Shankly's Football Fallacy

I first heard on Saturday evening. I hadn't gone to the game myself as I'd arranged to go to see Crystal Palace play Hull with my dad before the date and time of the tie was announced. My parents don't have ESPN, so I was planning to listen to the second half on the journey back from South London to Hampshire. I tuned in first to Five Live, then Talksport, but couldn't hear any commentary. I was about to put on a CD instead when the Talksport anchor said something along the lines of "and now we return to White Hart Lane for the latest on the very worrying events that have unfolded there". At first there was that acute tinge of excitement that hits you when you know you're about to hear some big news, that something extraordinary has happened. The heart quickens as the mind zips through the possibilities like a flick book. Crowd disturbance? Horror tackle? Suddenly, the flick book stops abruptly on a page where three words are written in bold, stark lettering. The excitement turns into a sickening dread. Those words are Marc Vivien Foe.

We were given a brief description of events from an audibly shaken Ian Abrahams and told that Fabrice had already been taken to hospital. The game had been abandoned by Howard Webb and supporters had made their way out of the ground quietly, respectfully, solemnly. Ian had said that an "eerie silence" had descended on the Lane while Fabrice was being attended to by medical staff on the pitch. For six minutes the 35,000 or so men, women and children had watched helplessly as a young man fought for his life on the pitch.

We love football for the drama; it is our escape from real life. Football is improvised pantomime; we cheer our heroes, we boo and hiss at the villainous opponents and evil referee. We go to football to experience strong emotions. To do so we need to convince ourselves of football’s ultimate importance and we do just that. In our collective delusion we scream in ecstasy when our teams score and weep when they are eliminated in a penalty shoot out. But our emotions, strong as they are (or appear to be) are experienced within very strict parameters. We experience heartbreak and devastation when our team is relegated in the same way we experience fear during a horror film; it is really only a simulacrum of the true feelings. But football is far more convincing than the movies. We are there, in the midst of the drama, even part of the drama. Its hold over us is mesmeric, the illusion unbreakable. Almost.

Rarely, in the soap opera that is football, we experience events that fall beyond those parameters which shatter the illusion. Reality encroaches on our sanctuary and renders football, with its diluted emotions, exposed as the unimportant, insignificant game that it is. The result is not the theatrical wailing of fans of relegated sides on the last day of the season, but the blank, confused faces we saw at Tottenham on Saturday evening of people forced to comprehend the triviality of the game they believed, until a few moments ago, was the be all and end all.

Bill Shankly is famously quoted as saying “Football isn’t a matter of life and death – it’s much more important than that” – a phrase that has come to embody the false importance we attribute to football. On Saturday, at White Hart Lane, that ultimate sporting fallacy was, at last, laid to rest.

Managerial sacking, financial cracking and Premier League slacking.

It's been an eventful couple of weeks since I last wrote my blog. The ranks of the unemployed have swelled with managerial sackings, one of Britain's biggest clubs has gone into administration, the top two teams in England have both been turned over by supposedly inferior continental opposition and Tottenham are crap again.

The highest profile sacking was, of course, AVB. While it was sad to see a promising young coach's reputation shot out of a cannon at the Chelsea circus, one has to admit that it was always on the cards. In fact it seems on the cards for any poor sod who takes the job, so much so that New Age shops on the Fulham road have started stocking tarot packs with an image of a sickle-wielding Abramovic replacing the grim reaper on "death".

The sacking of AVB coincided with two things. The first was a trend on the part of pundits and commentators to pronounce his surname "Villash Boash" in an absurd attempt to appear cultured and actually sounding like a dinner party bore doing a shit impression of Sean Connery. The second was a screening of the insightful fly-on-the-wall documentary QPR: The Four Year Plan, which followed the club as it was taken over by the consortium of Bernie Eccelstone, Flavio Briatore and Amit Bhatia. Bernie was largely absent (or at least camera-shy), while Briatore single-handedly affirmed every negative stereotype surrounding Italian masculinity in the first four minutes. The only one of the trio to come out of it with any degree of dignity was Bhatia, who came across as a balanced, calm and considered businessman, clearly embarrassed at times by the bullish egomaniac in the seat next to him. It was a fascinating and terrifying glimpse into how modern football clubs are run, particularly in terms of the relationship conflict between ultra-rich "benefactors" and the "football people", clearly mirroring the situation a few miles down the road at Stamford Bridge. The thing that struck me most as I watched it, was how much this "new breed of owner" (criticised by David Moyes in a recent BBC interview: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/17306087 ) acted less like professionals and more like your average fans. At points Briatore looked more like a disgruntled season-ticket holder as he gesticulated wildly and yelled obscenities at the string of hapless managers inhabiting the dugout at Loftus Road. And that seems to be the root of the problem with this new breed - they buy clubs for their entertainment, like many of us buy season tickets. This being the case, they often fall into the trap that many fans do - having their rational thought clouded by the intense emotion in the midst of a game. But instead of venting their frustration down the pub or on a 606 phone-in, they actually have the power to hire and fire the object of their disaffection at the drop of a hat. In psychology there is a term; negative affectivity, which refers to simultaneous, co-existing high-levels of different emotions such as extreme joy, anger and anxiety - which every football fan will experience through the course of a season, if not a single game. People with high-levels of negative affectivity struggle to maintain stable relationships, often falling madly in and out of love with someone, perhaps several times, before dumping them and starting the cycle again. So it is with football fans - one minute Arsene Wenger is tactician extraordinaire, the next a dunce who has "lost it", then a genius again. This new breed of fan-owner cannot seem to run their businesses with the necessary degree of detached objectivity that has kept clubs like Man Utd stable for a generation. Remember that in Sir Alex Ferguson's first four seasons in charge Man Utd finished 11th, 2nd, 11th again and 16th. Fans of the club would shudder to think where they'd be now if Briatore was in charge in the late 80s. It's strange, as Briatore is clearly a successful businessman in other areas, which further suggests it is the raw emotion attached to football that drives men like him and Abramovic to make sudden, impulsive decisions based on how they are feeling in the moment rather than looking at the long-term picture. The victims are the managers, particularly the young ones like AVB and Paulo Sosa who find themselves unceremoniously dumped and with a damaged reputation, albeit with a nice bit of compo to keep them going until the next appointment. And of course there are the fans, who are becoming increasingly disillusioned despite the initial success the new breed has brought the club. One of the most telling moments of the film was the footage of hoards of QPR fans singing "we want our Rangers back". Many Blues fans I know also want their Chelsea back, and long for the good old days when Ford Sierras were parked behind the goals at the bridge. In the meantime they'll have to hold on and hope the roller-coaster doesn't make them too sick or, even worse, that the wheels don't come off with an almighty crash.

Rangers are the biggest club so far to join the ranks of UK clubs that have gone into administration. At this point it looks as if large amounts of unpaid tax on wages form the bulk of the debt. Much has been written about the mega-inflation of wages since Sky invented football in 1992, but the threat of liquidation hanging over some of Britain’s most established clubs has brought it sharply back into focus. On the radio yesterday, I heard one presenter on a football talk show voice the argument that Taylor Swift was recently named as the world’s highest earning music artist last year - pocketing a whopping 22 million dollars - and no one is saying she's overpaid are they? That's fine, but A) Taylor Swift is essentially paid according to her performance; she makes (what some people think is) a cracking CD, they buy it and she gets paid a percentage unlike, say, Fernando Torres who gets paid a huge amount of money to score goals for Chelsea despite the fact that this happens about as often as Posh Spice pops into Lidl, B) The amount Taylor Swift gets paid will not have a knock-on effect in terms of how much her CDs cost and make her music unaffordable for her fans and C) Because Taylor Swift's pay is directly related to how many CDs she sells her record label is unlikely to go bust as a result of signing her. It's a massive gamble that clubs are taking, banking on players on inflated wages to bring the success and associated income to help them pay for themselves. The owners say "fans demand success", but most clubs maintain a stable base of core fans (usually ST holders) regardless of how successful they are, and it's these fans, rather than the occasional or fair-weather varieties that really support the club in the literal sense. Clubs such as Portsmouth are vital to their communities and you'd still get a decent turn out at Fratton even if the FA enforce their own rules and relegate Pompey to the Conference South, in the same way that Wimbledon maintained their core supporters when they were reborn as AFC and had around 2000 fans show up to watch them play on a roped off pitch in Chessington. Surely a more sensible approach is needed by clubs to buck these trends and keep the clubs safe for the people they really matter to.

With Manchesters City and United both crashing to defeats in the Europa League the quality of the Prem has once again been put under the microscope. However, what could be more telling than the poor performances we've seen in Europe is the fact two of the three sides promoted from the Championship have thrived this season. A few seasons back it was a given that newly promoted clubs would go straight back down or at least be bang in trouble of doing so, but Norwich and Swansea have both taken big scalps this season and sit proudly in the mid-table wilderness that most clubs strive to avoid. It could be that the level of quality in the upper echelons of the Championship has risen to be indistinguishable from the majority of the clubs in the Prem or, more ominously for English football, that the fears arising from our European form are not unfounded. The positive thing is that we've so far had an exciting and unpredictable season where anyone can beat anyone. Tellingly, there have also been plenty of goals, which has been cited by some as another indicator of the general lack of quality, but who can really complain about high-scoring games? For me, entertainment has been the winner, and if it's to our detriment in Europe for a season or two I'm not too bothered.

Talking Tactics

In my blog a couple of weeks ago I mentioned how football has a strange duality in being simultaneously simple and complicated; a street game that can be played with just about anything spherical (and, I dunno, perhaps a couple of jumpers for goalposts?) and a complex tactical chess match played between two grandmasters, except with drunker spectators and grotesquely overpaid pieces.

Football tactics are constantly evolving thanks to pioneering managers such as Arthur Rowe (push-and-run), Rinus Michels (total football) and Tony Pulis (find-someone-who-can-throw-really-far). It can be argued that in this sense the modern English game has lagged behind a bit – a cyclical criticism that often breaks the surface of public consciousness after a humiliating summer spanking by tactically astute Germans.

Over the past few years, it’s evident that the average English football punter has started to take knowledge of tactics a little more seriously. This is reflected by a proliferation of websites and blogs dedicated to the subject, such as http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/football-tactics and www.zonalmarking.net. Last week I was at AFC Wimbledon against Morecombe and picked up a new Dons fanzine, “Wise Men Say”. The editors had obviously picked up on this new found appetite for tactical knowledge and dedicated six pages to an interview with the club’s academy director to help readers savvy up in this area. The article was genuinely insightful, covering a broad range of tactical titbits ranging from the defensive idiosyncrasies of the Spanish national team to the utilisation of natural rotation in the AFC Wimbledon under 15s. Frankly, after the game I thought they should’ve stuck the under 15s out instead, as the first team played like a pub side that had been on the piss all night.

So where has this hunger for tactical knowledge come from? Personally, I think many of us have had to admit that we don’t know as much about tactics as we like to think. Maybe that’s putting it too nicely: We’ve finally realised that we’ve all been shouting at managers/players and TV screens for years without having a fucking clue what we’re going on about, hopelessly deluding ourselves that a few years under our collective belts playing schoolboy football makes us all oracles of the game.

Our ignorance runs deep. Like many kids, I grew up playing 4-4-2. You knew your position and you stuck to it – rigidly. As left-winger, my job was to attack the flanks when we had the ball, and mark the opposition’s right winger when we didn’t – simple. When I was 13 I was switched to striker. This job was even easier – hang around on the halfway line and chat to the centre backs –usually about Byker Grove or “fingering” girls – until one of our midfielders hoofed the ball over the defensive line for me to chase. I actually wasn’t a bad player at that level and got picked up by a scout for my local side, Crystal Palace. When I got to the training session I was in for big shock – this was proper football. We played mini-games where we were taught about positioning, movement and switching fluidly between attacking and defensive formations. Still pretty basic stuff, but neuroscience compared to what I’d been taught before. Unfortunately, I was used to being a big fish in a small pond and I suddenly felt like I was now swimming out of my depth. I stupidly decided to knock Palace on my head and return to blissful ignorance.

Playing at schoolboy level helped me enjoy football more, but the Tesco Value tutorage I received from unqualified coaches only gave me a limited understanding of the game. As the frailties of England’s flat 4-4-2 became exposed by more advanced nations, I - along with many others - suddenly realised at age 30 that my knowledge of the game was already archaic. Thankfully, it seems that the quality of coaching has vastly improved since I was a kid. They are being taught the game in a structured way rather than just being stuck in a position and told “off you go” (while the coach goes for a snout) – so hopefully they won’t be left behind in the same way my generation was. As for me, like many other fans, I’ve been hitting the books to make up for lost time and have started to see the game in a new light after all these years. And, of course, I now have the right to tell Harry Redknapp EXACTLY what to do.

Milan Restore Balance of World Football

When I was ten I played for a football team called Pirates, and we were rubbish. Not ordinary Blackburn rubbish, but hammered-ten-nil-every-week crap. Our coach was a Neanderthal called Steve who could’ve easily made a decent living as a Grant Mitchell lookalike. Memories of my first competitive forays on the football pitch are dominated by Steve barking orders on the sidelines beside his long-suffering wife, whose job it was to cut the half-time oranges and stop Steve smashing the shit out of opposition managers. One evening at training, Steve bounded over to where we were assembled with the excitement of a kid who had just found a shiny of his favourite club in a packet of Panini. “We’ve got a new player!” he beamed, leaving a dramatic pause before adding “and he’s Italian! PROPER Italian!” We all looked at each other, suddenly understanding Steve’s exuberance. Italian? Wow!

This was 1990 and Italian football held an almost mythical status among us kids. We knew it was where the greatest players from across the globe (and Ray Wilkins) plied their trade. The mystique was enhanced by the fact that, contrary to today’s plethora, there was little European/UEFA/Cup-Winners cup coverage on TV as English teams were still affected by the ban imposed by UEFA following the Heysel disaster. What we did know was that Arrigo Saatchi’s great Milan side were Kings of Europe, having lifted the continent’s top prize the previous season. For me, Milan represented the best of the best – club football’s Brazil – a super-team packed with the era’s Galacticos. It’s home-grown heroes, Baresi, Donadoni, Albertini and Costacurta, along with the Dutchman Frank Rijkaard formed the core of the team. But for me, there were three that stood above all. First and foremost was the steely-eyed, elegant and down-right beautiful Paulo Maldini , Milan’s left-back who could’ve been mistaken for a young Italian nobleman stepped straight out of a Canaletto crowd scene. Next, Marco Van Basten, who exuded a nonchalant, understated arrogance combined with the cold detachment and ruthlessness of Edward Fox’s assassin in The Day of the Jackal. It wouldn't surprise me if Van Basten's pre match ritual was to buy a melon, duab it with a likeness of that weekend's opposition goalkeeper, drive out to the countryside and shoot it to bits with a high-powered sniper rifle. And, of course, there was the wonderfully versatile Ruud Gullit, at home in any position on the pitch (and in the bedroom if Johan Cruyff’s daughter is to be believed), who came to epitomise “sexy football” despite looking a bit like one of the geezers from Aswad. These players personified the grace, style and swagger that were unattainable to English football. Italian football, encapsulated by Milan, had it all.

Since those glory days, much has been made of the demise of Italian football, as the world’s best gradually started upping sticks to follow the money to the nouveau riche clubs of England and Spain. While some have welcomed the shift of power away from what they see as a league that advocates negative, unexciting football, being a child of the 80s I have always believed that Italy is where the world’s best players and teams belong. Despite being English, I feel like the new money that’s poured into our league has somehow upset football’s cosmic natural balance and our clubs have become like gangsters who rock up to the Estate Agent in the posh part of town and pay for their mansions in used notes.

So it was with great satisfaction and a warm nostalgic buzz that I enjoyed Milan outclass and clinically despatch my behated Arsenal last Wednesday night. Right from the off I felt that I was about to witness something very special. As the game kicked off the San Siro was pulsating with energy. Goodness knows what it was like playing there, but at home the hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end. The atmosphere in the big Italian stadiums is different gear; no delusional chants about *INSERT NAME HERE* being the greatest team the world has ever seen or infantile ditties about Shaun Wright-Phillip’s mum, just pure, undiluted intimidation. A perfect example was Milan’s call-and-response chant of, er… something in Italian (it doesn’t matter anyway). The call part, presumably shouted by only a handful of supporters, was inaudible on the telly and made the booming response – from about 70,000 mouths – sound completely spontaneous. It was enough to make Russell Crowe piss his tunic. Like the bit in Jaws where some poor sod’s bitten-off loaf pops out of a hole in a boat, it made me jump every time, even though I knew it was coming.

Arsenal were like timid kittens that had been chucked into a pit of black and red striped tigers. It was all a bit too much for the North Londoners. Despite having decent possession they looked about as threatening as a machete made of wafer. Milan on the other hand looked happy to let them have the ball before winning it back – by saying “boo” really loudly – and attacking at will. Kevin-Prince Boateng’s blazing opener set the San Siro on fire – an absolute screamer that was straight out of a kid’s computer game. I half expected to see the ball ignite in blue flame and evaporate the net on impact. Professional unit Phillipe Mexes patrolled the back line like an uncompromising, belligerent bouncer, Robinho looked like he was having the time of his life and even the mercurial Zlatan Ibrahimovic broke the habit of a lifetime and stuck in a performance against an English side, showing us for once EXACTLY what all the fuss is about. The performance was a glorious reminder of why I grew up loving Milan and Italian football, and after the game I felt like the equilibrium of world football had been restored.

With the likes of Baggio and Maldini stirring our young imaginations it was obvious in hindsight that Giuseppe wasn’t going to live up to our childish expectations. Steve wasn’t lying – he was proper Italian. As in didn’t-speak-a-word –of-English Italian. We first saw him trotting along beside his father, a tall and sophisticated Roman, who was talking to his antithesis Steve (who had, by this time, been reduced to a squealing Japanese schoolgirl) with a look of polite bemusement on his tanned face as the Englishman desperately tried to establish a rapport with a man with whom he would clearly never have anything on common (“my nan was Italian y’know!”). Giuseppe was a lovely kid, but an awful footballer who, not being accustomed to the climate, tended to cry during games when the weather got colder. I guess it was on those frozen Saturday mornings that Italian football started to waver on its plinth, and despite our new import we remained rooted to the bottom of the division for the duration of the season. And the champions of the Tolworth Primary Boys Football League that year? None other than the great A3 Milan.

Whats in a Handshake?

The great thing about football is that it can be enjoyed on so many levels. It’s a game that’s easily accessible in terms of spectatorship and participation. Paradoxically, it’s both simple (you need to get more goals than the other lot) and mind bogglingly complicated (have a read of a tactical review of a game on www.zonalmarking.net which will leave you convinced that Neil Warnock is a strategist extraordinaire on a par with General Patton and Gary Kaspirov).

You follow a team – maybe more than one. They might play in front of crowds of 80,000 or 80. They could be on your doorstep or you might have a 600 mile round trip for a home game. Anyone watching the ESPN coverage of Spurs v Newcastle last night would’ve seen the shaven-headed Geordie hard-nut, stripped to the waist (on the top half thank goodness) in sub-zero temperatures baring his considerable beer-induced bulk and displaying his many tattoos relating to his beloved Newcastle United. The Prime Minister supports them too.

As it’s a sport so inextricably embedded into our culture it makes it fascinating from a sociological perspective as well – look at how many academic texts were written about the hooligan sub-culture and masculinity in the 1990s. It’s often said that football is a microcosm (a pretty fucking big one if you ask me) of our wider society. The problem is that it all too often reflects its darker cultural configurations such as racism (most recently the Terry and Suarez incidents) and sexism (Paul Jewell’s comments about Sian Massey a few weeks back). This disconcerting blot on the game was again brought sharply back into focus yesterday when Luis Suarez spectacularly custard-pied Patrice Evra (metaphorically, praise be) before the Man Utd v Liverpool game. I won’t go into what happened here, because unless you have been stuck on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic for the last 36 hours you would’ve already seen the incident at least 182 times in 3-D, HD and good, old fashioned slow motion from a multitude of angles.

It’s of course not the first time the pre-match handshake has come under such intense scrutiny; originally there was Beckham/Simeone (handshake successfully completed, albeit with a dirty look from Becks), Bridge/Terry (no handshake) and A. Ferdinand/Terry (there’s a pattern here…), which saw the F.A take the most sensible approach and ditch the whole meaningless ritual to avoid exactly the kind of scene we saw at Old Trafford yesterday.

Unfortunately the FA has today categorically stated that the pre-match handshake will remain. But why? What is the point of this sportsmanship at gun-point if there is no real meaning behind it? Stuart Pearce once said that he didn’t want to shake hand with his opponents before the game and while going through the physical motions refused to make eye contact with players from the other team. Why make him do it in the first place, then? What’s wrong with giving people the freedom to shake hands with those they want to shake hands with in the tunnel before they go out on the pitch?

Of course it’s all to do with the FA’s well-meaning-but-doomed RESPECT campaign, where the shining beacons of valour and chivalry that are our professional footballers (are supposed to) set a good example for our little cherubs to emulate on the pitch and in society (and everyone lives happily ever after). I have no doubt that the handshake would be a credible gesture of sportsmanship if it wasn’t completely undermined by players spending the rest of the game cheating, repeatedly telling the ref to “fuck off” with impunity and occasionally calling each other “black cunts” (allegedly). It’s this sort of disrespect to each other and attitudes to authority that kids take with them onto the pitches and into classrooms, and unless the FA starts clamping down on this by making examples of these “role-models” then the whole handshake thing will continue to serve only idiots like Luis Suarez, who can use the all-eyes-on-me moment to make a point.

The most depressing thing that’s sprung from the whole Suarez fiasco is that Liverpool F.C’s handling of the situation has caused some of the club’s long-standing supporters to stop following the team at all. One fan, Jeff Wiltshire said “I became increasingly disgusted by the clubs reaction. I haven’t been able to watch them since”. Nuff said really.