Running on the spot
Martin Amis in the Guardian today: English football is just no good. He's not wrong, and it's only collective delusion that leads people to believe England, in their current state, could ever win anything.
They only play anything approaching well when they go a goal down; the performances in Euro 2004 against France and then Portugal were the very opposite to that. An early England goal succeeded by 90 minutes of frantic down-the-park football. Amis makes a good point: in 2004 the game isn't about dribbling (bye bye Stanley Matthews) and it isn't the airborne game, the long ball from defence, over the top of mid-field, towards the small man in the box.
I downloaded the England-Portugal 1966 World Cup Semi Final from British Pathe. I remembered it as an exciting, crucial, historic game. After all, to win a final, first you have to be in the final, and that game, with the two goals scored by R. Charlton, was exactly the kind of performance that England have failed to deliver in the 38 years since. You need your Big Game players, you need your semi-final hero, before you can have your final hero.
But the Pathe footage, heavily edited as it is, reveals a game marked by the ball in the air, the midfield head-tennis, and not much ball-to-the-foot at all. And no mention, of course, of the brutal treatment meted out by Nobby Stiles to Eusebio, the Zidane of his day. Seeing Eusebio's ecstatic and passionate reactions during the penalty shootout at the end of the 2004 quarter final, you could tell he was tasting sweet revenge for the Nobby nobbling.
Two things strike me about this aerial style. First, the ball was heavier then, so when hoofed up the field, it didn't go as far, and fell more naturally to the players n the middle of the field. My childhood playing of football was characterised by a fear, when playing in goal, of not being able to achieve the first hurdle of the goal kick: getting it out of the area. A drop kick up the field was lucky to achieve the centre circle.
With the modern, lighter ball, the goalkeepers could spend the afternoon passing it to each other, and the clearance up the field invariably overshoots the midfield players, leaving the small strikers to struggle against a well-tuned defence, trying to "hold it up" so that support could arrive. It's a crap way to play, and from now on anybody praising a player for being able to "hold the ball up well" should be shot.
The other thing about this is that our best players are supposed to be the midfielders: so why spend so much time avoiding giving the ball to them by hoofing it over their heads?
The answer is not a happy one. It's this: they're not that good. I've heard them described as being "comfortable on the ball." Well, they don't look that way to me. In fact, they appear to me like nervous young boys who don't want to be given the ball. "Don't pass it to me!" They have a get-rid-of-it mentality, and are happy to concede possession over and over again, rather than attempt to keep the ball a moment and play it. They don't stand comfortably over the ball and stroke it around, like all the other teams. They run on the spot like they're trying to shake the shit out of their shorts. Lampard, Scholes, Gerard, all guilty of this.
As for Beckham, well, he's got the Yips hasn't he? You have a Beckham, combined with a Rooney or a Shearer, because the one will score goals or win free kicks and penalties, and the other will score from free kicks and penalties. But not when he has the Yips. Blame the new ball, blame his personal life, but he just didn't have the touch.
And we can't rely on one player to win games for us. It's a team game, a squad game.
which brings me to the much-vaunted manager. A foreign coach, we were told, would bring with him new ideas on tactics and strategy, a cooler style in the dressing room. Why was it, then, that their tactics and strategy have been so abysmally bad? The hoofing up the field, the running on the spot, the defending too deep: was Ericsson the brains behind all this? Their complete inability to defend set pieces? They worked this all out in training, did they?
English football is infected with the stupid shit the boys get taught by the stupid shitheads who run PE lessons and park football clubs up and down the country. You hear it in the impatience of fans who want to see the ball played forward, over and over again, who get restless when players pass it around "too much".
They only play anything approaching well when they go a goal down; the performances in Euro 2004 against France and then Portugal were the very opposite to that. An early England goal succeeded by 90 minutes of frantic down-the-park football. Amis makes a good point: in 2004 the game isn't about dribbling (bye bye Stanley Matthews) and it isn't the airborne game, the long ball from defence, over the top of mid-field, towards the small man in the box.
I downloaded the England-Portugal 1966 World Cup Semi Final from British Pathe. I remembered it as an exciting, crucial, historic game. After all, to win a final, first you have to be in the final, and that game, with the two goals scored by R. Charlton, was exactly the kind of performance that England have failed to deliver in the 38 years since. You need your Big Game players, you need your semi-final hero, before you can have your final hero.
But the Pathe footage, heavily edited as it is, reveals a game marked by the ball in the air, the midfield head-tennis, and not much ball-to-the-foot at all. And no mention, of course, of the brutal treatment meted out by Nobby Stiles to Eusebio, the Zidane of his day. Seeing Eusebio's ecstatic and passionate reactions during the penalty shootout at the end of the 2004 quarter final, you could tell he was tasting sweet revenge for the Nobby nobbling.
Two things strike me about this aerial style. First, the ball was heavier then, so when hoofed up the field, it didn't go as far, and fell more naturally to the players n the middle of the field. My childhood playing of football was characterised by a fear, when playing in goal, of not being able to achieve the first hurdle of the goal kick: getting it out of the area. A drop kick up the field was lucky to achieve the centre circle.
With the modern, lighter ball, the goalkeepers could spend the afternoon passing it to each other, and the clearance up the field invariably overshoots the midfield players, leaving the small strikers to struggle against a well-tuned defence, trying to "hold it up" so that support could arrive. It's a crap way to play, and from now on anybody praising a player for being able to "hold the ball up well" should be shot.
The other thing about this is that our best players are supposed to be the midfielders: so why spend so much time avoiding giving the ball to them by hoofing it over their heads?
The answer is not a happy one. It's this: they're not that good. I've heard them described as being "comfortable on the ball." Well, they don't look that way to me. In fact, they appear to me like nervous young boys who don't want to be given the ball. "Don't pass it to me!" They have a get-rid-of-it mentality, and are happy to concede possession over and over again, rather than attempt to keep the ball a moment and play it. They don't stand comfortably over the ball and stroke it around, like all the other teams. They run on the spot like they're trying to shake the shit out of their shorts. Lampard, Scholes, Gerard, all guilty of this.
As for Beckham, well, he's got the Yips hasn't he? You have a Beckham, combined with a Rooney or a Shearer, because the one will score goals or win free kicks and penalties, and the other will score from free kicks and penalties. But not when he has the Yips. Blame the new ball, blame his personal life, but he just didn't have the touch.
And we can't rely on one player to win games for us. It's a team game, a squad game.
which brings me to the much-vaunted manager. A foreign coach, we were told, would bring with him new ideas on tactics and strategy, a cooler style in the dressing room. Why was it, then, that their tactics and strategy have been so abysmally bad? The hoofing up the field, the running on the spot, the defending too deep: was Ericsson the brains behind all this? Their complete inability to defend set pieces? They worked this all out in training, did they?
English football is infected with the stupid shit the boys get taught by the stupid shitheads who run PE lessons and park football clubs up and down the country. You hear it in the impatience of fans who want to see the ball played forward, over and over again, who get restless when players pass it around "too much".
posted by Anonymous at
Monday, June 28, 2004
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