Even before he dished
out a supremely understated lesson in how to deconstruct a vaguely spirited yet laughably
ill equipped England side last Sunday night, watching Andrea Pirlo – the
concept as much as the man, the spectacle as much as the footballer –
was already my personal highlight of Euro 2012 so far.
No one
should need to qualify such a statement. This is a man, after all,
whose almost foppish physical nonchalance is complemented by what
seems like a cybernetically inclined ability to initiate attacks from
his own half, the kind of player who imbues the fundamental
simplicity of football as form with an aching beauty. Much has been
made of England's bizarre inability to quickly close down and
pressurize a thirty three year old deep lying playmaker who, despite
the renowned majesty of his technique, has never been blessed with
the most scintillating pace. Any pace at all, actually. We should
have shut him down. We should have pressed higher up the pitch,
packed the midfield, marked the potential recipients of those arcing,
crystalline passes out of the game. Of course, any or all of these
analyses are fundamentally wrongheaded, tacitly peddling, as they do,
the flawed logic that Pirlo is a player who exists as a product of
contemporaneity.
Lets get this straight:
Pirlo looks as if he could rock up to a party in pastel slacks and
loafers without socks and not look like a cunt. In my minds eye, he's
the footballing equivalent of what those hypnagogic dullards are
failing to capture, a manifestation of, simpler, intangible, scarier
times in another world that never actually existed. His very presence
amongst the dispiriting bipolarity of modern footballing avarice,
from the sexless, defeatist realism of Laurent Blanc's cowardly
tactical implosion against Spain to the World and European champions
oddly dissociated robo-posession-paranoia, Pirlo is a sort of
one man reclamation mission, like some dimension hopping spook
charged by Calcio's equivalent of John Connor to travel back in time
and battle against all the odds to stymie the inexorable rise of the
machines.
He's pure fantasy, is
Pirlo. He is, essentially, unreal. This might be a generational thing
on my part. I'm one of the last of our kind who will remember what
life was like before all the digitalized hyperinfo, before the acute
consumption anxieties fostered by large scale cultural
dematerialization. You have no idea how obsessed with this
actuality I am. I'm often crippled by it, rendered anhedonic for
hours on end, pressing refresh with the same mixture of perverse
relish and apocalyptic fear that grips the adherents of Opus Dei as
they flagellate the absolute fuck out of themselves for the big man
upstairs. At least those that come after us can bathe in the
excusable ignorance of their arbitrary birth dates, while those who
came before us were able to live out their wildest years with
something approaching an organic sense of temporality. If you thought
time flew then, imagine what
happens to a persons sense of self when, having had just over a
decade to adjust to the then prevalent speed at which culture is
produced and disseminated, corporate communication technology smashes
every one of those preconceptions to pieces amidst the onset of the
cyber-steam age. And you end up so completely free, so utterly
unburdened that you come out the other side incalculably
panic-stricken, terrified that you will end your days without having
been able to consume all
this shit, all of which sounds incredible.
You will die.
You won't
hear/read/see it all.
So, instead, you patch
together curious fictions from the data rubble, junkyard excavations
of inner space that eventually arrive at a kind of constantly
fragmenting, transitory mode of radical culture, one that encompasses
the actually pretty bloody Deluzian maximalism of, say, Rustie as
much as it did the self publishing CD-R and cassette boom of the
2000's. Which is paradoxical, really. The hand crafted, individually
numbered totems that spewed out of Vermont and Detroit, Glasgow and
Newcastle and a million other outposts of that free folk/noise nexus
thing were meant to be a bulwark against dematerialization. Most of
these groups still despise the
download culture. But the fact remains that the majority of their
admirers, whether through laziness, economic hardship or opposition
to the notion of intellectual property and subcultural product as
artefact, did download their stuff. This dichotomy was hardwired into
the very ethos of these groups though, folk like Sunburned Hand Of
The Man or early Charalambides, to name but two ostensibly pretty
divergent examples. In bypassing the traditional clidhes of the
clapped out MOJO humping linearity of musical history and
repositioning figures from the margins of mainstream culture (John
Fahey and Albert Ayler and Harry Smith in particular) as
transformative reference points, they had been prefiguring the
collapse of conventional material temporality that the advent of web
2.0, like some gauche, steroid loaded nutjob took a blowtorch to. No
one escapes this shit. Not really. We are attempting to map entirely
unnanvigated virtual terrain and anyone who reckons they know what's
really happening is a straight up fucking snake oil salesman. So we
create our own fictions, we recalibrate our own backstories and try
and grasp at something vaguely profound pre-sleep.
Sorry. This is meant to
be about Andrea Pirlo. And it honestly still is.
There he is right
now, pootering around somewhere between the empirical psyches and
collective unconsciousness of a the pre/post internet generation.
Probably in a Ferrari Daytona. And I know how he fits into my
particular fictionalized backstory, why watching him spray a football
about still seems important to me. The first game that I can actually
remember attending is now a veritable historic curiosity in itself.
It was the tale end of the 1992/93 season and the first match in
which me and Dad were ensconced in the Platt Lane “Family Stand”
of Maine Road, as opposed to the womblike, piss encrusted and utterly
threatening environs of The Kippax. Manchester City and Wimbledon
played out a harrowingly functional, meaningless end of season 1-1
draw, with Rick Holden scuffing one in off his baws' for us at the
death. This might have been the inaugural season of the Premier
League, but English football for your average bottom to mid table top
flight side was still fundamentally agricultural in its execution, a
percentage game of risk minimization and based around a defiantly
uncontinental predeliction for attrition that was a pretty accurate
reflection of the rampant xenophobia that still riddled the old
terraces. Maine Road itself was perhaps the most endearing, beautiful
shithole that I have ever laid eyes on. A bizarre melange of several
architectural failures, somehow pasted together by deluded chairman
Peter Swales inbetween televised,
proto-Brentian carcrashes, we were knee deep in a Moss Side,
engulfed in the immediate aftermath of one of the worst periods of
gang warfare Britain has ever seen, my overwhelming memories of my
early years as a City supporter tend to manifest themselves nasally:
horse shit, flat lager, soggy chips and piss (always piss).
This was the
footballing culture that I had been born into. Everything was falling
apart, rackety as fuck. Nothing had been painted for time.
Remember that shit about temporality and cassettes and that, that
stuff I was banging on about before? Well this is a bit like that.
Its hard to explain to anyone born after 1990 quite how intertwined
football and class still were – or at least felt – back then. As
football supporters, we were still licking our wounds from the last
round of top-down class war executed by the state against the
post-industrial regions, of which football had formed an integral
battleground. English football could barely be described as an
industry when Hillsborough struck. Sure, some clubs made money, some
made rather a lot of money, but 96 people might have had a chance of
coming home that day if football supporter wasn't just another
euphemism for how much economic leverage a person had, for whether or
not they were to be herded like disposable cattle into plainly unsafe
environments and (un)policed to their deaths. We sure as fuck werent
“consumers” then. No one went to any great lengths to ensure that
our “match day experience” was enhanced. In this light, its
perhaps easier to understand why the majority of less
glamorous English clubs retreated into the stultifying comfort of
the long ball game, the big fat anti-corporate fuck you kick-and-rush
reflex still practiced today – albeit with genuine sports science
and gluttonous pro-zone analysis - with admirable gumption by the
likes of Tony Pulis and Sam Allardyce.
(Sorry. This is
definitely about Andrea Pirlo. I promise)
Into this sporting
equivalent of national class based self harm blazed Channel 4's Gazzetta Football Italia in 1992, followed two years
later by the first truly post-Fordist World Cup: USA 94. The latter, often derided by the purists, was the first World Cup that I
can remember with any vividness. The outrageously bright transatlantic
satellite feeds forever rendering the genius of Georghi Hagi and
Hristo Stoichkov, the Cracked Actor era Maradonna gurn and the
pathalogically pugnacious tight-spot squirm of Romario into
scintillating memory bank keepers. But above all I remember Franco
Baresi and Roberto Baggio. The all consuming totality of the twin
tragedy at the heart of the Azzuri's penalty kicks capitulation to the most
functional Brazil side in living memory remains a blight on my youth.
Even at such a tender age, and possibly because of my upbringing as a
fourth generation football supporter, I was, and remain, obsessed by
the concept of masculinity. I'm unhealthily attracted to artistic
depictions of men whose presuppositions and hopes are collapsing all
around them, from Bigwig in Watership Down to
the new Bill Orcutt record. Just one of those things I guess. Baresi's insanely heroic
performance in the final and his complete emotional implosion as the ultimate prize gradually slipped away from the finest defender of his generation probably
sealed the deal on this lifelong obsession.
Keith Morris of Black
Flag and the Circle Jerks once described his first encounter with
punk rock as “like a fucking comet hitting the planet... I had
never heard or seen anything like it”, which neatly sums up the
insanely exotic allure of one game and one highlights package a week
streamed straight into our living rooms from a country that could
then quite comfortably claim to have the best league in the world. In
1993 Gazzetta Football Italia seemed like sci-fi. Having been served
up the turgid dunderheadedness of a Fitzroy Simpson, Mike Quigley and
Andy Dibble for the previous years of my existence, this was an otherworldly addition to my usual Sunday evening itinerary.
There was something different about the Italian game, something so
much more profound and expressive than what our season ticket treated
us to on a weekly basis. At least thats how it seemed back then.
Everything feels monumental when you're 8 years old. Even the minor
teams, the Padova's, Reggiana's and Chievo's of this world, seemed to
have a playmaker. Someone who could make time for himself on the
ball. Someone who didn't shirk under pressure. Someone who slowed the
game down. Someone patient.
Someone exactly like
Andrea Pirlo, then. The possibility of witnessing the birth of a
future mythology in real time is one of the few elements of
unpredictability in modern football that international tournaments
serve to enhance. My aforementioned preoccupations with the inherent
tragedy of conventional masculinities often leads me to pay
especially close attention to those players who know this might be
their last tournament, their final chance to etch a legend. I
make no apologies for this romantic filleting. Zidane's
magnificently original chest-butt represents the apex of this
tradition, for the true legend in the making must be prepared to do
things on their own terms, to never sell out or play the game by
someone else’s rules. Like Zidane was then, Pirlo is currently
possessed of an inescapable air of pathos, a sense that every pass
might be his last. The modern day obsession for absurd slo-mo hi
definition reaction shots of players has only heightened his
existential appeal, the total freedom he attains with every
calculated ball into his front men, each beguiling slip down the line
to his supporting fullbacks representing a man fundamentally out of
sync with modernity. And therein lies his real heroism. I don't buy
into the argument that Vicente Del Bosque's all conquering Spanish
side have become particularly boring to watch (that fault lies in the
adventurousness or otherwise of the opposition they face), but it appears
self evident that they are a by-product of information overload,
obsessive hoarders of possession like so many MP3's on an external
hard drive, terrified to give the ball away, to let go, they are the
ultimate multitaskers, resting as they work, working when they rest.
But Pirlo! Pirlo plays
Slow Football. Reflective football. Finding time, appreciating space
and the moments between actions. Coincidentally, the new LP by
Trapist arrived on my door step just days before Italy's first game in the group stages. As its
title suggests, The Golden Years shimmers throughout with a luminous
sense of unravelling time and space. Its dedication to patience
in an age of maximalism is the key entry point to its multiple modes
of emotional interrogation – in parts it is truly, glisteningly
beautiful. Tentative gestures, notes left hanging in the air
pensively. Its magnificently sad in places, moments of up front noise
and textured caterwauls are often immediately paired back to a
regretful, almost embarrassed minor key supplication. It often retreats into
near silence, a powerful expression of introspection in an age of
hyperinformation.
I
reckon Andrea would probably dig it.