segunda-feira, junho 28, 2004
Uma auto-flagelação merecida
We have to face it: English football is just no good
Any kind of win would only have prolonged the illusion
Martin Amis in Uruguay
Monday June 28, 2004
The Guardian
I must have been the only fan on earth who thought (for a full hour) that the England team had flopped out even earlier than it did: to Croatia. They like their football just fine down here, or they do when Uruguay is playing - or were playing, and winning their two Olympic Golds and two World Cups (the national team is now pitifully weak).
These days they are far, far more savagely engaged by how Peñarol did against Nacional than by anything achieved by their distant ancestors: the Spanish, the Italians, the Portuguese. When you catch any mention of "Eurocopa", down here, you know you are dealing with an intellectual.
Still, the tournament is ebulliently and chaotically covered by Fox Sports (pron. "folks spwarts"), which chose, last Monday, to show France v Switzerland in precedence to the simultaneous fixture, England v Croatia. I kept the TV on, ready and warm, and could hear from several rooms away the demented commentator's minute-long "Goooaaal!" and his crazed ditties about Zinedine Zidane and Thierry Henry.
I tiptoed in twice, early on in each half. During visit one, they briefly showed Croatia's first goal; during visit two, they briefly showed Croatia's second. And I thought: that's that. After the final whistle they stuck with the French celebrations and the same looped Adidas ad for about half an hour, while I submitted to the caustic hormones (familiar enough) of the failed jingo.
I was saying to myself: this is the punishment for the game against France. But I was also belatedly saying that the demeanour of the Croats, after their second strike, had not been the demeanour of a team that was now leading 2-0, or even 2-1. They would have been a wriggling heap of nudists; they would not have been hurrying back to the centre circle with the self-effacement of men who still had honest work to do.
Then Fox Sports flashed up the group placings: England with six points and a goal difference of 8-4. Then they flashed up the scoreline: Scholes (Scholes!), Rooney, Rooney, Lampard. Ten minutes later I sat back, with a bottle of Don Pascual, and feasted on the win. This, I submit, is the only bearable way of watching an England match, confident in the knowledge that, however hard they try, they can't possibly mess it up.
It was a genuinely charged performance, too, and the dynamo was the terrifying Wayne Rooney. When he smashed in his first goal, from that distance, from that angle, it was the way he shaped that stayed with you - like a gorilla, with fully demonstrative menace. Zidane twists, Henry glides; Rooney thunders. He is neither vicious nor undisciplined, but his is a game of applied violence. The sportsman he most resembles is not another footballer: it is the pre-decadent Mike Tyson. Behind Rooney, the midfield was for once as potent as it looks on paper. When the match was over it was possible to believe that the debacle against France had been survived, forgiven. Zidane in injury-time: that was just a nightmare. It never really happened.
But it did happen, and England v Portugal was, with variations, its grisly recurrence. When Owen scored in the third minute, the euphoria was soon qualified by the following intuition: with time added on, England were now going to spend an entire football match in frazzled defence, dropping back ever deeper, the beleaguerment solidified by ever-more paranoid substitutions. As Rooney limped off, after 20-odd minutes, you felt you were complicit in an act of unilateral disarmament. But by now it was taking some doing not to notice a qualitative difference between the teams: the abysmal gulf in technique.
The days when an England player's first touch could often be mistaken for an attempted clearance or a wild shot on goal - those days are over. The deficit is not in individual skill, it is in collective skill; it is in the apparently cultural indifference to possession . In 2004, football is no longer a dribbling game, still less a long-ball game (and how many balls did we float to our two haring midgets up front?); it is a possession game. The "clearance", as practised by England, is simply an anachronism. When an international defender heads it away, he heads it to a teammate. When we "clear" it, we just clear it, for two or three seconds.
After the match Eriksson talked of "possession" as if he thought of it as foreign frippery - as if he had succumbed to the masochistic machismo that says: You didn't score that time, did you? Have another crack.
During the second half it was a full-time job not noticing what the chasing game does to a side's morale. Pass it to a teammate? We couldn't even throw it to a teammate. A Martian, looking on, would have wondered at the mysterious discrepancy: whenever the ball went into touch, it seemed that it could only be reintroduced to a player in a red shirt. Portugal's equaliser was both completely inevitable and richly deserved. And then the crouched supporter was left to believe that England, this booting, blocking, sliding, nutting, hacking behemoth, this hysterical combine-harvester, was about to transform itself into an instrument of attack.
That it did so was a great tribute to the real but fading virtues of passion and will. It granted us the ritual of losing the shootout. Beckham "bravely" (ie vaingloriously) went first, and inspired his team by ballooning the kick without falling on his arse - which is what he did in Istanbul last October. (This time he blamed the penalty miss on the penalty spot, as, with infinite inanity, did Eriksson: "I complained personally to the Uefa official responsible about the penalty spot.")
How, by the way, did it ever get about that Beckham was good at penalties? He utterly lacks the steel for it. Maybe Scholes has it - but Scholes was off, physically spent. And if such a thoroughbred is out of gas at this point in the summer then so is everybody else in the Premiership. As a first step, on even-numbered years every player in the England squad should be rested for 10 games a season, by FA law.
As a second step, we must settle down to learning how to keep possession: how to retain the football. It is the best defence, it is the complete defence, as Brazil showed us in the quarter-finals of the last World Cup. The penalty shootout is a tawdry lottery, but any kind of win, for England, would have been a tawdry lottery, and would have meant the prolongation of illusion. Consider the statistics. For the main body of the match, Portugal have claim to twice as much possession, twice as many corners, and half as many fouls. At this level, we're no good, and we have to start again.
· Martin Amis's latest novel, Yellow Dog, is published by Vintage
Any kind of win would only have prolonged the illusion
Martin Amis in Uruguay
Monday June 28, 2004
The Guardian
I must have been the only fan on earth who thought (for a full hour) that the England team had flopped out even earlier than it did: to Croatia. They like their football just fine down here, or they do when Uruguay is playing - or were playing, and winning their two Olympic Golds and two World Cups (the national team is now pitifully weak).
These days they are far, far more savagely engaged by how Peñarol did against Nacional than by anything achieved by their distant ancestors: the Spanish, the Italians, the Portuguese. When you catch any mention of "Eurocopa", down here, you know you are dealing with an intellectual.
Still, the tournament is ebulliently and chaotically covered by Fox Sports (pron. "folks spwarts"), which chose, last Monday, to show France v Switzerland in precedence to the simultaneous fixture, England v Croatia. I kept the TV on, ready and warm, and could hear from several rooms away the demented commentator's minute-long "Goooaaal!" and his crazed ditties about Zinedine Zidane and Thierry Henry.
I tiptoed in twice, early on in each half. During visit one, they briefly showed Croatia's first goal; during visit two, they briefly showed Croatia's second. And I thought: that's that. After the final whistle they stuck with the French celebrations and the same looped Adidas ad for about half an hour, while I submitted to the caustic hormones (familiar enough) of the failed jingo.
I was saying to myself: this is the punishment for the game against France. But I was also belatedly saying that the demeanour of the Croats, after their second strike, had not been the demeanour of a team that was now leading 2-0, or even 2-1. They would have been a wriggling heap of nudists; they would not have been hurrying back to the centre circle with the self-effacement of men who still had honest work to do.
Then Fox Sports flashed up the group placings: England with six points and a goal difference of 8-4. Then they flashed up the scoreline: Scholes (Scholes!), Rooney, Rooney, Lampard. Ten minutes later I sat back, with a bottle of Don Pascual, and feasted on the win. This, I submit, is the only bearable way of watching an England match, confident in the knowledge that, however hard they try, they can't possibly mess it up.
It was a genuinely charged performance, too, and the dynamo was the terrifying Wayne Rooney. When he smashed in his first goal, from that distance, from that angle, it was the way he shaped that stayed with you - like a gorilla, with fully demonstrative menace. Zidane twists, Henry glides; Rooney thunders. He is neither vicious nor undisciplined, but his is a game of applied violence. The sportsman he most resembles is not another footballer: it is the pre-decadent Mike Tyson. Behind Rooney, the midfield was for once as potent as it looks on paper. When the match was over it was possible to believe that the debacle against France had been survived, forgiven. Zidane in injury-time: that was just a nightmare. It never really happened.
But it did happen, and England v Portugal was, with variations, its grisly recurrence. When Owen scored in the third minute, the euphoria was soon qualified by the following intuition: with time added on, England were now going to spend an entire football match in frazzled defence, dropping back ever deeper, the beleaguerment solidified by ever-more paranoid substitutions. As Rooney limped off, after 20-odd minutes, you felt you were complicit in an act of unilateral disarmament. But by now it was taking some doing not to notice a qualitative difference between the teams: the abysmal gulf in technique.
The days when an England player's first touch could often be mistaken for an attempted clearance or a wild shot on goal - those days are over. The deficit is not in individual skill, it is in collective skill; it is in the apparently cultural indifference to possession . In 2004, football is no longer a dribbling game, still less a long-ball game (and how many balls did we float to our two haring midgets up front?); it is a possession game. The "clearance", as practised by England, is simply an anachronism. When an international defender heads it away, he heads it to a teammate. When we "clear" it, we just clear it, for two or three seconds.
After the match Eriksson talked of "possession" as if he thought of it as foreign frippery - as if he had succumbed to the masochistic machismo that says: You didn't score that time, did you? Have another crack.
During the second half it was a full-time job not noticing what the chasing game does to a side's morale. Pass it to a teammate? We couldn't even throw it to a teammate. A Martian, looking on, would have wondered at the mysterious discrepancy: whenever the ball went into touch, it seemed that it could only be reintroduced to a player in a red shirt. Portugal's equaliser was both completely inevitable and richly deserved. And then the crouched supporter was left to believe that England, this booting, blocking, sliding, nutting, hacking behemoth, this hysterical combine-harvester, was about to transform itself into an instrument of attack.
That it did so was a great tribute to the real but fading virtues of passion and will. It granted us the ritual of losing the shootout. Beckham "bravely" (ie vaingloriously) went first, and inspired his team by ballooning the kick without falling on his arse - which is what he did in Istanbul last October. (This time he blamed the penalty miss on the penalty spot, as, with infinite inanity, did Eriksson: "I complained personally to the Uefa official responsible about the penalty spot.")
How, by the way, did it ever get about that Beckham was good at penalties? He utterly lacks the steel for it. Maybe Scholes has it - but Scholes was off, physically spent. And if such a thoroughbred is out of gas at this point in the summer then so is everybody else in the Premiership. As a first step, on even-numbered years every player in the England squad should be rested for 10 games a season, by FA law.
As a second step, we must settle down to learning how to keep possession: how to retain the football. It is the best defence, it is the complete defence, as Brazil showed us in the quarter-finals of the last World Cup. The penalty shootout is a tawdry lottery, but any kind of win, for England, would have been a tawdry lottery, and would have meant the prolongation of illusion. Consider the statistics. For the main body of the match, Portugal have claim to twice as much possession, twice as many corners, and half as many fouls. At this level, we're no good, and we have to start again.
· Martin Amis's latest novel, Yellow Dog, is published by Vintage
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