After the game

And suffer we did.

Espana contra Italia

Tonight a big game will be played in Vienna. 

On one side we have the red shirts of Spain, attacking with pace, class, brilliance, speed. Spain is a country where winning the league might not be enough to keep your coaching job: just ask Fabio Capello. On the other side the light blue shirts of Italy, defending with barricades, slowing the game down, erecting fortifications in midfield, never giving up. There is only one field where italians are said to be cynical: football.

This is how the British media would see the game: a clash between an ugly defensive team and a classy albeit unlucky one. The contrast is deeper: it is a clash between those who reduce the beauty of football to beautiful football and those who don't. What is commonly referred to as 'beautiful football' is a way of playing the game. It is fast, relies on constant runs of players without the ball, and shuns the long ball. In this Euro, more than Spain or Holland, it is Russia that has shown this type of football, and it is no surprise: beautiful football requires a lot of running and fitness, and it makes sense that players whose league is played in the summer display it. A Cristiano Ronaldo or Henry, after 50 and more intense games in top European leagues, can not find the energy to constantly dance around the ball without actually having it. Beautiful football is composed of short passes, the idea being that the player in possession always has two or three options open, created by a bunch of team-mates making runs. The philosophy of beautiful football is in Cruyff's phrase: "Simple football is the most beautiful, but playing it is the hardest thing".

To reduce the beauty of football to this type of football is generalizing, on the verge of fetishism. The beauty of football is also Greece European champions in 2004, or the punishment that comes from not converting your chances. It is the beauty of unpredictability, the satisfaction of pundits being proven wrong. There is, to come to our game, a particularly Italian way (but the English share it to a great deal, when they are at their best) of making football beautiful without the playstation-like-short-passing-all-out-attack frenzy. It is finding beauty in suffering. Part of it is not having possession for most of the game, great saves, defenders heading the ball out when it is about to cross the goal line, constantly feeling that the opposition might score: in a word, suffering. But just when the defence of the Alamo is taking its toll on fan's hearts, the counter-attack comes, the goal is scored. After that, it is even more suffering: but to win a game in this way is an experience that can not be easily matched.

Winning 4-0 can leave joy, enthusiasm, and a few jokes for the future. Winning after suffering changes you. Time is dilated: ten minute of Spanish pressure will seem a few years tonight. Italy have a long tradition of such games. The most notable ones in recent years, a 2-1 win over Nigeria in 1994, Roberto Baggio with a double,  and a win on penalties against Holland in 2000, when Francesco Toldo stopped the Dutch five times from the penalty spot. Those games live on even if the technicalities are forgotten. What was the defending midfielder's role in that Amsterdam Arena game? were the full backs helping in midfield? Was there much wing-play? Who remebers, who cares. What is remembered is Toldo saving from De Boer, Kluivert kicking his penalty against the post, and the waves of Dutch attacks failing to succeed. 

Tonight, if you are an Italian fan, expect to suffer.

Renaming the blog

I am considering changing the name of the blog. This name is a little moralistic, even if intended ironically. Feeling attracted to Brazil and its football, here are two possible options.

1- The World of Lidoanho

2- Em que mundo voce vive, amigao?

Lidoanho is a fictitious attacking midfielder.

The second phrase is similar in Italian, and expresses disbelief. In English it could be translated as "in what world do you live, my friend?". It was found in a youtube comment section. Any argument can go to those extents (when you have to wonder whether your opponent is a fellow terrestrian), but football ones do it better.

Garrincha died as an alcoholic, aged fifty, in the eighties: definitely one of those people whose life is better in recollection than in actuality. It is also rumored that he was slow-ish, not with his feet but with his reasoning (read: retarded). When he was signed, says wikipedia, by Botafogo, he was already a father. Later in his life he tried to run over his own father with a car- that was when he had stopped playing and just before his wife left him. Despite this he had a remarkable nickname, which, were it not too ambitious, would be a good title for this blog: Alegria do Povo (the Joy of People). Then again, joy for others often is the other side of misery for oneself.

A parliament

Discussing the situation in Gaza, an MP said the following:

"The situation is so desperate that we must absolutely...... express ourselves"

Rationality

Small Thought

It is ungraceful to tell directly to people's face that you will not compromise on a certain thing, that it is an absolute to you. It is worse to have no absolutes at all.

Football and Theatre

On why football is better than theatre

Football is better than theatre because it is unpredictable. In a real sense. A plot twist may be left unpredicted. But when something is unpredictable it means that it has to be left unpredicted. You may get it right, in football, but that is not to say you have predicted. A plot twist is something a mind has thought- something man made. Some human being holds all the secrets to a plot. He is the plot’s creator, its deity. But still a human being, a maybe remarkable one, but still a human mind. Biologically- over 99% compatible with a chimp.

Yet consider what can happen when you put 22 men on a field and tell them to put a ball in the back of two nets. Well, they will start by trying individually to do it, and then realize that specialisation pays and start playing in positions. Some will play midfielders, some strikers, the bravest in defence. But from then, no one can tell. That is, as it involves more than one person, it is impossible for one single mind to predict what will happen next. There is no creator, yet there is a plot. A cynical plot at times, an heroic one other ones. And then, of course, what you do not know you can explain in all the ways possible, possibly choosing the best ones. Beating a team after they have badly beaten you can be called revenge, or justice. You can say: surely, in theatre you get such ideas of Justice, revenge, nemesis. And more than in football. True, but, as said before, it is the product of a human mind, the piece is its child: if you ignore this, you enjoy theatre more. While in football, because no one has written any script, it actually might be Justice at work. Probably not, but then again, what you do not know you can explain in any way you want. And at this point why not choose the best ones? They are just as true as the worst ones, when one does not know. To choose the worse explanation in such cases is pettiness of the soul.

It is often argued that if something originated in a particular context it can not be universal. What they mean by universal, those lovers of moral castration, is unclear, but whatever it means they are proven dead wrong a million times by football. Of all the examples possible in football, football itself is the greatest. A 19^th century British upper class activity for glorious English spring days, it becomes in a few decades the game of much of the world. How, is not very important. John Stuart Mill says that persecution is useless against truth: truth always comes back. Thus, how football spreads and British imperial sailors are not very important. What matters is that it becomes the game of the world: universal in any possible understanding of the word. So- our preservers of dead cultures, those who see the world as a museum to humanity, would have each stuck in their own little game, each one dying in its own way. Much like plants that can not any longer stay in a pot and need to be planted in the ground, we, the human animal, like and need to go beyond. Beyond what is local to what is good: by any standard. From Eton to: Bahia, Genova, Paris, Montevideo, Sao Paulo, Madrid and Barcelona, Kiev, Donetsk, Moscow, Seoul and Tokyo, Lagos, Teheran, Munich, Brisbane… This was the march of football, the local and particular game of educated upper class white males. But where it comes from matters little, really. Incidentally, to testify this, it is sufficient to look at the English team now.

Football, said once a trainer, is the most important thing of the things that are not important. So simple and good as a means football is, that anything, virtually anything, can be shown trough football. For example, British imperial arrogance, and Justice. From the start of the century, through to, say, the second world war, the English team was the best in the world. So good it was, that, like Americans used to do in basketball, they sent amateur teams over the world to represent them, and they would win. So great this arrogance, that the FA did not join FIFA for decades, and England did not win the first World Cups for they did not bother to play. So good we are that we are not going to grace this cup with our presence: that was more or less the thinking. And now, 2007, England have won only one world cup, and the regrets that come with that must be enormous- and enormously deserved. We do not know what it is: but it might be Justice. The harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all, even mighty England now has enormous regrets. You would really- but then again to feel so superior as not to engage in world cups should bring you some punishment. And punishment is here, every time you look at the white shirt, the three lions, and the one star. The shirt of Uruguay has two.