fast for his brain; Messi's shocked awe at a team winning without him. So far, these have been the lowlights of the World Cup; the stars going out, the Nike curse...

Why such terrible form for their country?

There's already plenty of data unfolding, theories being unravelled... you just have to peer through the cracks in the fans' hands to see that everyone has a theory. There's a lot of bellyaching in the British Press about honour and national identity and... guff mostly and unsupportable. It seems unlikely that Patriotism or lack of it is responsible. At least 3 of the Germans actively refuse to sing their National Anthem on the grounds that it isn't their National Anthem but their team spirit doesn't seem to be lacking and, if anything their players seem to be displaying the reverse effect; playing better for their country after an indifferent season for their clubs.

People haven't been going crazy trying to buy Klose or Podolski in the close season but...

An idea struck me while watching the Spain vs Portugal game. A simple idea but one I think is worthy of further investigation. In Ronaldo et al's club teams, the team and the tactics are based around them, are for them, are built around their strengths. Man United buy some wingers to whip crosses in and Rooney scores, gulp, lots of headers. Torres has Gerrard can only really play together now, apart all the flaws start to show - Liverpool have to play in a way that gets the best out of them (Kuyt seems to have had a reasonable tournament; the unflashiness helping the Netherlands steady progress). Ronaldo has nippy strikers to play against and with and some serious looking, though skillful, holding players to negate the problem of him losing the ball (to be fair, he often loses the ball but mostly it matters less because his club team mates are able to get the ball back).

In their club teams, the weaknesses in their teams can be bought around, can be coolly considered and weighted against other other concerns - this inevitably makes the star player even more of a star since everything is weighted in their favour. In the National team, the dynamic is different; there are either more stars or less choice and either way this can be a killer for the over-indulged big players, things aren't set up to go their way and, in fact, in the case of the England set up things may even seem to be actively against them - just look at their little faces...

"Football is a socialist sport"

2010-06-29T23:18:00.002+01:00

John Barnes gives his opinion on the reasons behind England's exit from the World Cup. Worth reading in its entirety.

"The teams which embrace the socialist ideology rather than having superstars, are the teams that are successful. Or if there are superstars they don't perceive themselves to be that. That's why I use Messi as an example. As much as he's a superstar he respects his team-mates and their collective efforts. [...] Players from other nations when they play for their country are once again a socialist entity, all pulling in the same direction [...] football was different in our day because we had a relationship with the fans and we were normal people [...] England gets by on the individual ability of a Rooney or a Gerrard or a Lampard, rather than collective method or strategy. Now if that individual either isn't playing or he doesn't play well, that means you can't win. Spain has an identity. If you black out the faces and don't know who's playing, you can still say this Spain because of the way they play. You can see Brazil because of the way they play. We haven't got a method. We need to create an identity."

Via Ed Knock of The Crystal World on Twitter.

"The funniest book about football ever written ..."

2010-06-29T12:17:00.005+01:00

Deserved praise for David Stubbs' Send Them Victorious from Scott Murray in The Guardian's World Cup blog on Sunday:

Anyway, the English papers have been embarrassing themselves today, as you'd expect.

Send Them Victorious: England's Path To Glory 2006-2010 by David Stubbs

"It is no exaggeration, but rather an imaginative simile, to compare this game to World War II – World War II, that is, minus the participation of Churchill, Field Marshall Montgomery, Adolf Hitler, Herman Goering, and Douglas Bader, who like our own Frank Lampard, suffered from the handicap of not being able to use his legs in any effective way."

You have got to love this book.

Musical interlude: crossbar challenge

2010-06-29T11:35:00.000+01:00

Baron Mordant vs...

The golden generation's statistical failure

2010-06-29T11:16:00.002+01:00

James Lawton makes a spirited defence of Capello in the Independent today, but I fear that the tabloid/ TV narrative has already locked into the familiar pattern that can only end with Capello's sacking. As ever with these artifically-generated "clamours", there's plenty of bloodlust but little thought about who could do the job better. With Hodgson, the only English candidate with any international or European experience, looking as if he will take on the Liverpool job, the FA will have to look for another foreign coach (with an inferior record to Capello's) or turn to a manager with pretty modest record of domestic success like Redknapp, or, God forbid, back to the dark ages with the likes of Allardyce.

The statistics below, listed in Lawton's piece, tell their own story - confirming, for one thing, my long-held conviction that Gerrard is one of the most wasteful midfielders around. I doubt you will find another midfielder in international football so profligate with possession as Gerrard.

Rooney

3 Lost the ball in in tackles 32 times in the Germany game – more than anyone other player

55 Completed only 55 per cent of his passes against Germany, less than any other player

9 Failed to score in his last nine England games, his longest barren spell for the national team

Gerrard

10 Struck 10 shots from outside the penalty area, none of which went in

3 Only three of 16 crosses from Gerrard found another player in a red shirt

64 Gerrard's pass completion rate was the lowest amongst England's midfielders

Lampard

37 The free-kick that struck the bar in the crushing defeat against Germany was Lampard's 37th shot without scoring

16 Has the most shots in this World Cup without scoring

29 Of 197 completed passes, only 29 were to a forward

Terry

8 Was forced to make eight blocks over the course of the finals, more than any other player at the finals

39 Resorted to playing long balls from the back on 39 occasions

4 The defensive display against Germany was the worst since England conceded four against Uruguay in 1954

Capello

19 Fabio Capello has the highest win percentage ratio of any England manager, winning 19 of his 28 games in charge (67.9 per cent)

Options, illustrated

2010-06-28T21:38:00.005+01:00

David Beckham, there, placing a strong fourth. That's the David Beckham who has no coaching or managerial experience, and who didn't even seem like a great thinker or communicator as a player. Still, he looks good in a three-piece suit, and he gets angry when things go against England on the pitch. What could go wrong?

(I suppose the logic is that we tried a vastly experienced, decorated coaching legend with a great reputation in the game, and that didn't work, so now it's time to try something different...)

Steve McLaren is on the list, and somebody in the comments thread makes a plea for recalling Glenn Hoddle. As Danny Baker quipped to a caller making a similar argument after the Algeria game, "I hear Walter Winterbottom's available..."

In a way, Hodgson is another name from the past. He's been in the running for this job since the nineties - he was touted as a candidate after Glenn Hoddle's departure, and he made the FA's three-man shortlist to replace Keegan in 2000. He may well be the best of the candidates, but like David James in the No.1 jersey, he seems to have got there by outlasting all of his rivals, rather than through any tremendous effort of his own. What probably put the final gloss on Hodgson's CV from the FA's point of view was the relative success of his current spell with Fulham - managerial achievements abroad still seem to count for little over here.

Hoorah for neo-Victorian insularity!

Brazil have already won this World Cup

2010-06-28T21:07:00.003+01:00

Long, long ago, Brazil used to represent fantasy football. Now - everywere but in the minds of commentators, still clogged with mouldering images of 1970 - Brazil are international football's equivalent of the reality principle. Their victories are as inevitable as they are joyless, pulverising not only their opponents but any sense of drama and romance like flowers under the wheels of a tank. This is not a team that has tempered flair with organisation; it is a team whose success is entirely almost based on athleticism and positional discipline. There was a suffocating flatness about Brazil's destruction of Chile tonight; it was if Brazil's remorselessy effective defence - by some distance the most miserly in the competition, protected by a steely shield of two holding midfielders - had drawn the very oxygen from the air.
Brazil are the Terminator of the World Cup. "There is no fate," was the slogan of the latest Terminator film, but Brazil's success in this World Cup seems fated, the script written by their corporate sponsors, Nike, with teams like Chile tonight reduced to the role of background drones in the tediously slick CGI-driven commercials. It feels like Brazil have already won the World Cup, and that anything else will be a triumph for surprise over grim inevitability. That inevitability feels even more fated when you remember that no European teams have won outside Europe, and that Brazil have won all but two of the tournaments held outside Europe since 1958, including both of the tournaments that were hosted outside Europe and South America. Who, if anyone, can stop the inevitable from happening, and restore some sense of surprise and romance to the World Cup?

Fairness and Video Technology

2010-06-28T16:20:00.001+01:00

Following Frank Lampard's disallowed goal against Germany, and then Carlos Tevez's goal against Mexico which in turn was allowed, despite an impromptu video replay in the stadium showing that Tevez was conspicuously offside, the cry has been renewed for video technology to be introduced into the “multi-million pound” world of football, as a matter of urgent common sense. Frank Lampard wants it. Tim Henman wants it, as does Sue Barker, who interviewed him the day after at Wimbledon. Gary Lineker certainly wants it. (This is far too important an issue for the BBC to maintain its customary effort at impartiality). Smarting redly at England's ignominious defeat against Germany, Lineker muttered to Match Of The Day panellists Hansen and Shearer that video technology was something for which “everyone” was clamouring but which was denied solely because of the obduracy of “Sepp Blatter and his cronies”.

Now, there are doubtless plenty of reasons to narrow one's eyes in the direction of Sepp Blatter, as well as the dubious operations of FIFA. However, in this context, Blatter's role is the nebulous one of greasy, foreign Head Gnome, acting in an arbitrary and high-handed way, his agenda, like that of Michel Platini, to do England down.

However, wrong as he may be in all kinds of ways and about all kinds of things, Blatter is right to rule out video technology. This is not to say that mistakes have not been made, will be made. However, so it has been since the beginning of footballing time. They are a very occasional hazard, rather than fatal occurrences. In 1932, for example, in what became known as the “over the line” final, Newcastle beat Arsenal following an equaliser from a long ball which according to photographic evidence crossed the dead ball line before winger Jimmy Richardson crossed it back into play. Unfortunate, but hardly the ruin of Arsenal, who went on to dominate the decade, winning three successive championships. And one hardly needs point up the disingenuous smirks with which Englanders discuss Geoff Hurst's extra time goal in the 1966 World Cup Final, which are doubtless on the lips of German fans today. In both games, it was clear who ultimately deserved to win.

But then, some argue, now that we have such technology, which is applied in tennis and rugby, why not apply it in football? Well, for one thing, both tennis and rugby are games which are full of pauses in play, changes of end, interruptions. The technology slots in well to such games. In football, which is already increasingly blighted by outbreaks of heated, onfield litigation, you can be sure that the natural flow of the game would be broken up even more.

There is also the principle, cited by FIFA, of expense. It is one thing to have VT installed at the high end of the game, the World Cup, the Champions League. But then how far down into the domestic leagues can such a fundamental change in the way the game is refereed be applied? It is one of the virtues of football that the rules as abided by in organised leagues of pub teams on Hackney Marshes are the same as those abided by at the Nou Camp. In a game that is becoming increasingly high ended and subject to corporate forces, this egalitarian thread feels sovereign. Video Technology would be in breach of that. Sure, it's been argued, there are no fourth officials or technical areas on Hackney Marshes. Fair point, but these are far less radical tools of adjudication. Moreover, despite the claims of VT advocates that they would be sparing in its use, there's little doubt that once introduced it would be the thin end of the wedge – pressure would soon be applied, and succumbed to, for video adjudication on penalties, offsides, free-kicks, off-the-ball incidents. Then you would have a two-tier football – one at the high end, full on interruptions and contested decisions, the other its poor, increasingly detached, video-less relation.

Rugby is a salutary example in other ways. A relatively small sport compared with football, it's been subjected to all kinds of modernisation (Murdochisation?) in order to make a play for a bigger audience, suffering the undignified uprooting of many of its traditions. It isn't just video technology, it's giant hooters in lieu of final whistles and teams renamed The Rhinos. The marketing people, the meddlers, have been able to have their way with it, and to an extent, cricket. They would love to do the same to football and have certainly succeeded in making some inroads in some ways. However, the deep-rooted, worldwide nature of the game has made it fundamentally resistant in other respects. In football, you still get teams called Wanderers and Rovers. There are, as yet, no Super leagues, 39th games. And there is, as yet, no video technology. It's all of a piece.

The most loudly professed concern of those pressing for VT is fairness. However, in the balance of things, a sort of makeshift karma, or simply the laws of chance, ensures that eventually these things balance out – cf, 1966, 2010. The imperfections of the present system should function as a reminder that this is just a game, which should be neither overvalued nor undervalued as such. Moreover, if fairness is the paramount concern, than there are surely far more pressing issues to address in the modern game – the super-privileges of the top few moneyed teams in Europe, and their continued efforts to ensure that the ladder of opportunity is pulled up behind them, with success and access to the best emerging talent exclusive to them in perpetuity. Or the way fans are increasingly squeezed by opportunistic club owners, some of whom are making them pay for their own, ill-advised, leveraged purchases. These represent far larger injustices than the odd bad decision visited on a just wage earner like Frank Lampard.

England's Super-GAU

2010-06-28T14:14:00.005+01:00

The likelihood is that this match will leave more scars more than any of England's World Cup defeats. I hesitate to use the phrase perfect storm, but almost every detail of the game seems to accumulate into a massive migraine-inducing weatherfront of depression. Practically every potential weakness identified in the team manifested itself, and what should have been its strengths were only demonstrated by the opposing side. [EDIT: I've retitled this post in the light of Locus's fascinating explanation of the term 'super-GAU' in the comment below: 'largest presumable accident: the limit of calculation of breakdown in any particular context.'). Let us count the ways.

There are no excuses: this England team was coached and organized by one of the best coaches in the world. Capello was given absolutely everything he asked for in preparation, superb facilities, altitude training. It was played in the cooler temperatures of a South African winter. Fatigue cannot be blamed. The players had weeks to recuperate and recover from their season. None were involved in the Champions League after the quarterfinal stage. (The 38-game Premier League schedule cannot seriously be blamed: the Spanish, Italian and French leagues all play 38 games, and while France and Italy also went home early, Spain did not, and have in fact dominated the last few years of international football. Above all else, those four leagues are packed with most of the world's best players, so the 20-team, 38-game schedule cannot be exclusively impacting on England's performances, yet not say, Brazil's.)

No consolation: this was no heroic, glorious failure. England only dominated the game for two spells, shortly before and after half-time. Lampard's disallowed goal aside, there was nothing about Germany's goals to complain about, no referee-ing outrages, no injustices, just stunning ineptitude in the English defensive and midfield.

And then the historical ironies. In the build up, Franz Beckenbauer had disparaged the English for playing the same old kick-and-rush percentage game. Germany's first goal? A huge goal-kick straight up the middle into the space left by two dozing centrebacks. The first time an outfield player touched it was also the last, as Klose diverted it past James. And Lampard's goal will of course be greeted as no more than cosmic justice by the many German fans who still dispute Hurst's winning goal in '66.

Even more painful was the degree to which the England team - the apotheosis in theory of all the Premiership's power - was systematically taken apart by a team playing Premiership football: fast, direct, relentless and set up in a 4-2-3-1. As this interview with Jürgen Klinsmann reveals, the Premier League's pace and pattern of play was the explicit model for the reinvention of the German side undertaken in preparation for World Cup 2006. In fact the seeds of this re-invention probably lie a few years earlier, and therein lies another historical cruelty. In 2001, a young English side beat a more senior and experienced Germany 5-1 in Munich. They didn't dominate possession and steamroller their opponents from first to last, but having gone in at half-time at 2-1 after an early German goal, they played superbly on the break thereafter. Germany had to come forward, and clinical through-balls from Gerrard, Beckham and Scholes for the lightning fast Owen and Heskey made the win look more comprehensive than it really was. The effect on the Germans was massive though: a 'supergau', said Oliver Kahn, a nuclear explosion. The year zero from which German football began to rebuild. Only a fifth German goal was wanting to underline this game's lineage.

And England lost playing in 4-4-2, the archetypal English formation.

But this is where things get confusing and discussion of a national footballing ethos begins to breakdown. Because 4-4-2 just isn't the 'English' way anymore. In fact it's hardly ever seen anymore in the Premier League, and one of its most dogged adherents was the not very English Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger.

That 'English' footballing template Klinsmann and Löw adopted? Its directness is in fact a highly cosmopolitan concept, introduced by managers open to ideas from across Europe. The Premier League is often equated with the England team. But as the most popular league in the world, there is little sense in which it is English. Its international audience is massive. Licensing peculiarities mean that it is easier to watch in Iran and Uganda than it is in the UK where it is mostly locked up in pay TV. Its top clubs are owned by foreign oligarchs and billionaires. They are not, and have not been for a long time, managed by Englishmen. These England players have been trained to play the game by the elite of continental footballing technocrats: Mourinho, Houllier, Benitez, Wenger, Hiddink, Ancelotti. I would even include Carlos Queiroz in that list, because though he has never managed in the PL and was a dismal failure at Real Madrid, he is universally credited with organizing Man United's shift to 4-2-3-1, as well as their defensive solidity and dependence on lightning counter-attacks. The fact that the England team hold their own individually in this environment proves not just that they can compete at international level, but that they can play disciplined, structured, subtle and flexible football.

So Capello's choice of 4-4-2 and the players' interpretation of it is a post in itself (coming soon since you ask).

But psychological pressure, the massive glacial pressure of personal confidence (over-inflated by the Sky-tabloid hype machine), multiplied by the nine noughts of national hope and expectation, and then set against the weight of history's defeats, is clearly a problem that had not been dealt with. This is a neurotic team, so fixated on not failing for once that it is drawn magnetically towards the trapdoor exit. You have to hope none of the team had read Richard Williams' piece last week on the stakes of the Slovenia game: essentially the future financial health, even viability of the Premier League and FA, in a period when few promising England players seem to be coming through. Whoever is managing England when qualification for Euro 2012 begins, perhaps the most important signing the FA could make would be this man: Steve Peters.

Heskey isn't the problem

2010-06-28T13:32:00.003+01:00

"There's a sense of relief when England go out of a major championship, like the end of a short but crap relationship," wrote Charles on his twitter feed. In truth, there is little to love about the "golden generation". Lampard does everything to conceal his reputed intelligence; there's an air of mealy-mouthed cruelty about him, as if he's fresh from reducing someone to tears at a nightclub. Gerrard has a kind of feckless fatalism. But it's Terry, with his slow, animal-stupid eyes, lumbering frame and brute malice, who sums up all that's loathsome about the England team, and indeed English culture. It's no accident that Enric Gonzalez singles out Terry - who mocked American tourists after 9/11, was arrested for brawling, parked his car in a disabled bay, all before the business with Wayne Bridge's ex - in his piece on how Thatcherite individualism has wrecked England's capacity for collective endeavour.

Heskey's being scapegoated, but he wasn't the problem. Yes, it was mystifying why Capello put him on yesterday when England needed goals, but the general thinking behind the inclusion of a player like Heskey is sound. He's the exact opposite of Hollywood - a player whose role is to allow others to play. The same is the case for Barry - a player of limited ability for sure, but one who can play short passes to team-mates and who will work for the team. (Yes, he was caught in possession for one of the Germany goals, but that was in the opponents' penalty area: he might legitimately have expected his team-mates to cover for him.) Millner, too, who at his best in this tournament resembled his Villa mentor John Robertson - his loping stride meant that he looks too slow to beat the full-back, but suddenly, inexplicably, he's past the defender and putting in a deadly cross. Germany has far more Heskeys, Barrys and Milners than it does Lampards or Gerrards; it's just that their equivalents of Barry, Heskey and Milner are fitter and faster. (The one England superstar who did live up to his reputation in my view was Ashley Cole - solid defensively when not exposed by Terry, comfortable on the ball, and a threat going forward.)

One of the pleasing trends in this World Cup, actually, has been its underming of the cult of the individual. It's as if the games so far have been an answer of the Real to capitalism's obsessive individualism. Despite the punditocracy palpably willing him to excel (Digital Ben has pointed out the absurdity of newspapers making him man of the match even when they score other players in the Argentina team higher in the match ratings), Messi has yet to really impress in the required way. As @andrewspooner acidly observed on twitter yesterday, "Drogba, Canavaro, Walcott, Evra, Ribery, Rooney, Ronaldhino - all suffering from Nike advert curse - only Ronaldo left."

The photophobic Englishman

2010-06-28T13:29:00.003+01:00

One of the many reasons that gets put forward to explain England's failure to win a second World Cup is that of its timing.

Faced with explaining the disparity between players who shine in the league over the winter, but play like shadows of themselves in the summer, experts point out that having been raised to play on such blasted tundra as the London suburbs, and in some cases - Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle - well within the Arctic Circle and exclusively with those hi-vis orange balls that show up in the snow, England players struggle when the sun is out and they are asked to run in temperatures as high as 28 degrees.

There are times when this seems almost plausible. In 2002 England went 1-0 up against Brazil, in a quarterfinal played in the stifling humidity of a Japanese summer. The memory of Oldham-born asthmatic redhead Paul Scholes labouring in the blazing sun to keep the ball while all around him were losing it, can still stir pity in my stony heart (the one I keep in a box and install only when called upon to imagine that Man United players are human beings too). Brazil dominated possession, forcing England to expend energy in chasing the ball, but they did indeed seem less bothered by the heat, and who knows, maybe their formative years in the Brazilian climate had left them better prepared.

The problem essentially with this theory is that it's complete bollocks. For a start, in 2002, the same year England came down with heat exhaustion, Germany – not exactly a set of players raised in tropical climates – reached the final. And this year, England, playing in in the cooler temperatures of the South African winter, completely failed to play their natural high-tempo, high-pressing game.

Of course the next World Cup is also to be played in the Southern hemisphere so England has one more chance to prove the photophobia thesis. It's just unfortunate that the same World Cup gives Brazil home advantage.

Form

2010-06-28T13:00:00.002+01:00

Before a inane montage featuring quotes juxaposing English and German authors (Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche versus Tennyson, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, a rubric of selection interesting in itself), the BBC showed a short clip of the abilities of the German squad and in particular mid-fielder Mesut Özil. The kind of play the Germans exhibited here favoured good passes ahead of the man, who sprints forward now having gained huge space, or incisive diagonal passes through opposition players as team mates run forward. Özil, as the pundit-bot remarks, has great intelligence, an ability to look up and pass and as Mark pointed out, compared to the England side, a refreshing lack of ego with regard to his need to shoot blindly from a distance and squander precious chances. It was precisely these kind of moves that enabled the two near identical German goals scored on the break as well as the second German goal - the first we can put down to, as the commentators noted, unbelievably weak Sunday league goalkeeping. In fact, substituting highlights of yesterday's game for the short clip they showed, it would be difficult to tell the difference. This is apart from adding several embarrassing minutes of Germany forming almost neat triangles and passing the ball about in a humiliating game of piggy in the middle. Indeed, the discipline of the German side, and its ability to stay in position (compare the first shot) and form these triangles where you always have passing options, people in space and support, was clear throughout the game. Compare this to England's bunching around one another.

Does anyone on the England squad actually watch their opposition's form?

Don't blame Capello, blame the players

2010-06-28T10:14:00.006+01:00

With his talk of "unrest in the camp" yesterday, Alan Shearer was starting to play his part in the standard responsibility-shifting exercise with which the English media always collude: blame the coach, not the player. A story is being prepared: the players weren't happy, Capello was too strict (just as, according to prevailing tabloid opinion, Sven, Mclaren and Venables were too lax), OK, Capello made mistakes (what coach doesn't), but, if anything, the problem was the Don's inability to impose sufficient discipline on the (golden) shower of players. I'm not resiling on my previous claim that the problem with these players is not their lack of technical ability; what most of the "golden genetration" lack, rather, is a certain kind of humility. (And athleticism: the most evident physical failing of the England team yesterday was their alarming lack of pace.)

Compare Schweinsteiger to Gerrard and Lampard. Most of Schweinsteiger's work is unfussy, even anonymous; it's a matter of short linking passes and rapid worker-bee movement. But Gerrard, with his raking, would-be defence-splitting passes to nowhere, and Lampard, invisible until he squanders a goalscoring opportunity, won't come on set if it isn't Hollywood. The longstanding difficulty with playing them together isn't just a question of the incompatibility of their playing styles. It's that (1) you can't afford players like this who contribute so little to the humdrum cohesion of the team and (2) in order to thrive, such players depend on others who will do this more mundane linking work. The problem for England in many ways is not that the players can't make the step up to international football, but that they are not willing to make (what they see as) the step down to the menial watercarrying duties that are essential to team play. The case against Gerrard was made by the graphic showing his contributions during play for England. The fact that Gerrard can't hold his assigned position was being posited as a reason for Capello not playing on the left, but really it is a testament to his indiscipline and egotism.

No-one sums this up this syndrome more than John Terry, as Sid Lowe argued yesterday:

My theory on yesterday's defensive anarchy is that players like Terry decided to rebel against what they perceived as Capello's restrictions, thinking that they knew better than the Boss, and choosing to roam wherever they pleased. How else can you account for the crazed indiscipline at 2-1? England were creating goalscoring opportunities; Germany's defence looked nervous. Why push most of the team up, in a straight line, for free kicks and throw ins, leaving yawning, cavernous gaps for Germany to run and pass through at will?

The roots of this individualism no doubt run deep in recent English culture (Enric Gonzalez blames Thatcher's destruction of social cohesion and working class soldarity). If Capello remains in the job, he now has a mandate to crush the golden generation. If someone else, such as Hodgson, comes in, it is imperative that they do it. Gerrard and Lampard can blame the coach if they like, but the reality is that they have underperformed at major international tournaments under a sucession of England managers. Mark E Smith's article on the management of the England team, which Alex Andrews linked to a few days ago, describes exactly what needs to be done.

The way the England team is now is ridiculous. A team of superstars is like a supergroup. It's like picking the best guitarist in Britain, the best drummer and the best singer, and expecting them to produce something that isn't prog-rock mush. It doesn't work: this England team will never work at the highest level. I know that. See, Sir Alf Ramsey [who managed England's 1966 World Cup win] - people never liked him for it, but he'd always have the full-backs from the second division. He took players and moulded them, like I do with musicians. Gordon Banks, the goalkeeper, was from Stoke City, who were bottom of the first division. They'd conceded more goals that World Cup season than anybody else. But it works. You want a goalie who gets bloody shot at every week!

It's strking how closely the German team - with Klose and Podolkski, who, as I said yesterday, couldn't score a goal for their club to save their lives - fit the model that Smith describes. Meanwhile, teams full of lesser known Premiership or even Championship players and their equivalents, have performed much better than England. But if even Capello can't break the superstar culture at England, who can?

Negative alchemy

2010-06-27T17:11:00.005+01:00

Perhaps the key fact about England's dreadful capitulation to Germany today was the : Podolski and Klose can't score for their clubs, but are deadly for Germany. The exact reverse is the case for England's "golden generation" who came nowhere close - not even remotely close - to capturing their premiership form in this tournament. (Well, that's not quite true: Gerrard matched his dreadful premiership form this year, with his standard retinue of ludicrously ambitous possession-losing passes, no-hope shots from distance and positional indiscipline. As @Liverpool_FC noted on twitter, "Let's not mince words - Gerrard's been as poor for ENG as he has been for LFC this season. Real shame to see.") I know some commenters have argued here that the failure of England's top players to reproduce their premiership form is because they are hiding behind better-quality foreign imports at club level, but this doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. Rooney and Lampard are at the heart of the United and Chelsea sides; they aren't peripheral fellow-travellers. Terry, I think, is the one England player whose weaknesses at club level are hidden by superior players around him. He's manifestly too slow, both physically and in his thinking, to be a top quality defender.
I can't remember an England defeat like this - its comprehensive manner removed all tension, depriving England supporters of even the accustomed rush of jouissance that comes from losing heroically. (There was nothing heroic today, and Lampard's disallowed goal is an irrelevance - no team that defended as amateurishly as England did today could expect to progress in the World Cup finals.) In fact, the three first-half goals - and the sense that there were more to goals to come, with Germany's defence scarcely any more watertight than England's - dissipated much of the tension early in the game. And the third and fourth goals killed off all remaining tension long before the final whistle. By then, it was a question of embarrassment, not tension.
I've stuck with Capello throughout but his decisions today were frankly bizarre. The problem was clearly the massive gaps in- and in front of - England's defence, but Don Fabio did nothing to rectify this. Then the mystifying substitutions. Cole was poor when he came on against Slovenia, while Milner still looked like his crosses could pose some threat. If there was ever a time to send on Heskey, it wasn't when England needed three goals to get back in the game. Shaun Wright-Phillips? Words fail me. You have to wonder what Crouch has done to offend the Don (score goals, perhaps: apart from Defoe, he's the only England striker to have hit the back of the net for some time). Perhaps even Capello was subject to the same negative alchemy that afflicted his players. Congratulations to Germany, for sure, but it's still not clear how good they are. What's certain is that they will not come up against a defence that inept again - not only in this World Cup finals, but in international football.

"He'll be in Lake Garda in a few weeks"

2010-06-25T15:26:00.002+01:00

Don Fabio showing how he lacks the passion to be an effective manager of England in the World Cup finals . . .

The Ontology of Alan Hansen

2010-06-25T11:05:00.003+01:00

Ardent BBC watchers may have noticed that Alan Hansen - always at the forefront of contemporary thought - has developed a new concept in his analyses.

In the buildup to the Greece-Argentina foregone conclusion, having exhausted all possible avenues of conversation relating to Lionel Messi, the panel reluctantly turned their attention to Greece. Hansen, lolling in his usual recumbent position, managed to tip his head forward long enough to drawl 'I saw the Nigeria game... they're officially useless.'

Last night, setting the scene for a competitive all-or-nothing encounter between Denmark and Japan, Hansen commented that the Danes, in their first game against Holland (whose match the panel would clearly rather have been watching), had been 'officially useless'.

What can we learn, then, from Hansen's new construction - 'official uselessness?'

Footballers have long been called 'useless' by their critics. Frank Lampard provides a salutary example of this, and doubtless many other things too. But Hansen's term has connotations beyond the everyday usage of the word. It is not merely a stricter category than 'conventional' uselessness - at times, the two concepts seem to be in complete opposition.

Players who, to laymen, may appear to have served no discernible function in this tournament - Wayne Rooney, most of the French team, several Italians - are not officially useless.

Conversely, players whose utility on the pitch is seemingly obvious (as they, for example, successfully shackle Lionel Messi, or take their unfancied teams beyond the first round) fall into the category of 'officially useless' all the same.

The exact co-ordinates of Hansen Usefulness are difficult to plot, but victory or defeat on the pitch are clearly not relevant to the calculations. Total career transfer value, presence at a top Premier League club, and appearances in sportswear adverts would appear to be the significant factors. We are left to ask ourselves - of the players still competing in the tournament, would Alan Hansen consider more than two dozen or so 'officially useful'? We know that Hansen is difficult to please - a droll Littlewoods Pools advert once played on this fact - but his standards must be becoming more severe than ever.

I think the only conclusion we can draw is that Alan Hansen is capable of perceiving football in dimensions inaccessible to the rest of us, and that if he deems that none of Slovakia's team are worth recalling by name, then he must be correct, regardless of what drab, empirical, unofficial reality suggests.

We can only hope that his Official World Cup has proved as enjoyable as our Apparent one.

Post Hoc, Ergo Bugger Off

2010-06-25T05:10:00.006+01:00

Both of 'my' teams exited the World Cup in spite of playing in the same group, which is quite a feat thank you very fucking much, but the reaction in the two nations couldn't have been more different. So while former All Blacks flanker Michael Jones hailed the unbeaten exit by the All Whites as the greatest achievement in New Zealand sporting history, Fabrizio Bocca declared Italy's last place in group F as our worst World Cup performance ever - worse than 1966, even. The best ever, the worst ever. In terms of New Zealand's achievements, I have my reservations about comparing different sports. Why should the fact that it was the Soccer World Cup - the world stage we crave so much down here - mean that a honourable placement in it is worth more than any other feats, including actual victories - say, those racked up by this bloke? But opinions may differ, and Jones was quite gracious in tipping his hat to the rival code. Bocca's indictment of the Italian expedition, on the other hand, is such a prime and depressing example of post hoc punditry that I'm afraid I'm going to have to have a little moan.

For one thing, we took a very different team to England 66, one that included the once-in-a-generation talents of Rivera, Mazzola and Bulgarelli. None of the players available for selection in 2010 are comparable to those gentlemen, and it seems churlish to blame the current crop for not being more talented. But Bocca is not really interested in defending the comparison, rather in making the case against the Italian football federation and Marcello Lippi, in the grand tradition of il processo, the trial, that Kafkaesque ritual that befalls all our failed sporting expeditions as well as the parties of the Left in the aftermath of a national election. So Lippi gets blamed for, in random order: taking the job, relying too much on the aged backbone of the 2006 team, selecting too many Juventus players, changing and chopping formation too often, giving too much importance to team bonding at the cost of not selecting the best talent. Not all of the charges are downright stupid, but some of them are: Juventus players were selected because it's a team that happens to have a number of Italian players. Inter's starting eleven, by comparison, has none. Yet Bocca actually reckons that Lippi ought to have emulated Inter's xenophilia by selecting and hence co-opting eligible foreign players (a reference to Brazil-born striker Amauri, who actually plays for Juve and has scored the grand total of five goals in the last season). Most of the other accusations rely on that splendid thing, hindsight: what’s the bet that if Lippi hadn't changed formation for the game against the Slovaks, he would have been blamed for sticking with the team that had failed against the All Whites?

By which I don't mean that a coach's technical decisions cannot be criticised, but rather that the punditry should be a little readier to acknowledge its role in setting the narrative and creating the expectations against which the team will be matched - were our players really that much more talented than theirs? - not to mention its extraordinary penchant for applying hindsight only to players, coaches and administrators, never to themselves. Mr. Bocca for instance no longer than a week ago reckoned that yes, we were mediocre, but in with a chance for a cup repeat because none of the other big teams seemed crash-hot either. As if the Italian eleven that drew against Paraguay could afford to concentrate on anything besides getting out of its group.

I guess this too is a function of sport's obsession with historicity, but what gets on my tits the most is the utter predictability of it all. I could have written most of the articles I saw in the Italian press today myself, just by changing the names of teams and trainers in any old article from past editions. Yet it's not such a compelling script that it needs to be followed every time, surely. It never fails, for instance, to completely ignore the opposition, as if it was accidental to our history, a sort of drab anonymous constant - the teams beneath us that we occasionally fail to rise above. And so the pundits neglected to blame Lippi for his greatest fault, the one that was truly inexcusable: that he didn't shake hands with Slovak coach Vladimir Weiss at the end of the game. I'll judge him solely on that.

Let us acknowlege this, then: that Slovakia needed to win, and they did so by taking the game to a much more fancied side. They played courageously, and won deservedly. I wish them well.

28 Years Later

2010-06-24T11:19:00.004+01:00

I don't know Slovakia except for what I saw of it on television and having admired some of its moves. I observe that they almost beat the New Zealanders, and cannot rule out that they might thwart us too. I shall therefore emulate a Catholic friend of mine whose name I am not going to mention since he is numbered amongst one of Italy's foremost literary figures.

Whenever I invite him to dine with me, this Catholic friend looks at me with the utmost contempt, for I have fallen victim to the temptations of gluttony. He turns down the dish I order almost with disdain. As I proceed to embrace my sin with great abandon, I can see that he's happy because he has mortified his flesh. Choosing a path of wise abstinence, he hasn't sinned: he is therefore in a perfect state of grace. I wolf down my meal and I can see my friend looking at me with an occasional air of curiosity. In the meantime, he nibbles on his dish, that is decidedly less appetising, and when he can't take it any longer he exclaims: "I see you like it, it looks good." And I, concealing my inner delight: "Yeah, it's not bad. You can taste some if you like." My Catholic friend tastes the dish and glances at me with hate: "Bastard!" he cries, "You could have told me it was such a delicacy!"

I pass him my plate and he helps himself, drooling like an ordinary glutton. Thus he manages to be happy twice: he mortified his flesh, he triumphed over his desire, and then he surrendered to the tastiness of the food.

So for my part what I'm going to do here is paraphrase ser Francesco Guicciardini, and proclaim after my long experience that "if you put your trust in the Italians, you shall always be disappointed". From the team that Lippi assembled for this World Cup I never expected nor I do expect now anything good. I doubt we shall manage to beat Slovakia: I cannot in fact rule out that we might lose, causing the pundits to exclaim that we have met a new Korea.

This way I shall have mortified my desire to cheer for the team and I might be happy to have made such an inauspicious prediction, if it proves correct. If on the other hand we should manage (God knows how) to win, the patriotic supporter in me shall rejoice! I shall then take the game and comment on it with the prettiest possible arguments, lauding my shorts-wearing mates and swear on the intrinsic qualities of our footballing kind, and on the unfailingly bright destiny of our beloved national squad.

(Translated and adapted from an excerpt from Gianni Brera's article for La Repubblica on the eve of the last game of the first phase of the 1982 World Cup, between Italy and Cameroon. The game ended 1-1 and Italy progressed to the second stage.)

watershed moment for U.S. soccer

2010-06-24T05:53:00.004+01:00

Last night was a unique concurrence of events that will never be repeated. I watched USA-Algeria at ACE, a heavily English drinking club in Cairo's southern suburb Ma'adi. Rarely has there been such a conjunction of feel-good elements in a situation.

Though it was still fairly miserable outside, England fans were exiled there, in their own club, simply because their numbers required the huge garden with its large-screen TV. There must have been 200 England fans in total. The 100 or so USA fans were put inside: with the advantage of air conditioning, but the disadvantage of a smaller screen and absurdly crowded conditions. I arrived with my friends early enough to snag one of the few actual seats in the place.

In any case, conditions and outcomes were ideal. The night ended with two large happy groups of fans. And not only that... All the Egyptians outside the club were happy too, simply because Algeria lost. It was bizarre to hear Egyptians saying "Kill them!" all day long-- the first and perhaps only time one will ever hear Egyptians encourage Americans to success in violent acts, especially against an Arab team.

And yes, it was an unexpected thrill to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" last night (my first time in years) with a hundred or so American friends and strangers. And I hardly need to comment on Donovan's goal. But whenever I cheer for the U.S. team in a World Cup, I am also cheering for the sport itself: every time our team breaks fresh ground in international play like last night, there is more hope for soccer in our country.

I joined my local team in Iowa in the late 1970's, and it was still a fairly exotic thing to do. I was 11 years old, and on my first day of practice I didn't even understand the rules of the sport: in fact, I still clearly remember the day when "offsides" was explained to us. Later, we were practically laughed out of the room when we requested status as an official team representing our high school, though a little over 20 years later it finally happened. (On a side note, the sport almost cost me my right eye a few days before my 16th birthday. While playing midfield for Mt. Vernon, I and a Coralville defender were charging for the same loose ball. Mr. Coralville got there first, and kicked the ball straight into my right eye; I was blinded outright for half an hour or so, then had cloudy vision, and ended up with the only hospital stay of my life so far. My right eye still has worse vision than my left, and is especially sensitive to sunlight.)

But back to the topic at hand... soccer was already considered the "sport of the future" in the USA back in 1978 or 1979, even though it began as the province of upscale East Coast preppie kids. Elsewhere, it has been a grindingly slow process. I've mentioned that several of my homegrown American friends have dropped all U.S. sports for exclusive attention to the English Premier League (after this Cup, and given the irreversible decline in my American sports knowledge, perhaps I'll do the same; last night I was toying aloud with various English teams as my possible favorite; Werder Bremen has already been my favorite Bundesliga club for more than 20 years, since my first summer in Europe was spent in Bremen, and I attended two of their games).

It is no longer a fringe affectation when Americans name their favorite Italian, Spanish, or Bundesliga clubs. And I've mentioned my shock at seeing FC Barcelona duffel bags in a sort of low-rent retail store in Iowa a few weeks ago. No doubt some of the momentum has come from the increasing Latino population in the U.S.A., but much of it simply reflects a more sophisticated attention to the sport among the American populace. Satellite TV and the web certainly add a lot of momentum, since information is no longer hard to come by-- if I had wanted to know the Bundesliga standings in 1990, I would have had to check actual German newspapers in a library. Now I can do it on my iPhone in a couple of seconds while on the sidewalk in Cairo.

But what the U.S. has always needed to give the sport a big push domestically is a defining World Cup moment. Donovan's late goal last night was a dramatic instant with quasi-iconic potential. But better yet, the USA now has a golden opportunity to advance to ... (gulp)... the World Cup Semifinals.

Ghana, Uruguay, and South Korea are certainly good teams. But are any of them out of the USA's league? Hardly. None of them are remotely as intimidating as England was for the past 6 months of waiting. I'm not saying we'll succeed, I'm just saying an opportunity this good will not come again for a long time. (Of course, we had a similar opportunity in 2002 if not for Ballack's undetected handball in a quarterfinal with Germany that we dominated and should have won. And we would have faced South Korea in the semi, a team with which we had already earned a draw in group play.)

When I cheer the USA against Ghana in a few days, I will also be cheering for the sport itself to capture the imagination of a previously indifferent population. We're close to the proverbial tipping point, I think. And Landon Donovan, a man who was just 8 years old at the time of our 1990 return to the World Cup following decades of absence, is leading us there.

"pundits want the WC to be like the Nike adverts"

2010-06-22T22:10:00.003+01:00

An interesting series of tweets from @digitalben, in the wake of Argentina's defeat of Greece tonight:

Star players monopolise the dialogue. Messi was flat today. The panel talk for ages about him (and how great he'll be next round) anyway.

They say 'the Greeks marked him out of the game' as if that was some kind of unsportsmanlike trick.

Conclusion: pundits want the WC to be like the Nike adverts. Star men and faceless mooks. Not so much a sport as a skills exhibition.

Commentating for the BBC, the dour Mick McCarthy moaned that the game was boring - but it was only boring if you wanted to see a skills exhibition, not an enthralling tactical battle. McCarthy seemed to want the Greeks to suicidally attack, allowing Messi and Veron the space to destroy them. OK, it didn't work out for Greece, but they held Argentina for most of the match, and could easily have scored on the break. It's difficult to see what other tactics Greece could have adopted if they wanted to succeed.

English jouissance

2010-06-22T19:33:00.004+01:00

Charles gets to the heart of English national jouissance - the way that we take pleasure (albeit a mean, miserable, grumbling sort of pleasure) in pain. We're back exactly where we want to be, with our backs against the wall, with just enough hope to make the pain exquisite. (I must confess to a certain measure of disappointment when England qualified from the group stage with ease in 2006 - where was the jouissance in that? Never mind - we still had the indifferent performances to moan at.) It's a classic case of finding satisfaction in the ostensible blocking of a desire. So far, the England team - like the policeman in The Wicker Man - have played their parts in this national carnival of defeatism perfectly, if, necessarily, unwittingly. The test now is whether they can disappoint us by starting to play well.
I'm pleased to hear that John Terry's challenge to Capello's authority has reputedly gone down badly with the rest of the England squad. The Times argued that Terry isn't as popular in the squad as he'd like to think he is - which says something for the rest of the players' judgement. Terry is tabloid thinking incarnate, and it's heartening that his attempt to curry populist favour didn't come off. The assertion of player power under Sven had predictably poor results; and I for one have more faith in Capello's tactical intelligence than that of England players who were consistently under-achieving at international level while Capello was winning championships with some of Europe's top clubs. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has enjoyed seeing the swaggering egos of England's players reined in by Don Fabio's disciplinarian regime.
The growing discontent with Capello - led by Andy Townsend on television - has taken a predictably xenophobic turn, although the thinking seems particularly confused, even by the standards of xenophobia. As ever, the xenophobic complaint seem to revolve around the issue of "passion". Now, it was easy for the pundits to complain about of lack of passion from Sven because this fitted the stereotypical image the English have of Swedes. But it's a problem trying to make such complaints marry with the stereotypical image of Italians, not to mention Capello's animation on the touchline. So now the complaint seems to be that only an Englishman can muster the requisite passion to manage the national side. As Townsend disgracefully remarked on ITV the other day, "Capello will be in Lake Garda in a few months, what does he care?" (Did being born in Maidstone, Kent and never living in Ireland prevent Townsend from being sufficiently passionate when he played for the Republic, I wonder?) And anyone who thinks that "passion" will cure England's malady need only remember the pathetic sight of Kevin Keegan making those puff-up-your-chest gestures on the touchline as a shambolic England were easily beaten by Germany at Wembley.
As Giovanni pointed out in the comments, England's problem is not a deficiency of passion or effort, much as it looks that way. There's an uncanny quality about England performances like the one against Algeria. The team have an underwater lethargy, almost as if they are subject to a higher gravity than the opposition, prematurely exhausting them. While the opponents skip about, easily finding passes, England lumber, the ball bobbling awkwardly off their feet, the options for the player with the ball narrowing every second until even a simple square pass becomes impossible. (For those who say England play to their level at the World Cup - can they remember a time when Lampard, Gerrard or Rooney played remotely as badly for their club?) A curious attitude of desperate hope and fatalistic despair takes hold of the team. The blustering attacks that the odd player manages to muster seem destined to fail, as if they run up against an invisible forcefield. You know that they won't score, but you can't stop hoping that they will. Other international teams play badly, but there's a particular quality about England's bad performances. England have put in performances like that under every manager for as long as I can remember. As I've remarked before, why this is the case poses all sort of interesting questions - about the nature of a psychology that is not only collective, but that repeats itself over time with completely different personnel. But it's confidence, not passion, that breaks England out of this fugue - will they be able to muster that confidence tomorrow? A quick goal, and we could see a repeat of England's demolition of Poland in the third game in 1986, but the longer the game goes on without a breakthrough, the greater the chance that The Fear will creep back in . . .

We Was Robbed

2010-06-22T11:02:00.005+01:00

In New Zealand, the aftermath of the game between Italy and the All Whites was an interesting study in how sporting events come to be recycled into the mass-mediated folklore. The game was played at 2am, local time, and the country woke up to a sense of euphoria and footballing achievement. A gritty draw against the world champions! An unfancied, often openly ridiculed side, routinely labeled as the worst, less deserving team in the tournament, is unthinkably in the running to advance to the round of sixteen. Well done the boys in white! But you can only stretch a Cinderella story so far, and so around mid-morning came a sudden and most sullen change of narrative. Okay, we know that this draw was as good as a win, but how is it that we did not actually win win? Daniele De Rossi and Guatemalan referee Carlos Batres were the obvious choice as villains, and so faced with two available storylines - Gritty All Whites Defence holds off Italy and Referee duped by Italian theatrics - almost every single media outlet and local Internet forum decided to all but drop the former and enthusiastically run with the latter.

I have a couple of problems with this. The first one is factual: if you only had one shot on goal, and it was from an offside position, then you cannot rewrite the game into a victory if you are in fact a stickler for the rules. Writing for Fairfax, Tony Smith got out of that particular conundrum by claiming that whilst the offside ruling was a honest mistake, De Rossi's penalty was won by guile, therefore it's a moral failing, which makes the All Whites the moral winners. And that's where my second problem is: the All Whites were already the moral winners, by virtue of having drawn a game against the World Champions. Think about it: the team includes four amateurs and at least one player who's currently unemployed. Its total combined payroll doesn't reach Gianluigi Buffon's salary. Ricky Herbert earns EUR 25,000 a year to coach the national team, versus Lippi's 5.3 million. Surely there is enough there to suggest that Italy - by virtue of its superior training and all the material advantages that come from enjoying better employment conditions and consistently playing at a much higher level - had the closest thing you can get in sport to a moral obligation to win the game (the Italian press certainly saw it that way). But that clearly wasn't enough, which is a shame in itself: because much more deserved to be said and written about Herbert's coaching decisions - including some key selections that preceded the start of the tournament, let alone the game - and the heroics of the likes of Messrs Vicelich, Nelsen, Paston, Reid and Smeltz on the day.

Once the 'we was robbed' narrative took hold - and I think the reporting of Ryan Nelsen's press-conference comments might have been the tipping point - there was no going back, but it's interesting to observe how the Web contributed to its almost feverish spread. It was the social media at its best, as on The New Zealand Herald and elsewhere - including a string of very enthusiastic Australian outlets apparently still smarting from 2006 - the comments sections and a string of online polls helped to increase the tempo of the story, whilst relieving the journalists from having to do much actual writing. The single most notable moment of brilliance belongs to the Sydney Morning Herald (h/t Martin Lindberg), which asked its readers to democratically determine whether the New Zealand goal should have been ruled out for offside (for the record, 83% answered 'No').

Before the morning was out, people started exchanging stories of past Italian crimes, or using the stereotype as it had already entered the folklore as evidence for the transgression. It was like watching one of those appalling and borderline racist columns that Stephen Jones routinely writes about the All Blacks being crowdsourced to an army of pundits, but the irony in that went lamentably unnoticed.

Ghostwritten

2010-06-20T12:01:00.003+01:00

One of modern journalism's tenets since Watergate: follow the money. It's a phrase with more than one interpretation of course. Consider:

Henry Winter in the Telegraph on the vexed question of who should partner Rooney:

[Capello's] wide-open 4-4-2 tactics were inevitably exposed as was the folly of persisting with Emile Heskey rather than pairing Steven Gerrard with Wayne Rooney. [source]

Winter is, let us say, a big fan of Gerrard:

Only one English lion looked like he belonged in Africa. Only Steven Gerrard really rose to the occasion of an opening World Cup game, scoring for England and driving his team on but too many of his team-mates faltered on the highveldt last night. The captain led by example but sadly nobody followed. [source]

But another equally – cough – objective viewpoint is that Crouch should join Rooney in attack instead. Sam Wallace in the Independent: 'It is a fact that England are a better side when Crouch partners Rooney' [source] .... and furthermore 'England need to score at least one goal on Wednesday and the obvious answer is Crouch.' [source]

Now if you click through to see this item on Amazon and then this one, noting the author credits along the way, is it not fair to ask, perhaps in your best Derrida accent, who is writing who in the above? Who is speaking who?

Divided Loyalties

2010-06-20T07:02:00.004+01:00

I've lived in New Zealand for nearly thirteen years now, so the game between the All Whites and Italy in a few hours is also going to be a test of where my loyalties lie. I'd say with the old country, still, but I won't know until some time after kick-off I suspect. The other day for instance I surprised myself jumping up from the sofa after the Winston Reid goal, a much more sanguine reaction than the one following De Rossi's equally vital effort against Paraguay earlier in the week. Rationally I might also be inclined to support the team that is likely to go further in the tournament, but again, picking sides is not always the result of calculation, and just as often it's the side that picks you.

It doesn't help that I find both teams quite likeable. This year's on paper is the least talented Italian squad since 1986, but Lippi didn't respond by bringing aged talismans or popular young bolters, nor by stacking the team with defenders. He brought players who can play, and asked them to play. Whilst never looking like scoring and being lucky to get away with a draw, Italy played entertaining football in the opener, and made Paraguay look the cynical team relying entirely on organization and worrying about not losing ahead of winning - that is, like the stereotypical Italian side. They also looked very much like a group of players looking out for each other, which may not save them against the more stacked sides later in the tournament but is, well, a likeable trait. Plus: no Materazzi!

For their part, New Zealand over the last few months have been a very pleasant surprise. I wasn't impressed this time last year by the unseemingly theatrical celebrations by the coaching staff after a 0-0 draw against Iraq in the Confederations Cup. They were cheering the first point by an All Whites side in an official FIFA game, I suppose, but it was still a 0-0 in a dead rubber - hardly the reason why you play the game. Later they qualified through a comparatively easy route, but I give them a lot of credit for sticking with the team that took it to Bahrain in the play-off, instead of switching to a more dour, speculative formation. So it looks like they'll be playing Italy the way they did the Slovaks: with three strikers and a more than capable winger in Leo Bertos in support. Look for Killen and Fallon to hurt the Italian defence in the air if they can get enough decent crosses, and don't be shocked if the unthinkable happens.

That said, my reason says Italy takes this one 3-1. Whether I'll actually be cheering for that outcome, only time will tell.

Father Merrin for England

2010-06-20T00:20:00.003+01:00

When Fabio Capello announced his provisional 30-man squad on 11th May, I wrote at length about Joe Cole's image of a 'ghosting' footballer (the Italian's present toying with him is no surprise - he seems doomed to such treatment). ZoneStyx then ran with it, picking up my hint by actively describing this 'hauntological' player. In the ITV studio last night, Gareth Southgate adjudged the team 'haunted', and in today's Independent, James Lawton further illustrated the England team's unique state:

The house built by Fabio Capello, which at times has looked so sturdy, was haunted....the demon was the 44 years of failure he had promised to put right, and the bitter truth for so much of a desperate night was that his team looked more in need of an exorcist than a manager.

There is not too much one can say regarding the game, and indeed quite how any broadcaster contrived their respective highlights packages is a mystery. I think fans in the main can accept bad performances or poor results, or even a lack of ability. The sheer extent however of England's lack of impetus, drive, or even the faintest recognition of this being the World Cup, the very pinnacle of the game that we all love, is pretty unforgivable. There are millions of us who in absence of any technique would at least give it everything, would guarantee an aspiration to the stout desire that has become the myth of our game. Can those actually detailed to the task truly claim that they committed as much? Exertion to the point of sickness or collapse we know won't win us anything, but is it a confusion between this and outright accomplishment that so troubles the players? What precisely do they strive, if anything, for?

And luck? Well, we've just endured two utterly risible performances yet have still emerged unbeaten, Algeria and the USA being particularly poor sides. Never mind the coruscating skill of the Argentinians, or the power and flair of the German team: the basic application of the North Koreans would have steamrollered England.

The lack of industry could at least be compensated for by Capello (on whom Mark so succinctly says "the size of the task is starting to dawn") by exhausting every option. That means Cole on the pitch for something, anything more than the cursory 5 or 10 minutes that he's so used to. If only to prove us all wrong. There isn't really sufficient evidence to hand that this should change everything - the problems clearly run too deep - but:

a) he is capable of changing a game in a way that no other England player can
b) he is a proven big game international, unlike several others
c) he has always made it clear - both verbally and in performance - that he simply loves to play

This last point seems kind of daft: don't they all really want to play? Well, it didn't look so clear cut last night. Where were the qualities that many have so conspicuously ascribed to Cole, of the pure joy and unfettered enthusiasm of playing?

All that would then remain would be the question of how Capello might fit him into the team: where would he play? How would the current system accommodate him? The answers are simple - 1) fucking anywhere, and 2) bollocks to the system. The myth that a midfielder cannot operate at all when stationed 2 or 3 yards from his normal position is a joke (and incidentally, aren't the same people who were decrying Capello for playing Gerrard in the middle now saying that he's crazy for moving him to the left? Why the hell should it matter so much?). As for the tactics, well, in all honesty, what is there left to protect here? Is it working sufficiently well to keep Cole out of the side?

That Cole should prove a talisman might not have seemed so unrealistic all those years ago, when he was feted as the possible saviour of English football: that he does so as the emblem of this current side by simply not being there now seems somehow apposite. And whilst Rooney last night appeared to want so vehemently to avoid any responsibility, Capello, dumbfounded as he is, might at the very least claim something back for himself by making what for him would perhaps be a bold deviation from the great plan.

But it's not the money or the Premier League's congested fixture list that so bedevils England: every other nation would be toiling through the same ruinous fog if this were the case. What hurts us is somehow purely English, a parochial zombified grief for long lost pride. At what point do we reign in our investment?

It's Our Party - And We'll Cry If We Want To

2010-06-19T19:42:00.005+01:00

Does it get any better than this? I watched last night’s dismal match at a friend’s house, the atmosphere becoming more and more animated and excitable as the night wore on. At half time there was an audible buzz of failure in the air. By full time people we were indulging in a collective orgy of despair.

We were on our feet, shouting and gesticulating, competing with each other to articulate the bitterest piece of invective, or the best verbal skewering of Gerrard’s wastefulness, Heskey’s farcical ineptness and Rooney’s unfeasible collapse in form. Honestly, we were throwing the biggest pity party ever, a total festival of disappointment.

This morning I consumed the sports pages of every paper I could get hold of, desperate for every last drop of analysis about why England are so bloody hopeless at football. I couldn’t get enough. If anyone has anything to add on the subject of why Capello thought bringing on the hapless Shaun Wright Phillips to replace the hapless Aaron Lennon was a good idea then bring it on. I want to read it.

Yep, England have arrived at the world cup riding a tide of (largely) unjustifiable optimism and played like shit. And doesn't it feel great? It’s a national addiction, a cycle of self-harm that the team and fans are locked into like an abusive relationship. It’s almost as if we would be disappointed were they not to let us down.

After following some seven world cups now where England have competed I can honestly say it’s always been thus. Secretly, this is how we like it. We get off on this international, televised public humiliation. Maybe it somehow atones for our historical sins. Or maybe it simply allows us to seek refuge in one enormous, collective bout of self-pity every four years.

It’s an abysmal and utterly familiar routine in which we all assume standard roles, like a dysfunctional family meal at Christmas. The tabloids will accuse the players of lack of metal, a deficit of backbone that is an insult to our fine warmongering heritage while the broadsheets genuflect towards more technically sophisticated European rivals. Everyone has their slot in this national farce, including the players who attempt to appear contrite and genuinely humbled for a while before resuming the usual business of getting off with each others girlfriends and having fights in nightclubs.

Fabio Capello, though, isn’t so well acquainted and seems genuinely befuddled by the swift degeneration of his squad. Previous managers have accepted their role with good grace. Taylor, Hoddle, Keegan, McClaren (my god, there’s been so many of them) and even Erikson have slotted into the national mood perfectly, blaming slight injustices and random acts of misfortune on the teams lack of progress. Last night Capello came close to simply saying; “No idea why but they played like shit”.

What happens next? Most likely England will fail to impress against Slovenia but still make it out of the group stage, only to go out against the first decent team they encounter. They will, no doubt, raise their game sufficiently for us to feel that they could have done much better. This is important. There has to be some hope. Maybe too there will be a piece of outrageous bad luck – a disallowed goal, a penalty given against us or, most likely, a red card – thus adding the requisite element of cosmic injustice to our dismal lot. There is, of course, the slim chance that, as in 1990, we might turn it around, have a decent run and produce some good football along the way. At the moment the only person who looks like being able to help us do that is on the bench. Joe Cole has been cast in the ultimate role in this tragedy: the potential saviour. He walks amongst us, but he's yet to unzip his track suit.

I prefer to believe in the latter possibility, if only to raise the bar of disappointment a little higher and keep the delicious sense of exasperation going. Honestly, I haven’t felt this bad in years. It’s great.

Lampard's cloak of invisibility

2010-06-19T14:25:00.004+01:00

"Frank Lampard, we can all agree," wrote the Wing Commander of last night's debacle, "has rarely put in a finer performance than the one he put in tonight. He occupied the centre circle like some international spy passing anonymously and unnoticed among the hordes of the foreign foe, unnoticed, indeed, by anyone at all." Lampard has the curious ability to be so invisible for England that you genuinely forget that's he's playing; it'll sometimes be the 70th minute or so before I remember that he's in the team. You can't make the same mistake with Gerrard (whose play last night, according to the Wing Commander, "was almost telepathic – it was if he was passing to colleagues who existed only his own head"). Gerrard is a high visibility player, regularly involved, not always successfully (in fact, it's hard to think of another player of such high quality who gives the ball away so frequently and so cheaply).
But it's hard to imagine any other player performing so consistently indifferently for England as Lampard has and still keeping their place, and after last night you wonder if England would do better if the "spine" that was supposedly so crucial to their success was ripped out. Carrick can be a diffident sort of player, but could he be as anonymous as Lampard has been? Dawson is inexperienced, but it's unlikely that he would be as laborious and lethargic as Terry, surely the most overrated of England's "stars". And Defoe and Crouch looked as if they might pose some goal threat, unlike Rooney and Heskey.

By the way, just in case there are those who aren't aware: the Wing Commander's Send Them Victorious, justly described by Brian Phillips of Dirty Tackle as "the funniest World Cup of all time", is out now on Zer0.

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone

2010-06-19T11:58:00.003+01:00

It's not good for England, is it?

Rooney's misfiring. Lampard and Gerrard are woeful. The defence is leaden and unconvincing. It's not that dissimilar to 2006.

There's one thing that we did have in 2006 though. This man:

Public opinion of players often swings in their favour more when they're not playing than when they are- we've seen it this week with Gareth Barry and Joe Cole. And we saw it with Beckham in '98. But he's a forgotten footballer now (though very much not a forgotten man: we had five close-ups of him looking pensive on the bench last night)- his injury was so long ago that we can't imagine him playing in this World Cup.

But he could've made a difference last night. That game against Paraguay (who- at least according to Fifa- are of similar quality to Algeria) was terrible, but a good Beckham delivery forced an own goal. Then we were dire against Trinidad and Tobago, but a Beckham cross provided Crouch with an assist (as did some dreadlocks). And then a similarly flat performance against Ecuador sufficed because Becks knocked in a free kick. He didn't do a lot else, and there was a fair bit of clamor for Lennon (who was impressing in substitute appearances) to make a start- but it was felt he wasn't quite there yet, because his crossing needed a year or two to come on (hmm). With Becks we were able to win two games that we would probably have drawn without him.

It was a shame we had to rely on Beckham, and it was thought that England teams of the future would be pacier and able to attack more fluently in open play. By 2010 we'd be a dynamic attacking force down the wings.

There was, of course, another chap at the last World Cup who was going to be integral to this vision, and who could have provided some much needed thrust...

Back in the Overlook

2010-06-19T09:30:00.007+01:00

The size of the task is starting to dawn on Capello. The reverse alchemy of England's performance in World Cup finals left him nonplussed: "what happened to the team that qualified?" Meanwhile, amongst the pundits, the old English xenophobia that eventually saw off Sven is now simmering over with unseemly haste, as they rush to blame Don Fabio for the shortcomings of the team. (The pundit consensus seems to be that it's the role assigned to Gerrard that is crucial; but Gerrard has laboured through a number of World Cup finals, long before Capello was on the scene, with limited impact.)

Some commenters have misunderstood my point about England, which is not so much that they play well in World Cup finals and go out unluckily; it's that they often play badly, but these performances aren't explicable in terms of the ability of the players. (By the time they do go out, they sometimes are playing quite well - it's then that they seem unlucky. Hence the wisdom of Danny Baker's observation that England aren't playing well enough to go out yet.) There's a deep psychological blight at the level of the team, which lingers no matter how much the personnel change. Playing for England is like being in the Overlook Hotel - generation after generation of players become possessed by the same spectres. Some are blaming money and the Premiership for England's inadequacies, but, in truth, this syndrome long precedes the high-rolling days of the Premiership. How can we account for players like Lampard and Rooney - by some distance, England's worst player last night, worse even than the red-faced Carragher, who looked all night as if he was on the verge of a stroke - devolving into these shambling shadows? Last night, it wasn't only that Rooney posed no threat; it was that he couldn't even trap a football. It was like a reverse of the situation in the old comic strip Billy's Boots, in which a schoolboy became a crack striker when he wore an old centre-forward's football boots. Rooney has looked like Billy without the boots: laborious, petulant, nothing coming off. He was like a superhero whose powers had suddenly and inexplicably worn off, raging uselessly against his new mortal limitations. Players who are imperious, deadly-ruthless assassins for their clubs become wretched cringing wrecks when playing for England, terrified of the ball and impotent in front of goal. Perhaps it was a foolish hope that Capello could summarily end this. It wasn't even that Algeria played that well - they kept the ball effectively, and they had some pace down the flanks, but they posed no real goal threat, even in front of an England defence so jittery it looked as if it would be relieved to concede a goal.
On the upside, England have never yet failed to get out of the group stage. Carragher has two bookings so can't play against Slovenia. England are in a better position than they were in 1986 (when they lost the open game to Portugal, and drew 0-0 with Morocco after Ray Wilkins was sent off), and the same position as they were in 1990 (when they drew with both the Republic of Ireland and Holland, before a late goal by Mark Wright sealed the win over Egypt in the final group game). The situation and the performances seemed even worse in 86, but, then, England had Lineker and Hoddle in reserve; in 1990, a reorganisation brought the best out of Gasgoine. It's not clear who or what England can call upon this time - Cole maybe, who, unlike the ineffective Lennon and Wright-Phillips, can score goals. But it's the intense, crushing force of The Fear - which robs England players' feet of their skills and their minds of imagination - which Capello must exorcise, a task that may be beyond the competence of even that great man.

watching Algeria-England in Cairo

2010-06-18T22:11:00.003+01:00

My Egyptian friends told me to expect it, and I knew from experience to expect it, but still it was strange: almost all Egyptians were cheering hard for England against Algeria tonight. The bad blood between Algeria and Egypt has grown so thick. (One remark overheard from an Egyptian: "I would support Israel against Algeria.") One of the Egyptian students with me was wearing a Lampard jersey, in fact.

The obvious amusing angle on this match was that both teams had benched their goaltenders for exactly the same reason.

In the end, disappointing though the night may have been for England, it's not even a terrible disaster. England, Slovenia, and the USA all still control their own destiny, and advance automatically with a win (and Slovenia even with a draw, and possibly with a loss under the right conditions).

However, as an outside observer I remain surprised at England's inability to finish. I realize they've been criticized for a lineup filled with non-scorers, but have to assume that this means there are no genuine scorers available, right?

As for the USA, as depressing as the 2-0 hole was, and despite the fact that I haven't even seen highlight footage of the match yet, the fact that the USA can dominate a half offensively against a Slovenian team that shut down Russia to qualify has to be good news for us.

I did see most of Germany/Serbia, and it confirms the point Mark keeps making about not overreacting to recent results. Many of us were too quick to be blown away by German prowess after the opener. Suddenly they look full of holes and soft in the heart.

Lemon Squeezy

2010-06-18T21:44:00.002+01:00

Climbing The Peaks

2010-06-18T15:42:00.002+01:00

What geographical features could England have on their kit? The undulating path of the River Severn? The Lake District's craggy peaks? Or perhaps something a little less physical: a stone circle inspired pattern?

A Bunch of Clowns

2010-06-18T12:53:00.003+01:00

Mark asks who should be brought in as a football pundit to replace the droning Vuvuzelas of Thought and Comment that the current crop represent, and on the way drops in what should be etched on Shearer's gravestone: 'He looked like a squaddie who'd just beaten someone to death with a shoe.'

In many televised US sports they now have professional comedians as the co-commentator. I think this would be vastly preferable (in principle). We could end the say-what-you-see idiocy you get from the likes of Keown ('It's come out to him and he's hit.') or Le Saux ('He won't be happy with that' -- no shit Graham, he didn't score did he?) which suggests they believe themselves to be principally providing a service to blind viewers.

The problem with the ex-pro as pundit is they so rarely provide the actual insight their experience is supposed to furnish. You get the occasional figure like Strachan when he was on MotD2, who genuinely enlightens the audience... But mostly the performance as a pundit of a Platitude Production Engine like Shearer simply follows through on the logic of their appointment. That is, they've been appointed to these jobs simply through virtue of who they were and are. I'm sure that deep in Shearer's cerebral cortex lies an assumption something like: they gave me the job because of who I am - why should I need to do any homework? know who Marek Hamsik or Alexis Sanchez are? I don't need to work on being Alan Shearer. I don't need to train to be Alan Shearer. I AM ALAN SHEARER. HEAR ME PUNDIT.

Having co-commentators and post-match pundits drawn from outside the realm of the ex-pro would also introduce a cleansing sense of neutrality. Few things are more agonizing than watching Redknapp Jr jabber obsequiously about his Old Dad.

But the comic as commentator introduces a whole new raft of problems.

'And joining Simon Brotherton for England-Algeria, his co-commentator Michael McIntyre........'

An Insecure World

2010-06-18T12:16:00.004+01:00

Listening to yesterday's coverage on BBC Radio 5 live I caught a short discussion by Mark 'Chappers' Chapman and Martin someone or other. After an interview with Shaun Wright-Phillips, the discussion turned to how Capello is not telling players that they are part of the team until the very final moment. Martin said that this was causing uncertainty in the England camp and he detected this uncertainty and angst in Wright-Phillips' voice. "He sounds quite unloved, he's a long way from home, and you've got to start building the players together and you've got to love these players" Martin opined. Capello simply wasn't being fatherly enough to his players, and was being "hardline with the players" and "doesn't share that love around". Because of this insecurity, players cluster around Capello, trying to win his favour, grasping at any hint, "looking for any signs, any signal" that you've made the final teamsheet. This makes being on the England team "an insecure world". Without a lurch into a deep psycho-analytical discussion of this deep ontological uncertainty of being on the England squad, we should briefly note the ruthless infantilisation on display - Chapman's response was correctly akin to "he is a grown adult, not twelve year old boy". Yet this exchange provoked me to think of what the correct management style in fact is for international football. In contrast to Capello's supposed 'distant father' approach, the relationships between Diego Maradona and his Argentinian side was noted earlier in the day as being a hugely friendly one, embracing them warmly when they succeeded, but one where failure will be met with firm, angry, but ultimately loving words. Clearly, despite Capello's Italian origins, the commentators have mapped the management of England and Argentina onto cliches of national fatherhood - the seen and not heard type versus a perhaps violatile, but always loving Dad. Which led me to remember the classic article by Mark E. Smith on football management that surfaced during the last world cup. As readers will doubtless be aware, The Fall have a somewhat revolving door policy regarding personel, and seems to have adopting a similar stance to Capello:

Running the national football team is very much like running my group, the Fall. As a manager, you've got to maintain a certain detachment from your players, and it's the same with my musicians. When we're on tour, I sit at the back of the bus. We're friendly but the secret of it is never get too ally-pally. You can have a pint or two together now and again but you don't want to be going round their houses.

You don't want people to get too comfortable, because if they do, there's no way they'll be on top of their game. It's not a job for life. I see the Fall being like a football team with a two- or three-year cycle. There's always going to be a period where I'll need a new centre-forward.

I always like to keep a strong subs' bench of people who can step into the breach, cos you never know when you might need them in an emergency.

Well worth a read. Which leaves the question, how best is the affective work of managing a football team done? And more vitally, why have The Fall not previously been associated in World Cup football song, until 2010? We have Theme From Sparta FC.

I cannot let this pass without adding this video. Mark E. Smith reading the football results. The interview afterwards is sublime.

And the marvelous Kicker Conspiracy: "HOT DOGS AND SEAT FOR MR. HOGG! AAAAAANNNNDDD HIS GROTTYSPAWN!".

In the light of these, Smith's recent World Cup offering, and an outing for his 'soft voice' best witnessed in Bill Is Dead, seems a bit pale. Writing in the band Shuttleworth with Ed Blaney and Jenny Shuttleworth, the video is a sight to behold.

After watching, perhaps Mark is right to insist 'it's not a Fall song'.

Ironically Following England

2010-06-18T10:48:00.003+01:00

Could I cope with England winning the World Cup? The boost it would give Cameron; the fact that John Terry and Steven Gerrard would be national heroes for evermore; the horrible jingoism that would break out. I'm not sure I'd handle all that too well. The sheer crapness of our nationalism rubs me up the wrong way. Car flags and Carling? I'll pass, thanks.

So I find myself in rather an odd position when England play. I take more interest in their games than most, and would currently register somewhere between 'really looking forward to' and 'excited' about tonight's game. It'll be nice to sit down with some friends and a beer and watch a match that we're all interested in. But it's always a bizarre experience, and my hostility to the national team fades into a vague, ironic ambivalence whenever they're actually on the pitch*.

This makes it an incredibly stress-free experience. I can still enjoy England winning, but a defeat or disappointing draw (particularly one punctuated by a characteristic English blooper or two) tends to be met with an wry amusement somewhere between fatalism and smugness. Maybe I'm a 'follower' rather than a 'supporter'- someone interested in the team, but who doesn't care about results.

There's a contradiction at the heart of this experience though. To keep enjoying England games, I need them to win some. Just when do I want them to lose? And there's the crux of the matter- I'm not sure I really do. Actually willing England to lose a game seems to slip over the line marking a lefty awkwardness with nationalism to a rather reactive, snobbish position- denying others their 'inferior' happiness so I can feel superior.

There's a further complication in that- as tournaments progress- I find subconscious support taking over my ironic stance. At least, this is what I've found in the Champions League- particularly in 2005. I've not liked Liverpool since suffering so many intolerably smug fans of theirs at secondary school, and I couldn't bare the thought of them feeling vindicated in their belief that Liverpool Football Club (it's always Liverpool Football Club, isn't it? As if they were somehow more of a football club than anyone else) are indeed The Greatest Team On The Planet. Yet when they staged that comeback, I found myself cheering them on- and I was genuinely delighted when Dudek saved Shevchenko's penalty. Would the same thing happen if David James, or Joe Hart**, or Michael Dawson, or whoever Capello's decided to trust in goal repeated the feat in the World Cup Final? I have a sneaky feeling it would, you know.

*All this will all be complicated further tonight by the fact that Algeria have Adlene Guedioura in their squad- a player I've come to like immensely during his short spell at Wolves so far. I was delighted when he was called up into their squad (despite being uncapped) and chuffed to see him come on in their opening match against Slovenia. The phrase "Good work from Wolverhampton Wanderers' Guedioura" is up there with my moments of the World Cup- though we had Seol Ki-Hyeon at the last World Cup it was fairly apparent he'd played his last game for us after a season in which he looked particularly uninterested, and it's still something of a novelty for me to have Wolves players in the World Cup (Hahnemann and Milijas complete our contingent this time round).

**I'd quite like Joe Hart to win the World Cup because then one of my claims to fame would be significantly more impressive. On my debut for Shifnal CC's second XI some 9 years ago, I strutted out to bat at London Road, Shrewsbury, and saw the home side bring on a lad of about 14. I was quite pleased by this turn of events, hoping it would mean some easy runs- but he proved to be rather rapid and had me caught in the gully- surprised by the bounce- with his third or fourth ball. I distinctly remember wandering back to the pavillion chuntering away, and exclaimed my surprise as to the lad's pace to a teamate. "Aye- he's a good little player. He's better at footy, mind- he's on Shrewsbury Town's books: plays in goal. They reckon he'll be in the first team soon."

"England aren't good enough to go out yet.."

2010-06-17T23:02:00.004+01:00

... "France will make the quarter-finals." ... "We're always ready to start an autopsy without a body." With his counter-intuitive gambits on the BBC tonight, Danny Baker showed how punditry should be done. Baker was like a speedfreak thrown into a room full of somnambulists, gleefully providing all the controversy Tom English called in for in his blast against anodyne pundits in the Scotsman. It wasn't contrarianism for its own sake, but an intelligence that won't countenance mouthing platitudes even if they're true. Baker might be wrong, but his thought-bombs are always stimulating. Too often, the ITV and BBC panels manage to both state the obvious and be wrong. They extrapolate ploddingly on the basis of received wisdom and/ or what they've just seen, failing either to notice long-term patterns or to contemplate unexpected twists. Robbie Earle getting sacked by ITV is far more interesting than anything he's ever said. The only interesting thing about Alan Shearer is the faint air of suppressed violence that surrounds him: he looks like a squaddie who's just beaten someone to death with a shoe. Andy Townsend inarticulately and over-excitedly voices your own most banal thoughts, ten minutes after you'd dismissed them as too tedious to vocalise: he's like Trevor Brooking, but even more dull. Hansen retains a flinty charisma and a stern authority, but he's stale, lacking any foils.

The lesson: employ those with expertise in talking and thinking as pundits. Any other suggestions for who would make a good pundit?

Grieving before a death

2010-06-17T17:46:00.003+01:00

It sounds as if Gary has already reached stage three of the grieving process described by Martin Samuel in the Mail today. Samuel applies the famous scheme devised by the German psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross - and used by Zizek as the framing device for his latest book - to chart the England fans' gradual coming to terms with defeat:

First there is denial (if we win the tournament playing badly, nobody will complain), then anger (these players are hopeless, we're never going to win with this useless bunch), then bargaining (you know, I wouldn't even mind if we lost to Germany/Algeria/Papua New Guinea/the Platinum All Stars just as long as we play well and don't go out on penalties), depression (oh God, what's the point, I really can't take this any more) and finally acceptance (ah well, there's always next time, I bet Roy Hodgson could sort this lot out).

What's interesting about Samuel's application of Kubler-Ross is that the grief comes before the loss, which I think says a great deal about what the England team is up against. By this, I don't mean a hostile press - I think Samuels captures pretty accurately the state of mind of England supporters - I mean the mixture of wild hope and resignation that the England players must have to fight in themselves. When Jürgen Klinsmann was on the BBC last night reminiscing with Gary Lineker about Italia 90, he said that the West German team had a conviction that year that they would win the tournament. Lineker claimed that the England players felt the same, but it's hard to really believe that they expected to win. Expecting to win isn't the same as arrogance; and England over the last forty-six years have found it impossible to achieve that frame of mind where you expect to win, but make sufficient demands of yourself in order that you will achieve victory. England tend to struggle when they are the favourite to win, but freeze when they are the underdog, stirring themselves into their best moments only when the game is all but over.

Even given all this, it's hard not to think that the response to the US match here has been something of an overreaction - especially after the results of Spain, Italy and some of the other more fancied sides. Samuel's claim about 'momentum' is dubious: sometimes teams who win the World Cup start strongly; sometimes they stumble at first. (The one thing they don't do, at least not in any of the tournaments so far, is lose the first game: an ominous sign for Spain.) I suppose the overreaction might be because people had dared to hope that Capello might have ended this syndrome (England held or beaten by teams which they really ought to have defeated). But the USA game recalled the frustrations of campaigns past, raising the fear that not even Capello can overcome England's tournament curse.

Tomorrow's game? My sense is that England do best when they operate with a less rigid formation than they used against the US, with players moving more fluidly between midfield and attack. Last week, Rooney was like a negative version of this, marooned in some ineffective no-man's-land between midfield and the forward line. I also think that using two wingers tends to leave teams overrun in midfield, and with Wright-Phillips and Lennon playing on Saturday, Landon Donovan was able to dominate the middle of the pitch. (Wright-Phillips and Lennon were also a curious choice when you recall that Rooney doesn't typically score the kind of goals that they provide assists for. In addition, using two wingers also inhibits the forward running of our two full-backs, one reason, perhaps, why Ashley Cole in particular seemed so subdued agains the States. Then you have to bear in mind that with Wright-Phillips, Lennon and Heskey on the pitch, you had three attacking players who had minimal prospects of actually scoring a goal.) Barry's return should allow that greater fluidity in midfield. In defence, what's worrying is not Green - he's unlikely to make a mistake of that magnitude again - but the prospect of Carragher playing again. It was a real blow when England lost their best central defender (not the past-it Ferdinand, but King), but it's hard to believe that either Dawson (a very accomplished centre-half, who has done well for Tottenham this year) or Upson could do worse than the labouring Carragher, horribly exposed for pace many times on Saturday.

low scoring: much follows from this one fact

2010-06-17T14:40:00.006+01:00

We've now seen 4 goals from Argentina and 3 from Uruguay in the last 24 hours. But before that there were many complaints about the low number of goals in this World Cup so far. What this reminds me of is that a large percentage of my fellow Americans still have no interest in the sport we call soccer, and that one of their main complaints is that the sport is boring. What I think they mean is that there isn't much scoring in a typical game.

Since many readers of this blog might not understand the rules of baseball or American football, I will be referring to basketball as a comparison. A typical score in an NBA playoff game might be something like 102-94. That's a lot of scoring. Even the losing team in a 105-72 blowout has succeeded in putting the ball in the basket many times during the night, and this is not true of the loser in a soccer match.

It is interesting to explore this theme of low scores in soccer (pardon me for using that word; "football" would be an affectation for me, since I never call it that in daily conversation). It is remarkable how many of the specific features of the sport of soccer follow from the pivotal fact that it is very difficult to score.

1. Patience is required when watching soccer. It's over 90 minutes of action, and you need to pay attention the whole time. During this World Cup alone, I have missed *three* interesting goals simply because I happened to be checking email messages on my iPhone: including, I'm ashamed to admit, the Clint Dempsey goal that went through Robert Green's hands. I saw that one on replay only. If you're watching basketball, and you're distracted by a phone call or a joke aimed at a friend, you might miss a beautiful play, but at least that beautiful play is unlikely to be the fulcrum of the entire game. But by missing Dempsey's goal in real time and seeing it only in replay form, I missed what could turn out to be the most interesting American moment in the Cup. Much patience and concentration is needed when watching soccer.

2. There is a much higher stress level when watching soccer than when watching basketball. Scoring opportunities are rare enough that one desperately wishes to capitalize on them. We were just reminded of this an hour or so ago, when South Korea blew a golden breakaway opportunity to tie the match 2-2 with Argentina. Instead, they crumbled after that botch and lost 4-1. If your basketball team blows a layup, they can still recover. But when South Korea blew that goal opportunity, I was pretty sure it might be their last of the day, and that turned out to be true.

3. A corollary of point 2 is that soccer seems filled with miracles generated ex nihilo. I'd rather trail by 12 or 15 points in basketball than by 1 goal in soccer. At least in the basketball case you can call timeout, change strategies and lineup a bit, and then measure your incremental progress over the next few minutes. "Oh good, we've cut the lead from 15 to 8 over the last 3 minutes. Momentum has shifted our way." In soccer, by contrast, goals come suddenly as gifts from the gods, and you can't tangibly measure your progress toward getting the next one. Just look at Switzerland in the 1-0 surprise over Spain, with commentators shaking their heads that the Swiss goal came "against the flow of play." In the NBA you could never say "that dunk came against the flow of play." A friend emailed me yesterday and wondered: "How on earth did North Korea score a goal against Brazil?" But obviously no one would ever ask of an NBA game: "How did a team as bad as New Jersey get a dunk against the Lakers?"

4. The deserving team doesn't always win. Yes, this also sometimes happens in basketball. You might find yourself once in awhile asking: "How did Miami win that game? It felt like Atlanta really outplayed them." Yet this can happen all the time in soccer, including in the World Cup. It is not that hard to dominate utterly in soccer and then lose 1-0 on a fluke goal, perhaps from a stupidly allowed penalty kick.

5. Subtle judgments of player performance are required. In a sport like professional basketball, there is a crude but useful tool for judging player performance: points scored. If someone scores 30 or 40 points in the NBA, that's a good game. It's true that points aren't the only thing, but many of the other features of a basketball game are also quantified by a sandstorm of statistical information. Even if Paul Pierce doesn't score a lot in Celtics-Lakers Game 7, if we read the following line we know he had a good game: 14 points, 11 rebounds, 8 assists, 5 steals, 3 blocks, 1 turnover. Despite the mediocre point total for Pierce, numbers come to the rescue and help us form a picture of what sort of game Pierce had. And in baseball statistics have taken over to a crushing degree, thanks to Bill James and sabermetrics. (For the benefit of non-American readers, "sabermetrics" was the brilliant James's whimsical coinage based on the acronym SABR, or "Society for American Baseball Research." Sabermetrics is a sophisticated set of statistical analyses applied to baseball, one that was a fringe intellectual pastime through the 1980's and 1990's but is now taken so seriously that some of the best teams employ sabermetricians in the office.)

By contrast, in soccer many aspects of a player's performance can't really be quantified, and judging them often takes on all the subtlety of wine-tasting. And so you get things like this (from the Sun in 2006), which would be completely unnecessary in basketball since numbers would do the work:

"Ashley Cole. Got through the 90 minutes in hot conditions but question marks still surround his fitness. Got forward without ever threatening and was given a good workout by Nelson Valdez."

"Frank Lampard. Tried his luck on numerous occasions but found Paraguay keeper Bobadilla equal to all of them, his low drive towards the end of the game the pick of the bunch. Forced backwards as Paraguay looked for an equaliser but stood strong."

In short, the simple fact of soccer being a low-scoring sport generates a number of other peripheral features, and it's hard to say which of these five features is most to blame for the United States only gradually warming to the sport.

However, we really are starting to warm to the sport. To give just one example, my American friend Casey in Egypt, a huge U.S. sports fan, recently abandoned all of our traditional sports in favor of a satellite dish and the English Premier League. He doesn't even stay up all night for the Super Bowl anymore. 10 years ago this would have been eccentric, but it's now cutting-edge hip in the U.S. to follow the English Premier League, if still not entirely widespread. Bill Simmons now frequently refers to English football in his NBA columns.

And finally, I was shocked on my recent trip home to enter a K-Mart (that's a low-end retail store) and find FC Barcelona duffel bags for sale: in Iowa! Absolutely unthinkable before a few years ago.

The Ballad of Butch Wilkins

2010-06-17T13:35:00.003+01:00

Amidst the muddle of some roundly criticized punditry on this World Cup (attacked most notably here), the tournament seems as if it's finally coming to life. We may now be more diverted by the quality of the football, rather than the at times insanely abstract drivel served up by those at the mic. Mark Lawrenson's reference to a "corridor of uncertainty" during the New Zealand v Slovakia tie the other day was a standout comment, alluding perhaps to some dark alternative version of the game accessed only by a trap door at the apex of 18-yard box and byline.

All this talk however does bring the contrasting opinions of those that have played the game professionally and those that haven't into sharper focus. Is there a discernable gulf in outlook between 'the game' and the punter, and a resultant difference in why we commit to following our respective nations?

The distance between player and fan wrought by commerce in recent years has of course been well-documented, in relation to the Premier League especially. But the player's objective of simply winning games versus a wish on the part of the fan to be entertained offers a particular contradiction, brought to light most starkly in this tournament's fairly tepid opening week. The classic contrast in styles that shaped the dynamic of the Brazil v North Korea and Spain v Switzerland games has offered tension, uncertainty and potential upset via the conflicting traits of skill and fluidity of movement versus aggression and organisation.

The specific predicament of England puts a new slant on the 'winning ugly' approach already discussed on this blog, and the failure to properly define a clear playing style arguably complicates expectations even further. Despite mining a largely typical northern European game based on physical strength, England have oddly reared, once or twice every generation, a player of naturally Latin technique. Unlike South American nations, who regularly boast half a dozen such ball players at any one time and can thus afford to drop one to the bench, England traditionally decide implausibly not to build a team around their sole playmaker (see Marsh, Hoddle, Waddle and now Joe Cole), and instead concentrate their resources on the kind of game lambasted by Franz Beckenbauer after the draw against the USA. Add to this the fact that in recent years, successive England coaches (two of which haven't even plied their trade on the 'kick and rush' English way at all) have predominantly rejected the passing game seen during the Venables and Hoddle years in favour of a more direct but somewhat aimless style of play, where possession is not the key ingredient.

So, in absence of both front to back flair and a basic possession game, England routinely look lost. Having endured so many disappointments at World Cups and European Championships over the years - usually under the delusion that we might just win it - I'm not quite so bothered about 'progress' per se this time. A chronic lack of depth in quality tells me that we honestly don't have much of a chance.

Why then should it be so strange to want simply to be entertained? Why not go all-out to score goals? Why not, instead of detailing wingers to nullify the progress of the opposition's attack, urge them to express themselves and create? As I write, Argentina, big favourites for many, have swept the South Koreans aside with some occasionally breathtaking forward play. They also have a terrible defence, but it doesn't look like Maradona or anyone else really cares about that. Brazil in '82 had a famously porous backline, but are renowned as being the greatest team never to win.

Even the most blindly optimistic appraisal suggests of course that the current England team are nowhere near that good, but whilst we are at least similarly dreadful at the back, it seems only to provide us with another great neurosis. And why shouldn't we want everything to be just right for this, the last chance for the 'golden generation'? In view of such determined turd-polishing (the performances at the last World Cup were, let's not forget, truly execrable, but hey - we made the last 8!), perhaps a somewhat more lateral attitude could be profitable. After all, what could be more destructive to the opposition than unrelenting attack, rather than a constant jockeying out of the (yet again) fear of conceding?

Golden Boot for Tact

2010-06-17T12:27:00.002+01:00

Another question: did I imagine the following line of TV commentary in the Holland-Denmark game?

'Three hundred years after arriving in South Africa, the Dutch are back, hoping to conquer again.'

Memoradelia

2010-06-17T12:15:00.002+01:00

Is it just me or is this Youtube video of Maicon's fantastic finish not deliberately aged - as if the slight haze is meant to underline the goal's lineal descent from Alberto Carlos and Josimar?

let the memories begin indeed

Hobbesian

2010-06-17T10:26:00.004+01:00

Midway through the first half of the game between Switzerland and Spain, this happened.

When I was five or six years old sometimes with my mates we used to mark a goal - with sweaters or what have you - grab a ball and somebody would yell tutti contro tutti, 'everyone against everyone'. I remember this call to arms very well, but quite frankly I don’t recall what happened after that. A melee of some kind, presumably. How do you even play football without someone to pass the ball to? Were instant alliances formed and broken on the field, so that a subset of the mob could get closer to scoring a goal? Did we even have a goal to aim at, or is that part of the memory spurious? Perhaps we just dribbled aimlessly, enjoying the inevitable collisions. I couldn’t say. I doubt that as a practice it lasted very long, we must have quickly switched to selecting the two fellows who would take turns picking players so we could get started with a proper game in short order. This I remember very well. It was done quickly because, especially during the morning break at primary school, each moment was precious, and every second that wasn’t spent playing football, wasted. And we kept score, unfailingly, I’m sure of that, although, since the make-up of the teams changed from day to day, it was only the personal stats that carried over.

I remember the first time we played against a team wearing a proper football kit. We must have been eight or nine years old, and they were kids from the area (but not from our school, I think) sponsored by the local pizzeria. They beat us nine to one. I’ll always maintain that they beat us because they had proper shirts. We were just intimidated by that. Some time later they agreed to play us again and this time we won by a goal. We had had a talk in advance about tactics and what we should do, and we remarked that their superior equipment wasn’t a reflection on their skills, or ours.

What is it that is so powerful about shirts, about the team’s colours? I used to think that it was a primal affair, hardwired into us boys especially - my memories of kindergarten all revolve around belonging to a gang, and each gang had its own colour, matching the colours of the rooms at the school. (We didn’t actually wear those colours or anything like that, it was more of a symbolic thing.) But what about tutti contro tutti, then? Where does that fit in, where did it come from?

Gangs of adults form around professional football teams at all levels, each swearing to defend those blessed colours. Footballers become simulacra, heroic figures for as long as they wear the correctly coloured shirt. When national teams are involved, they even make you swear allegiance before each game, when you line up for the anthems. And us supporters at home or at the stadium quietly do the same - each siding with the team from our own country because it is the obvious, the natural, the non-dickish thing to do.

What intrigues me about the image at the top of this post is that it that it makes it look as if Philippe Senderos had somehow forgotten in a moment of folly that most fundamental rule of the game - it is us versus them, the white shirts versus the red shirts - and had tackled his team-mate on purpose, like in one of those Hobbesian childhood games of ours, where all that mattered was to gain temporary possession of the ball. Of course, it’s not really what happened, the full replay shows that the two defenders were both going for the same ball, and Senderos was quite oblivious of Lichststeiner’s run. Nothing to do with Senderos being half-Spanish, either, which was one of the insipid storylines on the eve of the game. It was just an accident.

You couldn’t even imagine what everyone against everyone would look like, with adult footballers, in a visual cacophony of differently coloured shirts, could you? Except I suspect it would make a good commercial.

"There's more than one way to win"

2010-06-16T18:51:00.003+01:00

The Spain-Switzerland result today underlined a number of the things I've been trying to say: the 'best' teams don't always win; keeping possession of the ball isn't necessary to succeed . As Mick McCarthy grudgingly conceded in the BBC commentary, "there's more than one way to win." Possession: Spain 63%, Switzerland 37%. This wasn't a matter of blind chance or good luck. The truth is, Switzerland had a game plan to snuff out Spain's strengths, which they executed flawlessly. Spain had no answer to the superbly organised display that the Swiss defence put on today, reminiscent of Italy at their miserly best. Villa looked ineffective; only when Torres came on did the Spanish team briefly muster a sustained threat. But as the game wore on, it looked unlikely that Spain would find the key - indeed, by the final minutes, it almost seemed that Switzerland had an extra player, so successfully were they intercepting and blocking Spain's attacks.

Let the Memories Begin?

2010-06-16T18:15:00.006+01:00

I feel as if this World Cup is passing me by.

I've watched plenty, and debated plenty, and filled in my wallchart diligently (sans error, thus far). But it feels like nothing's going in. "Of course it's not", said a friend, "there's been nothing to go in".

That's not quite what I was getting at, though. What I worry about is not so much that the football's not going but that the feeling of this World Cup isn't going in. I'm not getting a sense of the aesthetic universe that goes with the football (as I type, Jurgen Klinsmann has- in his strange Teuto-Californian drawl- just spoken of something similar, saying that there's something about a World Cup that "goes beyond a 4-4-2 or a 4-5-1 or whatever").

It's probably because of my age. USA'94 is the first World Cup I spent any time watching and that and the '98 tournament that are lodged in my mind as some of the strongest memories from childhood. I remember far more about the football from 2002 and 2006, but they don't seem so special- there's no magic to the memories.

I was 9 during USA '94. I remember precious little of the football. I think I remember Aldridge going mad at a FIFA Official but it could well be a false memory brought on by seeing it so many times since. And I'm fairly certain I remember Maradona's celebration against Greece- though I couldn't tell you if I was watching live or saw it on a highlights show. I vaguely recall someone being sent off, but I couldn't tell you who it was or what it was for.

I do, however, remember the strange quality of the light that illuminated so many of the games- an intense, anemic glow that saturated everything; sucking in colour and making it all look decidedly unreal. The 16 years since might have exaggerated this memory- and watching footage of it on YouTube does little do deny or affirm it- but it's certainly how I remember experiencing it.

What really sticks in my mind, though, is the Bulgaria v Germany quarter-final. I watched it because my friends at school were telling me how it would be great if Bulgaria won, and when we played football in the playground at lunch my class got to be Bulgaria whilst 4M2 had to be Germany. Without having any idea why (just as I'd had no idea why my peers were all shouting for Denmark in the Euro '92 final two years previously), I was desperate for Bulgaria to win.

And so they did. I remember being pleased Bulgaria won but am fairly certain I only know Letchkov's header for watching it since. Rather, what I remember from the match itself is that suddenly the colour had returned (thinking about it now, this probably has something to do with the match being played in New York's more moderate climate) and the wonderful patterns on the playing surface. It was incredible, and I remember thinking how much fun it would be to play on a pitch that looked like that.

I wasn't allowed to watch the final: it went on too late, so it was videoed and I got up early the next morning to watch it, something I frequently had to do with night-time TV (why getting up early and losing sleep was worse than going to bed late and losing sleep I didn't understand then and don't now, an act of parenting that I always thought would explain itself when I grew up but which still seems petty, although it does mean I have a good selection of games on VCR: the '94 European Cup Final, the '95 Cup Winners' Cup Final)- but I found the game rather dull so fast-forwarded through most of it. After a while I became so bored I asked dad what the final score was, and when he said it had been 0-0 and won on a penalty shoot out I didn't bother with the rest.

France '98 wouldn't be dull though. England were going to win it! Euro '96 had got me into the national team, and I had carefully tippexed and red biroed a St.George's cross on my calculator in anticipation of our impending victory (something, I'm semi-pleased to note, kids still do now). John Summers brought his mum's pager into school and passed a note around English class saying that we were beating Tunisia 1-0, and then told the bus home that Scholes had added a second. We were definitely going to win. Something Kevin Keegan thought against Romania, only for Dan Petrescu to break clear and make him look a bit daft. Hoddle defied critics by playing Anderton and Beckham against Columbia and they both scored. How clever we all thought he was, although no-one wanted to be Darren Anderton on the school field the next day.

And then we were out.

My clearest memory of that game is fighting off the tears during ITV's slow motion montage following our exit (set to Green Day's Time of Your Life), and climbing folornly into bed in my England pyjamas, muttering that I didn't want to go on the next day's school trip to Alton Towers.

What also sticks in my mind from that tournament is the opening titles- perhaps because I could play the Jean Michel Jarre and Faure pieces used by ITV and the BBC, and so experienced a sudden surge in popularity during music lessons. If I hear either piece of music now, I'm temporarily transported into a state of heightened emotion: all boyish excitement and nerves- an intensity of feeling that always escapes voluntarily recalled memories. In writing this piece I watched those titles t for the first time in the 12 years since. Objectively, they're both a little naff now (though the ITV one in particular has some nice touches), but they still moved me as I recalled all the excitement they once roused.

No World Cup since has anything to match. I remember far more about the football in 2002: having a free period at college and being able to watch France lose the opening game; Beckham's redemptive penalty; Rivaldo's dive; Seaman's cock-up...but not a lot else sticks in the mind. I just watched the titles to the BBC and ITV coverage of 2002 on YouTube, but neither raised a glimmer of recognition, let alone evoked an emotional response (unless a brief Orientalist critique of ITV's counts). 2006 was fun- I was at uni, could legally drink and watched every game in the company of great friends- but the wonder had gone. In neither tournament did I care about England; in neither tournament did I learn about new countries, or new players- I knew too much and there was nothing to discover.

Perhaps rather naively, I longed for that boyhood feeling to return with this World Cup. I'm enjoying it greatly, and am looking forward to watching some games with supporters of other teams (doing a PhD means I have colleagues from Chile, the USA, Mexico...); as well as being abroad for the semi-final and finals (in Poland, so it's a shame they've not qualified)- but the idea that by watching all the games diligently I'd recapture the excitement of my youth has proved too much. It's rather blending in with 2002 and 2006.

Yet it could be that the thing I remember the most from this World Cup isn't registering consciously. I didn't decide to take in the titles in 1998; they lodged themselves in my mind involuntarily. Maybe something's worming its way into my brain right now, and one day it'll open a door for me to look back upon these next few weeks as a period of World Cup utopia.

Tuesday at the World Cup

2010-06-16T14:47:00.003+01:00

Brazil & North Korea were good, but the air of apprehension still pervades.

The South Will Rise Again?

2010-06-15T13:22:00.003+01:00

Or: why you won't win the World Cup without seven Northerners

The London Review of Books is blogging the World Cup, with mixed results. This post, by R. W. Johnson, apart from being anti-vuvuzela (bzzzz) is riddled with odd ideas. England's '66 team 'had a core of Northern grit' - Alan Ball, Ian Callaghan, Roger Hunt, 'plus Jack and Bobby Charlton, Nobby Stiles and Ray Wilson.'

Those seven played in almost every game. This year’s team is very different. True, it has three vital Scousers – Rooney, Gerrard and Carragher – but the bulk of the squad comes from the South, reflecting the perhaps inevitable rise of London clubs in the age of giant cheque books. It is not exactly confidence-inspiring that England rely on Heskey and Crouch, both explicitly rejected by Liverpool.

Apart from the absurd stereotyping involved in the notion that a squad should be largely born north of Birmingham, Liverpool wanted to keep Crouch and only let him go reluctantly, while Heskey was almost brought back to the club, before he opted to move to Villa instead.

Even more peculiar is the notion that, if London clubs had a financial monopoly, they would buy players locally from the home counties. The logic of unregulated trade, money without borders, means that the big clubs buy the very best, whether they are from Ivory Coast, Czech Republic, Ukraine, or Brazil. As for the London clubs' 'inevitable rise in the age of the giant cheque book'... The richest club before Abramovich bought Chelsea was Manchester United. And even now, the richest club is Manchester City. Northern clubs have never been slow to spend: from Newcastle and Leeds' (catastrophic) sprees, all the way back to Sunderland's 1950s nickname: the 'Bank of England' club.

Still, this Diary piece by Johnson for the LRB in the run-up to the tournament is excellent.

The Agony and the Ecstasy. Minus the Ecstasy.

2010-06-15T03:07:00.021+01:00

Somebody alert Daniele De Rossi’s family. He’s going to need to be airlifted to the nearest medical facility for immediate assessment.

No, wait, he’s fine.

The captain went through some pain of his own, but he too bounced back.

Now I don’t offer any of this in order to trot out the well-known clichés about Italian theatrics on the football field. What I think these images demonstrate is rather how expressive we are, especially when it comes to showing pain. We are not a stoic people. We do not repress our negative emotions. We carry a long history of suffering in our bodies and on our faces, and are not afraid to show it.

It seems to be a constant of Italy at the world cup that we should struggle in the first round, that we have to - it’s the actual word used - suffer. We didn’t in 2006, as a matter of fact, but this hasn't prevented the media coverage in the lead up to the game against Paraguay to be all about Italy and suffering in the early stages. On the evidence of today’s game, it’s set to happen again. So expect more intense close-ups and the kind of nervy lunging of bodies that would have caused Michelangelo to reach in haste for his sketchbook.

Italy / Paraguay best so far

2010-06-14T22:42:00.003+01:00

The Italy/Paraguay 1-1 draw was my favorite match of the Cup so far, despite Paraguay's lassitude in the second half and their apparent decision at some point that a draw was good enough. At the half I was ready to write an early obituary for Italy after their recent signs of weakness leading up to the Cup, but in the second half we saw a strong and sometimes exciting Italy.

Furthermore, both goals were interesting. Alcaraz's header had a tricky, childlike charm with its use of an odd part of the skull. Meanwhile, De Rossi's equalizer delighted as well, as the corner kick missed the leaping attackers but was shoveled in by the foot of another charging Italian: Daniele De Rossi himself, of course.

It's the only match in the Cup so far in which my opinion of both teams improved. It was the opposite, in that sense, of Algeria / Slovenia, which I missed yesterday and only caught on replay this morning at breakfast. The Algerian goalkeeper's blunder really was worse than Green's. Green was physically in the right spot and simply blew it. The Algerian keeper, by contrast, looked generally bewildered as to his precise location on the planet. He's also the guy who was tossed from the African Cup match with Egypt after preposterously getting away with a head-butt to the referee earlier in that same match.

Too much workload these days, so I'm only allowing myself one full match per day. Tomorrow it is Ivory Coast / Portugal that interests me the most. Brazil / North Korea sounds too much like science fiction to be palatable-- or like the beginning of a Tom Clancy potboiler, with North Korea pouring across the border into the South while the rest of us are distracted with the match.

Smugonaut watch

2010-06-14T20:47:00.003+01:00

Practically everything I complained about is exempified in this piece by Jason Cowley in the Standard today. Lazy, received opinion dressed up as hard-nosed wisdom.
Remember: the reason that England have gone out of the tournaments since 1990 has little to do with their failure to put together long, flowing passing movements and everything to do with their inability to win penalty shoot-outs and/ or their propensity to get key players sent off at crucial times.
And the last time a flamboyant team in the style of the current Spain squad won the World Cup was Brazil in 1970.

The Strange Persistence of Robert Green in the Memory

2010-06-14T12:16:00.004+01:00

After England-USA, blogger Anwyn Crawford posed via Twitter the rhetorical question 'How long before Robert Green is erased from English soccer history, Stalin style?'

For a second I was completely baffled - was I misreading it? Green, erased? Then I realized that being Australian, Anwyn has grown up with an entirely different conception of sporting failure.

When your national team regularly wins, and occasionally loses, those losses (and their culprits) become blots to be extinguished from the historical record. Some Australians may be completely unable to recall there being a 2005, let alone the cricketing events of its summer.

The English national football team and its supporters have no such luxury. It's won plenty of games, it arguably outperforms reasonable expectation (see penultimate question here). But without the actual imprimatur of a Major Trophy, its status as a Major Football Power remains embarrassingly honorary. It's been 44 years since England won a competition. This could more kindly be described as 22 tournaments - you can't win something every year. But still, in that context, what and who do the English fans excise from their memory banks? Or rather, where do they stop?

I pity Green though, because in a key sense he hasn't failed enough. For those who miss match-deciding penalties, the severity of the stakes becomes their salvation. Through martyrdom they are absolved of blame, reborn washed in the tears of tabloid pity, after which they rise again in the sixth year to rehearse their tragedy as a Pizza Hut advert.

Green didn't even cost England the match, let alone a place in the knock-out stage, just the win. His fate will be to join the increasingly crowded press purgatory where England goalkeepers are now kept. Peter Bonetti has never been forgotten, nor forgiven, nor especially vilified for his famous error against West Germany in 1970. But Green is part of a more recent run.

Before Green there was Carson.

Before Carson there was Robinson.

Before Carson there was Seaman.

And before Seaman there was, er, Seaman.

Seaman's position at the root of this dread inheritance is suspicious: the occult reasoning towards which fanthought declines suggests that subsequent England keepers have been a) suffering the karmic retribution of the Universe in atonement for that ponytail or b) paying off a Faustian bargain made by Seaman to secure said ponytail. It may be as prosaic as statistical distribution though: England had two of the world's best keepers (Shilton and Clemence) in the 80s, so a shortage in the 00s is simply the drought which corrects that surplus to a reasonable average.

Afterthought: the election of a Conservative government does perhaps suggest massive collective amnesia is real.

NY Post: USA wins 1-1!

2010-06-14T10:36:00.004+01:00

The New Statesman's blog flags up this headline from the New York Post:

Two things. First, that football is a zero-sum game. Looking at the English press reaction, it seems only logical therefore that the American press should take the view that they won.

Secondly, the New York Post is notorious for being Rupert Murdoch's attempt to introduce the British tabloid/gutter press aesthetic to the traditionally staid US newspaper scene. To this end the NYP has a long history of importing talent from the UK. This headline is not just fully aware of its own silliness (hello, the caption underneath) but probably crafted by an ex-Sun staffer, all too happy to lure their compatriots into tutting over American ignorance.

At This Level

2010-06-14T00:12:00.004+01:00

If David Stubbs had made it up, you’d have never believed him. Well, actually, if you’d ever seen England play in major competition before you’d have known exactly what was coming on Saturday night. The Wing Commander’s match reports are of course parodies of the English attitude towards the game – the events described and embellished upon really did happen. And if you’d grounded your expectations in some kind of reality ahead of the USA match, the outcome doesn’t look that bad.

But then it seems almost impossible to balance our deep-seated psychological terror surrounding football with the most basic pragmatism, as Mark says. Like him I’d considered this at the very start of Capello’s tenure, as it seemed a Latin temperament might be best suited to a correct definition and deployment of passion as something other than tears and wayward tackles. This has shown itself however as a source of confusion for the press over the past week: reading an effusive objection to intrusive photographers as mounting tension, and placing inordinate consequence on performances in preparatory friendlies. There’s really not much to see here. That the fragile mental resolve of the English should reveal itself so quickly and outside the realm of the doomed shoot-out was still something of a surprise, and shows that Capello still has much to do.

The BBC’s pundits made much of Robert Green’s apparent trance-like state in the Royal Bafokeng Stadium tunnel, citing this, somewhat obliquely, as an obvious sign of nerves. Looked pretty focussed to me if I’m honest. He could have been lobotomised by the CIA though. Nah. He’s just, you know, not that good. The media have of course duly diverted their scrutiny to his buttery palms, sparing the wider team’s utter failure to convert several golden chances over the 50 or so minutes that elapsed after the USA’s gift of a goal.

And oddly enough, it appeared that it was Capello’s decision-making that was as culpable for the dropped points – for that is what the result amounted to – as Green’s aberration. James Milner’s night was hardly any better than the goalkeeper’s, lasting as it did barely half an hour. Is he not fit, or not good enough? Ledley King on the other hand picked up an injury. Not the greatest of surprises. In view of the Spurs defender’s long-standing infirmity and the recall for the retired and frankly dawdling Jamie Carragher, perhaps Dean Ashton might feel a touch hard done by.

Otherwise, the Americans were pretty average, and ultimately fortunate. England looked positive and (just about) creative enough to win, but sadly for them their best chances fell to Emile Heskey and Shaun Wright-Phillips. Heskey was all set to make a mockery of his doubters before reminding us of just why we doubted him, then Wright-Phillips, the middling member of England’s aimless triumvirate of undersized wingmen, showed that not only can he not cross the ball, he can’t shoot either. Again, Capello should shoulder part of the blame here – if only he’d have included Joe Cole in his squad. Oh hang on....

So yes, England lost their nerve, and Mark called it about right. We have however been here before, and endured worse. If we’re seeking a measured understanding of why we seem to crumble on these big occasions though, we could start by looking at how our one true footballing legend eked out his career after retiring. Bobby Moore, a man of class and integrity both on the field and off, ended up plugging nonsense like that seen in the clip below not too long after actually winning the World Cup. And such was his apparent naiveté over business matters, I can’t help imagining he got paid about a tenner for it. Are we not, at some level, a touch ashamed?

World Cup as Seen From Egypt

2010-06-13T23:26:00.000+01:00

Thanks for the invitation; glad to be here. Though I retired as a Chicago sportswriter in 1998, I've gotten back into the spirit of it with occasional sports posts on my mostly philosophy-oriented blog. I live in Cairo, and literally while typing these words I am occasionally looking out my window at the Algerian Embassy that was stoned by an angry Egyptian mob in November, following Egypt's loss to Algeria in the World Cup qualifier. (And yes, I know for sure that it was stoned. The sound of stones woke me from my dogmatic slumber that night.)

It was sad that the Algeria-Slovenia match today was so dull, because those teams are standing in for the vanquished Egypt and Russia, who would have been interesting additions to the 2010 mix. Also, I'm afraid that Algeria's disgraceful 4-red card departure from the African Cup of Nations makes it hard for me to root for them, though as an adopted Cairene I would normally be pleased to support an Arab side.

Germany looked powerful and exciting tonight, in the most intimidating performance in the Cup so far. Klose's header wasn't just a goal, but a resounding statement. You could almost feel it rattle your own skull.

I'm also ecstatic that we (the USA) escaped England with a draw: a great result for the Americans. I agree with the poster below who said that the American team resembles a middling Premier League club in both its strengths and its weaknesses.

I was in transit during Ghana-Serbia and missed the whole match, but was sufficiently impressed by the poise of Ghana's players during this winter's African Cup that I wasn't all that surprised to see them pull out a win.

The pre-tournament consensus seemed to be that the African teams would not live up to expectations, but I still think they will. Home crowd energy in the World Cup means a lot. Who can forget the way France fed off home cooking in 1998, South Korea in 2002, and to a more minimal extent even the USA in 1994?

Who would have thought ...

2010-06-13T18:52:00.004+01:00

Tournament after tournament, it's as if pundits have no memory of previous World Cups. Today, we heard "who would have thought that Slovenia would be top of the group after one game". The answer: anyone who remembers England's habitual sluggish performance in the first group game; and anyone who knows that Slovenia only conceded four goals en route to the finals.
There is a remarkable degree of predictability from tournament to tournament. For instance, there hasn't been a new winner of the tournament that wasn't the host since 1958 (this should give pause to those falling into the trap of tipping Spain on the basis that they look like the best team). No European team has ever won outside Europe. There are usually a majority of European teams at the quarter final stage - expect five or six to make it through this time - even though the final is usually a European team versus a South American team.
But there are margins of unpredictability (even if these are, to some extent, predictable). In the group games, established teams being beaten by less fancied sides has been familiar for a long time: think Scotland's demolition of Holland, Algeria beating West Germany, Cameroon shocking Argentina, the USA upending Portugal. Note, though, that these defeats didn't tend to harm the 'bigger' teams in the long run: despite being victims of these shocks, Holland, Argentina and West Germany still made the final; only Portugal failed to make it out of the group*. You can guarantee that one or two major teams will not make it to the quarter finals, and that some lesser known teams will make it that far. But none of the 'smaller' sides has yet made it past the semi-final stage (Turkey reaching the semi-final in 2002 was the furthest that one of the less successful teams has gone in recent tournaments). The last time that the final was contested by a team that wasn't a previous winner or the hosts was 1978, when Holland lost to Argentina.

*Thanks to Graham Harman for correcting an error I originally made here.

And I forgot the Republic of Ireland's defeat of Italy in a group game in 1994; Italy fitted the pattern precisely, by eventually reaching the final. (The fact I forgot this match underscores Giovanni's point below that the 1994 tournament did not happen. It's the one tournament since 1978 of which I have almost no memory.)

'What did you expect, it's England' or: Pom defeatism goes post-colonial

2010-06-13T09:08:00.003+01:00

Further to Mark's pre-game musings, a screen capture from a current poll on the website of Fairfax Media, owner of the majority of New Zealand's metropolitan newspapers.

Myths about the World Cup

2010-06-12T19:12:00.001+01:00

One of the most unbearable things about following England is enduring the smug national self-loathing that pundits insist on pushing in the name of 'realism' - all those newspaper columns about how we should lower our expectation, England should know their place, that they are below the top level sides ...

It's true that England don't thrive on playing possession football, but the idea that they have repeatedly gone out of the World Cup because of inferior footballing ability doesn't bear much scrutiny. In reality, in all of the tournaments they have qualified for since 1982, they have only gone out in open play twice - in 1986 and 2002 - and these were very narrow defeats to the eventual winners. In 1982, they went out without losing a game; in the other tournaments they have gone out on penalties. This suggests that the problem cannot be accounted for in purely footballing terms; I've argued before that this demands some kind of psychoanalytic explanation - that there is a kind of jouissance of defeatism which contrives a situation in which heroic defeat is the inevitable result. I believe this runs deep into the psyche of the English now - and that's why it is essential that England have a foreign coach, who can interrupt what Mark E Smith called the 'inbuilt loser attitude' of the England player.

Partly this defeatism rests on myths about the World Cup that we'll hear endlessly repeated in the commentary on this tournament, especially if tonight's game doesn't go so well. We'll hear that you need to play free-flowing football in order to win the world cup and you can't win the world cup if you can't keep the ball - but neither are true. The hard truth is that you don't have to play particularly well to win the World Cup; and, conversely, flamboyant sides don't tend to win. For the last forty years, the typical winner of the World Cup has more closely resembled Brazil 1994 than Brazil 1970. Italy won the last World Cup by putting in perhaps one good performance. (And who, by the way, would say that the Italy side in 2006 were 'in a different class' to England? - and I write all this as very much an admirer of Italy). Germany have qualified for final after final without ever turning it on. Brazil only won in 1994 when they adopted a Dunga-anchored pragmatism. Even France in 1998, who were a great side, stumbled and struggled at points on their route to the final.

Similarly, possession is overrated. We hear a lot of cooing about Barcelona, but it was Mourinho's Inter who won the Champions League this year. Playing quickly on the break and pressing when the opponents have the ball is a highly effective way of winning football matches, a style of play that is well within England's competence. But England will never win the World Cup unless they can lose the belief that there are other teams (usually with Latinate names) who are a Different Class and who (unlike England) Can Win. Still, breaking down that belief might prove a great deal harder than learning how to keep the ball.

As for tonight's game? Well, England rarely win the first game in the World Cup (one interesting syndrome is the way in which the same patterns repeat themselves tournament after tournament, with completely different players - something I'll return to in future posts.) Still, a number of teams have lost the first game and gone on to win the tournament. Pessimism clouds my judgement in respect of England, but I wouldn't be at all surprised by a draw. (Which will promote precisely the bout of self-loathing I wrote about above.)

Advance Coverage

2010-06-12T10:58:00.004+01:00

'This is the moment'

Living in New Zealand means having to get up in the middle of the night for most major sporting events, but especially football world cups, which are unfailingly scheduled with the needs of European viewers foremost in mind, needs that happen to be quite literally diametrically opposed to ours. Now getting up for one game a night is bad enough, but if there are two and the first one starts at 1.30 am while the second one starts at 6.15 am, it can really mess with your circadian rhythms, not to mention family life and work. So you reluctantly opt to record either one game or both. I say reluctantly because there is always something a little dissonant about watching a delayed coverage. It shatters that illusion always lurking in the back of the mind that your thoughts and prayers can influence real world events happening thousands of miles away, for one thing, but it also messes with the sense of being there, in and of the moment, that the telemediated coverage strives to instil in the viewer. On top of that, you find that you can no longer wake up to the news on the radio, or consult news websites, or get on to Facebook and so forth, or be in the company of other people for that matter. This morning for instance my eldest son's team was playing so we postponed watching the two opening games until we got back home. Later at the park I was involved in the following exchange:

ME Nobody tell me the overnight soccer* results, I recorded the games.
VARIOUS SOCCER MUMS Cries of 'okay', 'sure', vigorous nodding, etc.
ONE PARTICULAR SOCCER MUM. Who played?
ME Mexico and South Africa first, then France and Uruguay.
SHE Oh, yes, that one ended nil-nil.
ME Argh!

Even worse than that, is when somebody tells you that they know the score but of course they're not going to tell you, and then proceed to say that it was a great game (which in itself is a spoiler, dammit) or find other ways to give away - or make you paranoid that they might have given away - who the winner was.

Why knowing the result should matter is obvious enough: each play is a mini-performance whose outcome is not predetermined, and in that uncertainty lies much of the fascination of watching a sporting event, whether you feel personally invested in the outcome or not. Whereas the instant replay is all about admiring the skill and the athleticism and the tangling of bodies, or the emotions on display, and as such it is quite a different kind of experience. That's why it is slowed down, isn't it? It's already remediated in the form of a memory, a flashback.

But of course, as Richard Grusin teaches us and has Mark pointed out in the aftermath of the last tournament, contemporary media are about flashing forward as much as they are about flashing backwards; they see their task as preparing us for that moment of magic, the highlight reel play, the historic outcome. Let the memories begin, indeed.

And so this morning, during a replay of the opening goal of the tournament, by then less than ten minutes old (or several hours old, if you factor in when it was that I watched it), I heard the nameless FIFA commentator of the feed that is beamed to New Zealand say this:

This is the moment. This was the moment. And it will be one of the moments of this world cup. Whatever happens from here, it will be one of the most memorable strikes of this tournament.

Siphiwe Tshabalala's brilliant goal was being relived, but also pre-packaged as tournament highlight, flagged for the commemorative DVDs of the tournament, pursuant to the same logic that makes so many commentators these days anxiously dot their calls with cries of 'will this be the moment?', or preface every other corner or free kick with the words 'will they score?' What one detects at such moments is true anxiety, actual fear: that the sporting event that is being filmed and described to us, and that ought to be something quintessentially Real, might fail to deliver a single memorable moment, perhaps for the very reason that the whole world is watching; and that therefore the game itself, and then who knows, maybe even the whole tournament, might fail to take place**.

* That's what we have to call it in New Zealand, where football is reserved for rugby.
**Like, say, the 1994 World Cup.

The 39th Game

2010-06-12T07:50:00.002+01:00

My theory regarding tonight's England-USA game

USA are the toughest opponent in England's group and nowhere near as weak as they used to be - they beat Spain last year etc.

But being quick, strong and aggressive, while shaky at the back and short on technique, they look like a typical mid-table Premier League side.

In other words, they play the kind of football that this England side knows best. As good as the US team may be, it's generally Latin teams and their impertinent emphasis on ball retention that England are completely hapless against.

Generally.

hotly tipped

2010-06-12T07:33:00.002+01:00

Based on the opening day of World Cup 2010, the following commentary tropes look like being strong favourites to dominate the tournament:

- The 'colourful' native support.
- Their 'child-like' enthusiasm.
- References to (implicitly barefoot) villagers watching games projected on sheets.

Those watching in stadiums may well fare better, as the stewards' first aid training will hopefully cover anyone patronized to within an inch of their life.

If the words 'marvellous natural rhythm' pass Clive Tyldesley's lips at any stage my head may explode.