Blast this infernal winter weather!

Here I sit, hunched over my writing table, intermittently convulsing on account of my wretched coughing. After several days in isolation I felt a great need to pass beyond my chamber door and take the air. Having soothed my condition with a vial of cough medicine and a little gin I felt in fine enough spirits to take in some cultural diversion. A mazy walk through the streets of London saw me arrive at the princely abode of an acquaintance of an acquaintance who, I heard tale, was something of a collector of fine art. Perhaps he was surprised to see me, soaked in the rain as I was, and so my entry had to be somewhat forcibly accomplished, but never mind! And this, gentle reader, is how I came to stand in front of Edvard Munch’s early 1930s painting Unwelcome Visitors.

True, I was not in the most coherent of mindsets and, perhaps, the medicines that held my illness at bay contributed to a feeling of wooziness that impacted upon all five of my senses, but you must believe me in what I say. Casting my gaze on the painting I could scarcely believe my eyes, for before me on Munch’s canvas stood none other than Professor Arsène Wenger. Looking glass to hand, I embarked upon my exegesis, the weather now quite forgotten.

Art historians, no doubt, would tell us that the figure aiming the rifle at the unwelcome visitors is Munch himself, who painted this work, alongside several others, to recount a traumatic dispute in which he became embroiled. Here Munch has taken flight and retreated to his home, whence he repels his assailants. Walled up within his home – his fortress – Munch will, evidently, protect it by any means. Yet how can one not regard this image without being reminded of Mr Wenger, himself battered and bruised, not by physical confrontation but by the rigours of time, who has taken to buttressing himself within his own ideological homestead, which he will defend until the bitter end.

Of course it makes so much sense that it would be Munch that would chronicle the travails of A. Wenger. For an artist who never shied away from the portrayal of decay – physical and mental – The Professor is the subject par excellence. Has he not been the curator of a decay notable for its painful inevitability and attrition? From the Invincibles of the early 2000s to the modern day Arsenal, where key talents have not been replaced and both established and promising talents have been stolen away by rival clubs with increasing ease, Arsenal have indeed been in the grip of decay.

Back to the painting at hand then! Regard the table to the left of the image. It is well know that Munch himself liked a drink, and indeed we see bottles and glasses strewn across the table, containing a variety of mixtures. Like a chemist, Mr Wenger too has experimented with many concoctions – this one lacking a little bit sharpness, this one lacking a little bit maturity. These are Monsieur Wenger’s beloved creations – Wilshire, Gibbs, Jenkinson, et al. Tellingly Wenger/Munch stands guard between the trespassers and his experiments, which are themselves positioned around the table – it is as if he fighting to safeguard the space that these experiments, these teams, need to make their mark on the league table. And make their mark they may yet do: there are no coasters in sight.

As for those outside, they can only look on as the venerable Wenger lets his project unfold as he sees fit. These interlopers could be anyone: the Arsenal board, the fans, the press, or the upturned studs of the Stoketon Rovers (of The North) players. What matters is that these voices emanate from the outside; there is only one way in and Arsène has it covered. He’ll shoot dead any man who interferes! And the police would never catch him: they did not see the incident. Of course this self-imposed martyrdom should not completely fool us: let us not forget that there is something evangelic about isolationism.

Backed by a critically acclaimed (and popularly adored) film franchise, Batman is currently DC Comics’s most beloved superhero. Spare a thought, then, for his equally famous, albeit less in vogue, peer. For in truth, it is hard to write a good Superman story.

The Man of Steel may have won over the imaginations of impressionable 1940s children, but their initial wonderment strikes us as being equally naïve as that of the pioneering cinema-goers who fled in the wake of the images appearing before them on celluloid. This is in part resultant of the fact that Superman has fairly prosaic powers – super strength and flight are ten a penny in the Marvel and DC universes – but more than this it is because seeing him facing off against his rogue gallery quickly gets boring once you realise that he can do pretty much anything. Superman Returns really jumped the shark when our hero lifted an entire continent of kryptonite – if you can still lift a continent when your Achilles heel is exposed then perhaps it is not so much of an impediment. (This, incidentally, is why one of the primary aims of the Post-Crisis DC continuity was to depower Superman to a degree – the notion of fallibility was important to the strength of the story.)

Tellingly, DC’s most popular franchise character, Batman, is so fallible and flawed that upon consideration one could conclude that he is not only in the wrong, but even insane. Frank Millar’s grim portrayal of the Caped Crusader as a kind of Nietzschean übermensch hinted at the arbitrariness of the character’s ethical stance, whilst Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight offers a good account of how Batman’s presence engenders escalation. He’s not the hero that Gotham needs, but the hero that they deserve.

Watching Lionel Messi play football puts me in mind of reading a Superman comic. Not only is he clearly better than all of the other players with whom he shares the pitch, but he makes it all look so easy. It is painfully obvious that he can do almost anything that he wants on the playing field. Against Bayer Leverkusen in the 2011-12 Champion’s League he made it look like chipping the ball into the net was the easiest way to score possible, rather than being a deft skill. What Superman is to comics, Messi is to football. We encounter, therefore, a parallel problem: is Messi so good that he is boring? Does the seeming inevitability of his brilliance have a detrimental effect on the narrative of the game?

If we are in any way suggesting that conflict breeds drama and intrigue then it is, perhaps, no coincidence that if we were to look for a footballing counterpart to Batman we might be put in mind of Arsène Wenger. Wenger shares the Caped Crusader’s fundamentalist sense of mission and, like Batman, is not averse to training kids to further his message. If Wenger is amongst the most compelling figures in football then he is also a manager who is always struggling to enforce his principles whilst kicking against the pricks. He faces real challenges, powerful enemies and visceral obstacles.

Returning to Messi, then, perhaps we can take our lesson from the Man of Steel since, as we mentioned, whilst it is hard to write a good Superman story, it is not impossible. The most gratifying Superman stories are often when he is faced with a problem – this is why Lex Luthor is the best villain in his rogues gallery. As a cerebral villain Luthor possesses all of the moral flaws that Superman lacks and embodies everything that the Man of Tomorrow is opposed to. Brainiac and Mr. Mxyzptlk also offer interesting challenges that transcend both the limp contests offered by nobodies such as Prankster and slugfests with foes such as 90s pointy-rock nonsense Doomsday. If we look at Messi’s opponents we might observe that the challenge offered by most teams offer no real challenge to him. Within La Liga, Real Madrid and Messi’s arch nemesis Cristiano Ronaldo may provide a worthy challenge, but this challenge resembles more of a brainless brawl than a battle of wits. It is as if a 1990s comic writer invented Cristiano Ronaldo specifically to come along so that he and Messi could punch each other again, and again, and again…

Superman never really fought individuals – rather he fought against the very idea of evil. He stood for good, a concept which is so wholesome as to appear utterly unglamorous to cynical audiences unaccustomed to symbolism over realism. In a comparable way, Messi’s battle is not against Ronaldo, Mourinho or Madrid. Rather it is against everything that is wrong with football. It is against gamesmanship, against money, against ego – against whatever is bad. He plays for the very joy of football. To watch him in action is to fall in love with the game that he also embodies. Unlike Xavi, Messi is not soluble into the idea of FC Barcelona – he is bigger than this, he is better than this. He is not the player that we deserve, but he is the player that we need.

At the dawn of the 2012-13 Premier League season, one of the most interesting narratives revolves around the fate of Liverpool FC. Historically one of the biggest names in football, Liverpool are in a sorry state now – venerable patriarch King ‘Kenny’ Dalglish not only failed to stop the rot, he may have accelerated it.

But now hot, young managerial slut Brendon Rodgers has a chance to change everything.[1] He has been charged with nothing less than a rebooting of Liverpool. One of the biggest cultural changes that he is expected to implement relates back to the style of football that Rodgers advocated whilst at Swansea: a possession-based game that has drawn comparisons with the fare offered up by Barcelona and Spain and their Velcro-booted tiki-taka tykes. Pass-ace Joe Allen is the order of the day; the delightfully retro Andy Carroll is jetsam. Whilst this footballing ideology is certainly impressive from a technical or scientific point of view, some questions remain about its efficacy. In advance of Mr. Rodgers’s Grand Project, then, allow me to offer some thoughts about the paradox that haunts the possession-game. Unfortunately, in order to achieve this, we will have to briefly review our Schelling.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was not a football fan and, entirely unrelatedly, never offered a critique of the possession game. If he had, however, he might not have had to stray too far from his philosophy of creation. As we all know: in the beginning was the Word. According to Schelling the Word is a contraction in the guise of an expansion. When a subject pronounces a word he contracts his being outside of himself, hypostatising his being in an external sign. When pronouncing ‘I’, the ‘I’ pronounced is outside of the self who pronounces it – the subject-self posits its unity in an external signifier. Consequently, ‘creation means that I reveal, hand over to the Other, the innermost essence of my being.’[2] Of course, this contraction represents the subject imperfectly. In his reading of Schelling, Slavoj Žižek sees him as coming upon what Lacan would later term the problematic of the vel, a forced choice that is constituent of a subject:

The subject either persists in himself, in his purity, as the void of pure $, and thereby loses himself in empty expansion; or he gets out of himself, externalizes himself, by way of ‘contracting’ or ‘putting on’ a signifying feature, and therefore alienates himself, that is, he ceases to be what he is.[3]

Or in Schelling’s words:

[T]he subject can never grasp itself as what it is, for precisely in attracting itself it becomes an other…either it leaves itself, then it is as nothing, or it attracts-contracts itself, then it is an other and not identical with itself.[4]

Thus the choice between something and nothing is such that the something is also a something-else: ‘either it remains still (remains as it is, thus pure subject) and there is no life and it is itself as nothing, or it wants itself, then it becomes an other.’[5] The Word resolves the pre-symbolic antagonism at the expense of self-alienation, from a subject to its imperfect symbolic representation; the pure subject is never represented in a signifier. This loss of self-identity is the price of the Word.

Consider now possession football. Here the ball circulates around the pitch ad infinitum. It is all very controlled; all very tidy. If done well, these simple, low-risk passes make it possible to retain the ball with relative ease. Yet maintaining this possession does not win games – for a game to be won a goal must be scored. Now for a goal to be scored means that at some point the possession game must be interrupted. There must be a shot, a mazy dribble, or a daring through ball, and the increased risk in executing this manoeuvre means that the ball may well be lost. Reflecting on our Schelling, perhaps we could describe this as such: in order for a goal to arise (for a subject to become) it is necessary to interrupt the cyclical abyss of possession football (an abyss since, ultimately, possession statistics mean nothing with regards to winning games) through a gesture of contraction (Zusammenziehung, in Schelling’s terms) – a risky operation such as a shot or through ball, that must appear as a rupture in the possession that preceded it.

To summarise, then, the problem with possession football is that as an ideology it is undermined by the apparent paradox that any example of its effectiveness can only be understood as a break with its ideological core. When a team is overly dedicated to the maintenance of possession they forget the importance of scoring. At their most self-indulgent, both Barcelona and Spain fall foul of this. Swansea too, for all the media encouragement about them playing the right way,[6] made their lives much harder by dogmatising their possession game. Against Newcastle in 2012 Swansea had 68% of the possession, but the only statistic that counted at the full time whistle was the 2-0 scoreline in favour of the Magpies.

Rodgers’s progress at Liverpool will be interesting to follow, as will the progress of his successor at Swansea. Regardless of his mixed managerial career, the appointment of Michael Laudrup is a very exciting development. Indeed, watching how his tenure with the Swans progresses will be one of the more romantic stories of the season; certainly the 5-0 trouncing of Norwich was a promising start. Whether Laudrup – not quite possessing ‘Barcalona DNA’ (to quote diminutive ideologue Xavi ‘eyebrows’ Hernandez), but certainly exposed to a strain of it – decides to maintain Rodger’s style is yet to be seen. No team has an obligation to aesthetics, but perhaps we should heed the words of Mr. Ajax himself, Sjark Swart, who, commenting on Van Gaal’s interpretation of total football, lamented: ‘Many games you are sleeping! On television, they say “Ajax seventy per cent ball possession”. So what? It’s not football. The creativity is gone.’ The ball is in your court Mr Rodgers. Don’t be too possessive with it.

Walking through the endlessly convoluted streets of Palermo last week, I began to notice a particular pitch of silence over the car horns and swallowed Sicilian vowels. Football was not making its voice heard. No shirts drying on rusting balconies, no posters in cafés; one square did yield a dusty five-a-side game, where a boy in a Buffon kit performed endless elasticos, but the old-wordly, provincial, Southern passion that I had naïvely expected was swamped by sultry indifference. It might as well have been London.

Another indifference materialised, too. Palermo is a port city, one of the oldest and most storied in the Mediterranean, whose entire fetid and unreconstructed heritage is a product of the water, and yet, as per the local expression, as a town it turns its back on the sea. The longue durée of post-war redevelopment has preferred to concentrate on backstreets minutiae and painstaking church jobs rather than marina bars and apartments, let alone maritime industry. This elusiveness, even self-denial, made me wonder about the symbiosis between ports and football, the manner in which different seas weather teams in their own azure image.

Some effort is required to think in properly maritime terms. We are inclined to misunderstand the sea, or else not to see it at all; our eyes glance off the surface of that mythological non-place, the end of life: here be monsters. The sea is ahistorical, without topography. These projections may be reassuring for those seeking to sink their feet ever more firmly into the sand, but they are hardly convincing. The sea is a thing, with its own seascapes and seamarks, which can be charted and inhabited.[1] Indeed, given how trade has contributed to today’s landlife, it can reasonably be stated (in Derek Walcott’s words) that ‘The sea is History.’ Of course, these marine topographies vary. The Atlantic is cold and violent, traversed only hardily; it is a seamass often figured parallel to the landmass on the other shore (the MLS then is some strange, unmapped new country, imagined only in satirical terms from the comforts of the Brittany beaches). Conversely, the Mediterranean, as David Abulafia constantly affirms, is warm, inviting, manageable. It is made to the measure of man, and as such can be thought of on its own terms.

These terms are ripe with connotations, and they have spawned a raft of intriguing, infuriating, and ineffably Mediterranean clubs. What is the character of the ports they spring from? Free of the continental concerns of agriculture, ancestry, possession, and frontiers, the fishbowl of the Mediterranean has magicked up communities without territory but endowed with great wealth, sophistication, and influence (on pasta, pigments, porticos, and on and on). The guarantees of this cultural weight were always in a manner distant, locked up in some other seaside province, reached by ploughing the febrile, labile space of the convenient sea itself. Perhaps, in as much as the Mediterranean is a positive historical site, its principle historical attribute has been its traversability, its negative capability.

Yet cultural weight is not political force, and rarely have these ports overwhelmed the stolid industry of the capital. What is left from this tug-of-war between land and sea are a long string of coastal teams that fascinate the epicurist but never dominate for long periods. The potential of the sea is expressed in the archival significance, one-off triumphs, cup runs, or brief dazzlings of Napoli, Valencia, Cagliari, Hajduk Split, Trieste, even Marseille. Barcelona stand out as the exceptions, but, as every schoolboy now knows, Barcelona exist only in as much as Madrid do (and vice versa); they are a coastal club craning their necks back towards the dusty centre.[2] Like the sea, these achievements are made to the measure of man; the Mediterranean has enriched men, as the landmass has empowered peoples. In this individualistic sense, perhaps, clubs like Valencia and Cagliari are living proof of the validity of the dangerous liberal notion linking trade and democracy: the labile sea provides each sailor and his shoreline the chance to partake on an equal footing in the process of building a cosmopolitan cultural burden. As Jacques Rancière has it, ‘the almuron, the tang of brine, is always too close… The sea smells of sailors, it smells of democracy.’[3]

Which brings me back to the petulant backstreets of Palermo. Unione Sportiva Città di Palermo is impoverished even by coastal standards, with its three losses in Coppa Italia finals and a handful of underwhelming UEFA Cup appearances. My host, Giovanni, told me that generations had grown accustomed to supporting Juventus. Maybe the Palermitans turn their back on the sea in affront at its paucity, a symptom of the old Sicilian tradition of common goods vanishing, whether siphoned-off or plundered. Maybe the moguldom of Maurizio Zamparini can rekindle some of that old Mediterranean entrepreneurial spirit and enliven the five-a-sides again. Yet one thing about Palermo is for me still wonderfully redolent of the sea: its affair with il bomber tascabile, Fabrizio Miccoli.

Giovanni did not take kindly to being told he resembled the Palermo figurehead. Eventually we settled upon a likeness to Di Natale, and went about the evening unscathed. Miccoli, he said, had too dark a complexion, too unshaven: a Salentine specimen. Yet it is this alien nature, alongside Miccoli’s seemingly illogical devotion to the club of Palermo that makes him, in our reading, so utterly Palermitan and Mediterranean. It is common knowledge that Miccoli is an avid Lecce fan, who has only been able to form one other emotional bond in his career, with his Sicilian adopters.[4] The way in which this unreformed ultra can embody the humours of another team is surely made possible by the sea. Miccoli is homesick, to be sure, but his is the nostalgia of the sailor, always on the move, never settled enough for the melancholy to become despondent. Miccoli has already failed to woo Juventus enough to make a break in Turin. In a country split between earthy metropoles and dashing coastline, clearly he suits the saltier side of calcio. If the Mediterranean is a negative channel, then every marine breeze carries the scent of a hundred homes from which to be estranged. Palermo is just one club of many that might offer this respite; why not fall in love with such an indolent, indifferent town?

Why does the dog wag its tail?
Because the dog is smarter than the tail.
If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.

It should not strike us as odd that discourse-about-football has not received as much attention as football-itself. Yet, eager to entertain, it is this dry topic that this piece addresses. We can console ourselves by remembering that this topic is important, at least. After all, it would be naïve to suggest that our understanding of football is divorced from the terminology though which we comprehend it and since it is in our discourse-about-football that these terms are shared amongst us, it should be fairly clear how reflection on the way we talk about football relates back to how we understand the sport itself. Furthermore, I suggest, this discussion is all the more relevant given pernicious tendencies that have arisen in what we might, tentatively, term the blogosphere.

It is time for some pedagogy. We will take it as read that there are, in the broadest of forgivable senses, four main subcategories that we should consider. These are the historic (which tells stories of football across time), reportage (which relays information about recent occurrences as they are immediately observed), gossip and speculation (the salacious and gratuitous whirl of transfer rumours, managerial switches and club crises), and tactical-statistical reductionism. It is the latter upon which we will reflect.

Tactical-statistical reductionism is the favoured discourse of the football intelligentsia. These are the acolytes of Jonathan Wilson and Michael Cox, whose pioneering work has now taken on a rather stale feel in the hands of others. What are the characteristics of this form of discussion? Well for one it frowns upon localism. Embracing the international aspect of football, the football intelligentsia pour scorn upon those who display ignorance of developments abroad. Alan Shearer fell foul of this when he opined that Hatem Ben Arfa was something of an unknown. There is also a feeling that most football journalism (or reportage) is falling short – in their eyes it is superficial and fails to provide a broad enough scope. Further to this is the reductionist element in their appraisal of the game – tactics and statistics become magical indices offering deep insight into the intricacies of the game. Perhaps a generation raised on Championship Manager was ripe for such a development. At its extremes this crudity can lead to a ‘top trumps’ style of discussing football – 4-3-3 beats 4-4-2 and so on.

A corollary of the veneration of tactics and statistics is that those managers and pundits who show no evidence of tactical astuteness are shunned. It should be noted, of course, that many of these judgements amount to little more than speculation: we never know who is a tactician and who is not – we are not in the dressing room to see what gestures and hollers Harry Redknapp produces to inspire his players. Fixated upon tactics and their enlightened appraisal of the game, the football intelligentsia chatter endlessly about formations and the definition and redefinition of roles. Whilst I would not want to advocate a linguistic theory of total difference I would question whether this terminology is developed enough for such usage to be truly valuable. After all, perhaps one man’s trequartista is another’s fantasista.

It is not my intention to disparage any attempt to introduce a greater degree of scrutiny and wit into discourse-about-football, but I am eager to dispel any attempted linguistic triumphalism. The language of the footballing intelligentsia is not inherently better than the other modes of discourse. Principally, we should note how dull it is to reduce everything to discussion about the bare mechanics of things. In doing so we miss so much of what is interesting in football – the metanarratives, the comedy, the aesthetics. Football stripped of this becomes horribly sterile and devoid of the Life that infuses it. But further to this, it is delusional on our part to think that tactical-statistical reductionism is the ‘real’ football at the expense of this Life. In and through obsessive classification and reclassification the football intelligentsia seek to control football with their terminology. Yet, in these attempts, the tail wags the dog – the language, in seeking to enframe and control, restricts rather than facilitates discussion. Rather than demonstrating any real intelligence we bear witness only to the ‘clever ordering of ideas’. It is not incumbent upon us, however, to insist that football possesses an essential irreducibility; complexity does not defeat categorisation, but it does show why our classification is inappropriate. The football pundit is not a lepidopterist, pinning back the wings and labelling the specimen which, now lacking its natural majesty, is reduced to a mere exhibition, or a curio. The confrontation with the excess of living-football demands more than this – it demands a cataphasis, a wealth of description that serves to demonstrate the poverty of categorisation.

There is room for all of the above discourses. Certainly it is important that there is a degree of freedom for one to discuss football as one enjoys – it is, after all, meant to be a bit of fun, and one should not feel pressured to conform to a discourse that is alien: consider how bizarre it sounds to hear football consultant Iain Dowie extolling the importance of Pep Guardiola’s ‘brain lines’ on the European Football Show. But, given the simultaneous poverty and munificence of language, we might want to posit a further mode of discourse. This discourse would be properly interdisciplinary, recognising that football is in life and that life is lived in. It would recognise football as an aesthetic and ethical endeavour, as much as a statistic-based pugilism. Such a discourse would not be inward-looking and po-faced, but rather would take itself all together less seriously, embracing the inherent humour of paradox. ‘The ball is round’: the lesson here has always been one of ludic unpredictability, not glum fatalism.

Yeah, I’m losing my edge. 
I’m losing my edge.
The kids are coming up from behind.
I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge to the kids from Naples and from Bilbao.
But I was there.
I was there in 1969.
I was there at the first Ajax European Cup final in Madrid.

I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear on Twitter and all that.
I’m losing my edge to the internet seekers who can tell me the line ups of every World Cup finalist from 1962 to 1978.
I’m losing my edge.
To all the kids in Dortmund and Lisbon.
I’m losing my edge to the art-school Bilardistas in replica kits and borrowed nostalgia for the largely forgettable seventies.
But I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge, but I was there.
I was there.
But I was there.
I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge.
I can hear the footsteps every night on the Twitter.

But I was there.
I was there in 2011 at the first War Room in a loft in Angel.
I was watching the Clasico with much patience.
I was there when AVB picked his first team.
I told him, “Don’t do it that way. You’ll never win a thing.”
I was there.
I was the first guy playing 3-4-3 with wingbacks.
I played it away from home. Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.
I was there.
I’ve never been wrong.

I used to work for Setanta Sports.
I had all the news before anyone.
I was there in the Football Weekly studio with James Richardson.
I was there in Glasgow during the great Old Firm clashes.
I woke up naked at the International Stadium in Yokohama in 2002.
But I’m losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
And they’re actually really, really nice.
I’m losing my edge.

I heard you have a compilation of every good goal ever scored in Serie A.
Every great goal by Roberto Baggio.
All the goals for Brescia.
All the Sinisa Mihajlovic free kicks.
I heard you have a VHS of every FA Cup Final from the 80s.
I heard that you have the home kit of every seminal Bayern Munich team – 1974, ’75, ’76.
I heard that you have a Panini album for every good ’60s team and another from the ’70s.
I hear you’re buying a trequartista and a regista and are throwing your target man out the window because you want to play a possession game.
You want a 95% pass completion rate.
I hear that you and your team have sold your trequartistas and bought false nines.
I hear that you and your team have sold your false nines and bought target men.
I hear everybody that you signed is more relevant than everybody that I signed.

But have you seen my blog?

Matthias Sindelar, Gigi Meroni, Oviedo, the Yugoslavian national team, Didi, Obdulio Varela, The Black Diamond, Il Gran Torino, Laszlo Kubala, Pichichi, Kanu and Okocha, the Cat of Prague, Cubillas, John Charles, Bella Guttmann, Piola, St Pauli, Fritz Walter, Dominique Rocheteau, Eduard Streltsov, Nereo Rocco, Robbie Rensenbrink, Netto, Stade de Reims, Estudiantes, Gilberto Yearwood, Brian Wilson, Rui Costa, Asparuhov, Helmuth Duckadam, Masopust, Gudjohnsen and Gudjohnsen, De Kuip, Cristiano Lucarelli, Maradona (“Quien es Butcher?”), Jimmy Johnson, Pietro Vierchowod, Aleksandr Chivadze, Reading 4! Pompey 7!, Dr Lobanovskiy, Savicevic, Zizinho, Hugo Meisl and the Wunderteam, Super Depor, Bobek, the Cosmos, the Cosmos, the Cosmos, the Cosmos.

You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.

More than most things – and more than we often care to admit – football reminds us that genuine gravity and significance resides in the marginal, the ornamental, and the fragmented. Football is a Kunstkammer, a cabinet of curiosities, stacked with oddly carved exhibits in exotic, fading colours, all witness to the fact that nominal ‘centres’ often declare their worth more brashly than their real import would suggest. The nominal centre has to perform its own self-importance. If Bidone d’Oro winner and weary Sylvester Stallone lookalike Diego Milito doesn’t make the well-timed run, that Swiss-watch-passing of Sneijder’s crumbles into rusty cogs.

To draw on an obvious geopolitical example, particularly pervasive to Old World football: capital cities and their clubs exist on different planes of relevance.[1] Although they can call upon the broadest urban congregations, and so tend to reside in echoing stadia and the upper reaches of their national leagues, capital clubs in the grand old towns of this continent tend to lack something: the surly industrial force of the factory towns, or the whistling bravado of provincial upstarts. Roma and Lazio have fewer Scudetti between them than Bologna or Genoa. Arsène Wenger’s calcified decline and Roman Abramovich’s nervous shimmy have prevented London from mounting the long historical charge that might have overturned the North West. Hertha Berlin barely merits a shrug. Amsterdam, perhaps, has some international legacy; but surely, within Holland, Ajax exist largely as one pole of a dialectic with Feyenoord, sophisticates to the Rotterdam dockworkers, a polished reflection of football’s roots.

Paris is an exaggeration of the above tropes, a stereotype/archetype of aloof detachment and irritatingly justified cultural self-satisfaction that has never been translated onto the pitch. There is something pleasing, for our purposes here, that PSG, the club that now stands alone for ‘Paris’, was injected into its bloodstream only forty one years ago. PSG and Paris stand as a reminder that when the importance and style of one’s identity is taken as self-evident, and put on display as a capital centrepiece, an ineluctable deferral occurs: the frame overpowers the painting, identity is ossified and never lived-in, always put off to some later date; perfected, perhaps, but untouchable.[2]

Maybe Paris suffers so from its deferral of identity because France as a whole has a more pronounced history than others of organic, contingent, and self-limiting teams. As we discussed elsewhere, the history of French football is most often that of middling towns, municipal activism, provincial patrons presiding over single industries, and a stubborn semi-resistance to full-blown urbanity. In this context, it is much simpler for a club to inhabit and reflect a town; the natural limits of growth maintain an image of manageable identity, like a carefully pruned tree. This wholeness must be what made it possible for these topiary pieces to garner national affection: see Stade Reims in the 1950s, or Saint-Etienne in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Paris, conversely, has born the ornamental hallmarks of centralising power (Haussmann, above all), whilst lacking the everyday enactment of its political identity. It has only had a mayor, for instance, with the requisite system of local government, since 1977.[3] When Haussmann flattened the squalid, medieval remnants of the city, its lived-in identity, it seems, fled into the suburbs that have sprawled outwards ever since. Paris’ two ‘great’ teams prior to PSG, Red Star Paris and Racing Club de Paris, with their scattering of pre-war cups, belonged not to Paris per se, but to particular suburbs. Indeed, if we were so inclined politically (and let’s assume that we are), we might say that since Haussman, and since ‘Paris’ has meant his boulevards and Mansard roofs and arcades and late-period Woddy Allen films, the city has been deprived of an organic, contingent identity precisely because it has had the working class sense of itself expunged. There is something tyrannical, hence cynical, about the ornate Paris that remains; one that can’t be touched, or experienced as the chocolate box it somehow longs to be.[4]

And it is hardly controversial to call PSG a cynical club. Founded to the west of Paris proper, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, by Francis Borelli, in the 1970s and ‘80s the haul was three leagues, one cup, and little European progress: hardly gluttonous. Removed from the world of homogeneous-local identities, attempts to invent a tradition in Paris have always relied upon Big Business Sponsorship. It is deliciously appropriate that the Big Business that PSG’s owners turned to in the early 1990s was the television giant Canal+: broadcast sport is a fine reflection of the deferral of something that should and can be tangible. The 1990s, which saw three Coupes de France, two Coupes de la Ligue, and another league, and a Cup Winners’ Cup, also saw average attendances rise from around 20,000 to around 40,000. This is PSG’s archaeology. Money, which will go anywhere, had capitalised the capital.[5]

The above is rather sharp-tongued. It is only fair to concede that by the 2000s, fans of PSG had come to be representative, in a quantifiable, demographic sense, of the capital more broadly; in terms of age, employment, and ethnicity. Since the prehistorical 1970s, Paris as a city has become more Parisian in the sense that it has embraced suburbanity as its proper identity. Paris is now the Paris region, more than it is the royal capital. Both club and town have settled into a deferred identity made more comfortable by money and success. Although, even this New Suburban is a more conceptual, assimilated label: Red Star and Racing Club, at least, were organically suburban.

What’s more, the ossified architecture of Paris, the intangible boulevards, have thrown up their own problems: uncannily real problems derived from a town which cannot be lived-in. Since 1973, PSG have resided in the Parc des Princes, located, awkwardly, in the bourgeois area of Saint-Denis. The invention of tradition and the more raw facts of football culture have not always avoided friction. Not everything can be deferred. From 1979, Borelli, no doubt perturbed by the atmosphere at the Parc, began to encourage the more vociferous fans in the Kop de Boulogne end. Since that time, the Kop has maintained an uneasy reputation for racism and violence, a self-conscious replication of British hooliganisms. It is hardly difficult to read this as a terrace revolt from banlieue fans to the gentrified environs into which they must place themselves in order to see their club play. The issue has since been complicated by the induction into the opposing Auteuil end of Italian, tifo-style carnival and choreography, a knowing rejection of the unironic aggression of the Kop: for some years, the most highly pitched battle of a matchday was that between Kop and Auteuil, with PSG themselves something of an afterthough, a flâneur’s reverie.

PSG, then, has for much of its short history, exhibited the nervous-hysteric symptoms of the scandalised bourgeois, entirely proper given the context. Merely in enacting the rituals of a football club, it unleashes a series of bipolar disorders into that famously romantic night air, questions of identity that the city itself is unable to answer: banlieues solidarity or white discontent; bourgeois Saint-Denis or bearpit Parc des Princes; firms or tifosi. This analysis is trenchant, but there is a pathological sense to it. PSG suffer from a kind of desperation that, for instance, it is impossible to imagine Saint-Etienne succumbing to in their snug Loire indolence. The hysteria of the king, as of the magnate, is always the shriller, more unhinged and comedic.

The avid follower of football would be hard-pressed to deny the satisfaction that arises from witnessing a sliding tackle. The masters of this art, such as Alessandro Nesta, are a breed apart from those we would term ‘effective defenders’, who, whilst strong in the tackle, are a swarthier batch of bastards: Pietro Vierchowod, Walter Samuel and Ivano Blason, for example. But what is it that encourages us to make such as distinction? What is it that makes a great tackler and why does it thrill us so?

First things first: not all defenders are good tacklers (and this applies to ‘defensive midfielders’ too). There is no necessary connection between a player’s proximity to his own goal and his ability to defend – Marcelo proves as much on a weekly basis for Real Madrid. Indeed there is need for a far more technocratic appraisal of players’ abilities, recognising the existence of expert tacklers. Yet in and through language players are given positions and subsequently assumed to possess corresponding abilities. Nigel de Jong is given the appellation ‘defensive midfielder’ since, superficially, this is an accurate description of his role on the pitch. Implicit in this is the assumption that the defensive midfielder can tackle. However, language – properly a secondary language, which speaks of opinions of things, rather than of things themselves – is ill-fitting. De Jong may be a defensive midfielder, but he is no tackler. This is not to say that he is an overly aggressive (some would say malicious) tackler, in the mode of Lee Cattermole or Karl Henry, but rather that his tackling technique is not very good; the tackles which resulted in serious injuries for Stuart Holden and Hatem Ben Arfa were not malicious, but rather sloppy. De Jong’s technique was crocked; casting our eyes across the pitch we are presented with a trail of broken legs reflected in the stainless steel grin of the lawnmower.

Playfully, then, allow me to propose a hypothesis: in truth, the perfect tackle exists in a unity of supposed opposites. It is habitually acknowledged that the defence is a place where the faint of heart will not last: Joe Cole or Luka Modrić would be unlikely to flourish at centre half, and when positioned there Michael Carrick seldom looks comfortable. It is a full-blooded position where each skirmish is shot through with clenched jaws and flexed muscles. In this sense it is the most exaggeratedly masculine of positions. Playing at centre back is a similar symbol of status to ordering one’s steak rare – the bone crunching tackle having parallels with the satisfying bleeding of pink beef.

Yet at the same time, and, perhaps, far less obviously, there is an important degree of femininity that we encounter in the tackle. Whilst part of the enjoyment derived from witnessing a coming together may stem from the strength of the collision, what perfects a tackle is its precision. In the perfect tackle, the defender measures his own velocity, the velocity of his opponent, the trajectory of the ball, and the flow of the game around him, and executes a move with balletic majesty, in which his rival is exactly and expertly dispossessed. This art of perfect execution is something distinct from the prescient positioning exhibited by characters like Franco Baresi or the speed and determination of a warrior like John Terry. And of course the very best defenders combine these many of these characteristics in their game: Fabio Cannavaro’s possession of all of the above made him close to the perfect defender.

Perhaps bearing this in mind, we might dare to address yesterday’s zeitgeist. In a recent FA Cup derby between Manchester City and Manchester United, flair referee Chris Foy issued Vincent Kompany with a straight red card for a tackle. He went in hard, took some of the man, and won the ball. Should this have been a straight red?  Certainly there is a degree to which we are compelled to absolve Kompany – football is a contact sport, after all, and should the mere fact that the Belgian performed a muscular collision lead to his condemnation? Yet such appeals tell just half of the story. As we have already suggested, the perfect tackle should be pristine; Kompany’s was far from this – with his trailing leg he looked more like a drunk slipping on the ice than a world class defender – more like a charging rhino than a graceful dancer. In other words, whilst Kompany may have appealed to the masculine conditions for a successful tackle, he fell far short of the feminine qualities that perfect the art. If one compares Kompany’s tackle with a recent challenge made by Nesta on Messi, the qualitative difference is clear for all to see.

This discussion is far too brief to draw any serious conclusions, and certainly I do not want to direct our discourse towards an academic discussion of gender. Whilst it is true that in the meeting of the masculine and the feminine within the vessel of the tackle we can see one of the many examples of the dissolution of these two archetypes, the extension of masculinity and femininity far beyond the biological is as precarious as it is presumptuous. In invoking these categories we are questioning them. Yet by drawing some attention to the transitory androgyny of the footballer – which perfects rather than tarnishes the individual –we might want revisit our assumptions about the kind of man we are talking about when it is said “it is a man’s game.” Just what is this man? For in the ‘manliest’ of positions we find that just as the perfect night out requires dinner and a show – raw steak and ballet – so too does the perfect defender need strength and grace.

This is a piece about Yugoslavia and what came after, but it does not attempt to recount the events or arrange the facts. There are several compelling accounts that do this. In the spirit of this new series, this is a reflection on how we think about the events and the facts of a region that we have to think into existence.

As football was coming to light, in the first half of the twentieth century, Europe crumpled and pockmarked itself; and out of that demi-era of tactical waltzes and firebombs, has any scar come in retrospect to seem so redolent and malevolent as that of Yugoslavia? An exercise in cartographical bravado, rotten fruit fallen from an ailing tree: when ideological collapse swept Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, and the bombs started falling again in the West Balkans, we all got to see just how putrid its flesh was. This is what we tell ourselves.

If the eruption of a shell, like the winning goal, cannot be abstracted out of existence, we can at least ask ourselves what we imagine the relationship to be between that terminal piece of rotten fruit and the moment of sowing. When the through-ball is played, its trajectory is obtuse yet irrevocable. Can we speak likewise of a twentieth-century phenomenon like Yugoslavia? Are there such things as bad seeds, innocent in the farmer’s hand, yet bound to produce acrid leaves?

What would be the road to travel between Vladimir Beara and Darko Pančev? Beara, the goalkeeper who went a season unbeaten with Hajduk Split, and picked up league titles in the 1950s like sweet wrappers. Lev Yashin’s favourite custodian. Beara stands at the foot of the field as a witness witty enough to translate the game in front of him into goalkeeping sublime enough to earn the nickname, Ballerina. How does this flower-picker connect to Darko Pančev, our Macedonian delegate? An iron-foundry striker, soot-coated, soldered, with no need to exert himself: a mechanical bastard. European Cup and Golden Boot winner with Red Star Belgrade, he belonged in such a provincial capital: too surly for Internazionale, destined to ponder the industrious spires of Leipzig and Sion before too long. Beara and Pančev are on the same field for us; but one is imitating birdsong and the other pushing the plough. 

Walter Benjamin writes of the difference between seed and fiction, organism and mechanism:

The word ‘unfolding’ [Entfalten] has a double meaning. A bud unfolds like a blossom, but the boat which one teaches children to make by folding paper unfolds into a flat sheet of paper. This second kind of ‘unfolding’ is really appropriate to the parable; it is the reader’s pleasure to smooth it out so that he has the meaning on the palm of his hand…[1]

If we owe ourselves one thing (and we cannot seriously hope to owe the victims anything meaningful), then it is to avoid parable; to refuse the satisfaction of cheaply unfolding pieces of paper, to avoid making of a complex rush of history a moralistic, Aesopian fable. In the first instance, this means a refutation of journalistic parables, sung to bored commuters – ancient hatreds, the inevitability of Balkan conflict, civil blood making civil hands unclean – as bland broadsides with little relevance. The number of histories now compiled that show up this demeaning narrative for what it is is sizeable; there is no real need here to go into the centuries of coexistence and cooperation, the deep cultural affinities, the pernicious influence of the Great Powers, let alone the popular surges of will twice to create a unified South Slavic state out of a region cracked by world war. Suffice to say that anyone content with the ‘explanation’ that Serbs and Croats and Bosnians and Slovenians and Macedonians naturally despise each other too fiercely to sustain anything other than an ideologically-manipulated shared identity is fooling themselves. It should be obvious, in any case, that such a whirlwind cannot, constitutionally, have such a simple cause.

Yet we all acknowledge that storms possess eyes; centres of suppressed turbulence in which some players are asked to survive. Velibor Vasović and Branko Zebec are the kind of men we need for such an expedition. Two athletes able to read the dusty plains of the match like tornado-hunters, reacting to the slightest atmospheric quirk. Vasović was the altar on which Rinus Michels founded Total Football, a man who scored in two European Cup finals for different Balkan sides; so convinced of his own politic that his first reaction to the outbreak of conflict in 1990s Serbia was to storm the Football Association headquarters in an attempted coup d’état. As for Branko: here we have a man who incarnated the consciousness of whichever nominal position he adopted, who once marked Raymond Kopa out of a match whilst playing as a centre forward, inhabiting the supposed boundaries of the pitch as a farmer paces his field.

Yet there is also no sense in merely unleashing moral outrage at moral outrage. What is important is the valorising of potential over inevitability. Determinism is not historical. The matter at hand is one of Benjamin’s seed – with its implications of capacity, self-performance, and plurality – over the paper boat, which means inertia, subjection, and singularity. Or, we should figure Yugoslavia (and, yes, Yugoslav football) as history, not result. As much as you cannot abstract the winning goal, you may end up remembering the through-ball all the more vividly than what it exploded into. Above the Olympic triumph of 1960, or the European finals of ’60 and ‘68, the most historically poignant self-realisation for Yugoslav football is the World Under-20s conquest of 1987, in Chile: the Chileanci, the children from Santiago, an astonishing harvest who found themselves maligned as bad seeds, and asked to react as such.

If determined outrage is unhistorical, then so is the light-headed dreaming of the Julian Alps, reveries on themes by a socialist goatherd. The answer is never nostalgia, the detachment of form from content. The seed contains its future organism in its most total, yet most reduced form. As such, any historical object (be it a state or a midfield) contains the energy of historical confrontations; this is why the energy of germination can only be understood in objects considered historically. Attempting a diagnosis despite ourselves: when Yugoslavia was resurrected as a socialist federation in 1945, unity was replaced by brotherhood, content usurped by form. ‘National in form but socialist in content’: nothing pertains from such formulations but cartoonish and totemic notions of ‘folk’ culture, paraded as proof of a creative potential that in reality has been filed away. Allowing the culture of each republic to persist so that a shared culture need not be chiselled out; dwelling in cracks, let alone papering them over.

Has there been a more folkloric player in modern times than Siniša Mihajlović? He is by turns the errant hero, by turns the ogre, always with the archetype of the free kick in his knapsack. A Balkan wagtail, as others have come to be, drawing complexities and violence out of the most benignly painted scenery. When Patrick Vieira called him a zingaro di merda – a gypsy shit – maybe he provoked the bloodied pride of a man who won leagues in glorious Southern cities (Milan, Rome), but for rugged, cynical teams (Inter, Lazio). His Croatian counterpoint here, Robert Jarni, also understood that the simple narrative of a flank is in fact a theme to be set as whistling variations: he danced his way down the Adriatic, from the port of Split to that of Athens, via the ruins of Torino and the beaches of the Canaries. 

Yet would that process have proven so arduous, given the ceaselessly overlapping of all involved? The bones of countless medieval Balkan empires, feeding off of each other, are the tangible historical legacy of the South Slav people, obscured by Ottoman incursion and Great Power wranglings over the course of a five hundred year daydream. All that history has demanded is that these people dwell in their similarities. The fetishising of difference amongst them has of course found its most muddily implacable manifestation in religious difference; recourse paid to the cultic and the ritualistic, the separation of the village circle dance from the village sex it enables.

‘Mountains come first,’ said Braudel. A topographic glance at the pocket of Europe into which Yugoslavia was stuffed proves how inevitable and painstaking overlapping claims must have always been: this is the every-space, Black Mountains, tribal lakes, rivers too merry and steep for the merchant’s barge, the sea and the plain a breath apart. The midfield is such a terrain; it requires all-comers yet permits very few, hustling and bustling over a deceptively small patch of grass. Here, it is not perception or wit that is both most necessary and most elusive, but balance. Perhaps there is some hint of past aggravations in the remarkable proliferation of attacking spearheads that Yugoslavia has thrown up, so numerous as to be incompatible: Savičević, Prosinečki, Boban in one generation alone. In situations like this, the final recourse is to populism and demagoguery, and so we have no choice but to plump for Stjepan Bobek. Yugoslavia’s and Partizan’s greatest goalscorer; Partizan’s greatest ever player; manager of the black and whites as they reached the European Cup final. Puskas spent his career trying to copy this ‘noble artist’. Behind this glacial elegance we root the jocular, gruffly intelligent Zlatko Čajkovski, our team’s brother-in-labour, as sturdy as the Bavarian foothills where he would later manage. Beside him, Bosnia’s favourite son, Safet Sušić, providing the requisite cosmopolitan flourish to complete our modest architectural model. This is the man, after all, once voted Paris Saint-Germain’s finest of all time, and we’re told that in Paris, they know something of style.

We need to make of these federations and folk tunes and centre forwards a series of dying wretches, not captured kings. They should be allowed to speak to the suffering of as many as possible, and not to some grim procession. This means not glorifying in combat, or reducing bodycounts and defeats to euphemistic inscriptions on royal sarcophagi; not revelling retrospectively in hooliganism as though it could start a war. Football, for one, is not cultic: it is not properly defined by its distance from the spectator, but by the tangible and unfixable manner of its unfolding, the million miniscule potentials locked in each boot, and each one openly available to the mass audience. Watching football can be ritual, but not the game itself. The most wrenching scene in Vuka Janić‘s quite brilliant documentary, Poslednji jugoslovenski fudbalski tim (The Last Yugoslav Football Team) occurs towards the end. Ivica Osim, the Bosnian who had quit as national manager of Yugoslavia following the bombardment of Sarajevo in 1992, sits alone in front of a television. In 1999, independent Croatia are hosting the ragged, Serbian stump of Yugoslavia, in a European Championships qualifer. The national anthems and the ugly match float in the air in front of a mute old man deprived of spectacle, or at least of anything meaningful.

No player is more intangible and mass-consumed than the winger, defined by a strip of turf but encountered as a blur and most hotly adored. The symmetry here in being able to invoke one hero of Red Star, and one of Partizan Belgrade, is inappropriately neat for the unframeable antics of Dragan Džajić or Miloš Milutinović. Dragan, Yugoslavia’s most capped player, Pele’s ‘Balkan miracle’, who owned the 1960s for Red Star, the consummate left-winger. Miloš, with more than a goal a game in over 200 Partizan performances, a decade older than his compatriot but with the same bureaucrat’s hairstyle, the same gentlemanly goodwill of the early film star.

Most of all, if we want to talk about Yugoslavia, the spaces where it used to reside on the map, and its footballers, we should renounce our authority over the past, and over the little seed that both is and is not what it goes on to become. We roll the kernel over in our hands, and if we clench it too tightly, then it becomes a crumpled scrap of paper, a footnote to ourselves; in any case, in our own handwriting.

*

OLD MASTERS: YUGOSLAVIA

Beara

Jarni; Zebec; Vasović: Mihajlović

Čajkovski; Sušić

Bobek

Milutinović; Pančev; Džajić

Why is it that we find Michael Owen comical? What is it about watching Pippo Inzaghi repeatedly standing offside that forces a smile? There are, undoubtedly, a number of figures in the world of football who could be described as being comic. And this comic element arises not from any ability that they possess as comedians (even if Gerd Müller were great company at a dinner party, this would not be our concern here), but rather from the way they play their game as footballers. We might recall the humorous images of Rino Gattuso hurtling around the pitch like mad wolf, or Gabriel Obertan continually laying off an ineffectual passes after manoeuvring into promising positions. In order to explore just what it is about these figures that makes them so amusing there is some value in pursuing an argument along the lines of Henri Bergson’s astute (albeit not exhaustive) ruminations on the comic.

According to Bergson, ‘the attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.’[1] The more that life appears to us as mechanical, the more man reminds us of an automaton, then the more comic a situation, character, or configuration of words appears to us. There are plenty of examples within football that we could draw upon where life appears mechanical, but none with more frequency and consistency than the example of the poacher. In short, within football the poacher is the species most resemblant of a machine. We shall now take some time to explain exactly why this is the case.

An important element to identify, with regards to the comic, is the kind of mechanical inelasticity that arises when one is determined upon a certain course. For example, even if one has their chair pulled out from beneath them before sitting down, one will proceed to sit obliviously, much the same as if the chair remained in place. The resultant tumble is, of course, comic. Similarly, are we not amused when a player attempts to kick a ball that is intercepted or diverts its course before arriving at his boot? And this inelasticity is evident not only in actions, but also in characters. Consider, then, the poacher. This odd species of player is focused on but one goal: to score. Everything else is of secondary importance – the poacher is entirely vindicated by his goals per game (indeed goals per minute) record. Recall the humorous contortions that the poacher’s body must make in order to score from the most obtuse of angles! A corollary of this complete devotion to goals means that the poacher demonstrates what we might term an antisocial approach to the game; there is no passing, no tracking back – indeed it is almost as if he is playing a different game entirely to the rest of the players on the pitch. In this sense, one might say, the poacher is conversationally stunted – he is not partaking in the same discussion as his teammates.

Of course we bear witness to this inelasticity of character in examples other than the poacher. We might equally laugh at Roberto Martinez’s refrain about ‘playing the right way’ in the face of continued defeats, Sam Allardyce’s obstinate devotion to the “retro” methodology of Charles Reep and Charles Hughes and, until recently, Arsène Wenger’s naive insistence on youth (this final example, incidentally, was why the recent signing of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain was amongst the more humorous signings – signing a teenage winger when other areas were clearly in need of strengthening was a decision that could only have been made by an ideologist). Indeed, for better or worse, devotion to a cause (and particularly an atypical cause) will often attract laughter, indicating derision and effecting a pressure to conform.

It is also the case that moral traits, such as those discussed above, are revealed, to an extent, in and through the physical traits displayed by an individual. Bergson again: ‘there is a natural relationship, which we equally naturally recognise, between…the mind crystallising in certain grooves, and the body losing its elasticity through the influence of certain defects.’[2] Our attention is drawn, for instance, to Inzaghi’s hunched posture and drawn face, to “short, fat Müller” (as his coach at Bayern called him), and to Owen’s monotone voice. Indeed, Owen’s inner life is revealing: whilst he finds it second nature to enjoy scoring goals, he also claims that he does not enjoy watching films (having watched only eight, five of which were the Rocky series). In a previous discussion we considered how Javier Hernàndez appears to go out of his way to defy expectations of the poacher’s character. In doing so, he attempts to have his cake and eat it, to infuse the gears of a machine with Life, grafting green shoots onto dispassionate steel. To what God does a machine pray? An exception to the rule, Hernàndez is something of a Pinocchio figure – a marionette trying to convince us that he is a real boy after all.

In addition to his character, there is something comic about the acts of the poacher and how these acts fit into the game as a whole. Let us take it that ‘any arrangement of acts and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement.’[3] Bergson considers three archetypal mechanisms to which we can relate actual events, in order to show how comic effect is generated by resemblance to a mechanical arrangement. One such archetype is the jack-in-the-box. Here the tension increases until an unbearable point before the inevitable release, when the jack springs from the box. There is a clear parallel here with the role of the poacher. The seeming inevitability that the poacher will score at some point means that the tension increases until the jack (bearing the face of Darren Bent) bursts free and the poacher strikes. For comic purposes, the later in the game that the poacher gets his goal, the better, since in these late stages, when the final whistle is imminent, the tension is at its highest. In this sense, Solskjaer’s last gasp goal in 1999 Champions League Final was the height of comedy. And it is not just the jack-in-the-box that we can cite here – there is a further mechanical archetype that Bergson mentions that is relevant to our enquiry: the snowball. With the snowball, a complex series of events proceeds from a simple starting point, as when a snowball rolls down hill gaining in size and momentum. We could equally consider a small stimulus such as the single kick in the centre circle that initiates a football match. What furthers the comic impact of the snowball is when after this series of complex events we find ourselves back at the starting point of our endeavour; back to square one, as it were. Consider how slowly, painstakingly and intricately one side will labour to gain advantage in a match, putting together beguiling passing combinations, searching for the killer ball, attempting technically demanding long range efforts. After some time, advantage may be gained through this industry, but then, in a flash, the poacher will strike for the opposition, and we are level again.

What has been offered here is a brief attempt to explain some of the reasons why the poacher is a comical character in football. As the goals continue to ricochet in off any available appendage, at seemingly randomly appointed instances in the game, the laughter flows. As mentioned, this article is not an exhaustive endeavour – I would insist that Bergson’s essay only captures the comic partially – but it is certainly the case that something of the oddity of the poacher’s character is revealed herein. Owen, Inzaghi, Van Nistelrooy et al are not the prettiest players to watch, their craft is not be as mesmerising as the mazy runs of a winger or the delightful through balls of a trequartista. Nevertheless there is a special place for this species of player within the game, a place that is located somewhere close to the heart; perhaps we might identify it as the funny bone.