This is an argument about what everyone is saying about the England – Argentina match. I am going to state an essential fact about football. It is not a science. It is a magical art, built out of openly admitted tricks. The simplest trick is the pass. A more complicated one is the dribble. Much more demanding than that is the dead ball shot. And then there is the full raft of Ibrahimovic / Ronaldhino decorative tricks. Put ‘em together and you have something like Lionel Messi.
Now the English are very vain about football. But this vanity is, or should be, a national shame: and a far greater one than any loss on the football pitch.
“Football is coming home” are by some distance the most pathetic (i.e., causing pain) and bathetic (i.e., having no other consequence than causing pain) – and probably also the most shadthetic, meshthetic and abednethetic – words in the English language.
Look, burn a football, call it the “Ashes” and then we can make a fuss about bringing the football home. But let’s be frank: the World Cup is just a squabble of shinsplinters swarming around a sphere: all fighting over a stumpy and stocky gold bauble.
Has anyone noticed that Donald Trump might have indulged Infantino so much not only because of flattery but because the actual World Cup makes perfect sense to Trump? It is gold.
I noticed that Trump weighed in, following Roy Keane, Gary Neville, Jonathan Liew, Barney Ronay, Jason Burt and all your other favourite football-content-providers, in order to express the same bloody opinion. Let us see that same bloody opinion in full, in paraphrase.
It was Tuchel’s fault. England were 1–0 up with only x minutes left to play. They made the mistake of falling back, not controlling the ball, bringing on defenders, trying to hold onto a narrow lead but then Argentina, Messi, etc.
I say, No.
This is complete balls. It is a heap of exploded Triondas.
It is just blame appended to description.
The description is alright.
But, about the blame, like Dickens, I say It was Nobody’s Fault.
And like Socrates, I believe in justice. And football is a sort of meditation on striving and struggle. We should look at it with the eyes of justice. Aye, it is possible to tie the game up. But it is also possible to conjure the ball into the goal. There are apparently causeless waves of influence. Without warning, one team acquires a sort of ant-like or termite-like capacity to act as one, and then it goes up the pitch and swarms over the opposition. This happens at times. The rest of the time, the players individuate and become a bit awkward. (The Telegraph informs me that in the 18 minutes before Argentina’s equaliser, England attempted 8 passes and completed 3. This is actually quite funny.) Balancing individuation and collectivisation is a tricky business: because some of the skills of football, especially the Haaland / Mbappe skills, depend on individuality, although individuality can cause chaos if it runs riot. So there is always a balance of team vs individual. And we watch. And justice demands that we acknowledge a loss – I was going to say “like a man,” but I am told that sort of language offends people nowadays.
I am going to use the language of Plato.
In Plato’s Republic the highest class in the city was rational, the middle class was spirited (i.e., warlike), and the lower class was desirous. Don’t worry. I won’t say anything more about that.
The point is that everyone who condemns Tuchel is seeing football in spirited terms. It’s war. Three lions. St George. Crusaders. A surrogate for actual war. Now, I don’t like all the Las Malvinas son Argentinas rubbish. But one sees how it connects. Argentina had an actual war with England in 1982, and then a surrogate one in 1986. And, yes, VAR would have disqualified almost everything Diego Maradona did in his entire career. But this recent match was just another psychological sop to the Argentines. They take a side, support a team and it feels a bit warlike, angry, the working out of oppositional emotion. And if they beat Inglaterra then in their tiny spirited minds they dream idly of the Falkland Islands “coming home”.
Well! I suggest that we all be a bit more erotic about football.
Eros. Technical term. Desire is erotic. Plato associated desire with the lowest parts of the body and the lowest class of artisans, but this is a bit unfair. For eros is not only about lust. Let me quote Leo Strauss’s book the City and Man, which I happen to be reading:
One kind of desire is eros, which ranges in its healthy forms from
- the longing for immortality through offspring
- via the longing for immortality through fame
- to the longing for immortality through participation by knowledge in the things which are unchangeable in every respect.
How about that? I recognise this, right the way through. I have sons. I at least half would like to be famous (if it wasn’t such a responsibility to be famous). But lacking that, I seem to find myself spending a lot of time participating in the, etc.
The point? If we had an erotic view of football, instead of a spirited, angry, bitter one, we would see the game as what they often call “the beautiful game” – or, at least, an occasionally beautiful game in between all the fouls and preening.
The true reason we watch football is because it is in the hands of the gods. And the gods are capricious. They bless certain players, no doubt, at certain times – and it is essentially miraculous. There is a reason why Catholic players do all that Eli Wallach-in-The Good, the Bad and the Ugly business with the fingers and cross-kissing, or point upwards to the heavens. They are saluting the pagan Mesoamerican gods of football (as sanctioned by the Holy Catholic Church): those gods of the old aristocratic Aztec/Incan ball game.
Football’s coming home? Balls. It goes home to America. That’s where it belongs. Spanish America. Land of the ball game. You ask, Spain or Argentina? I say, Same thing. Conquistadors with a bit of Indian or Moorish sensibility.
English sport, by contrast, is a sort of gentlemanly violence in mud, designed to knock the edges off everyone and make ‘em into Kipling Tommies or doomed Raymond Asquith types.
And we are meant to lose. Think Captain Cook in Tahiti. Think Nelson at Trafalgar. (He won the battle; he lost his own match with the Redoutable snipers.) Think George Mallory. Think, above all, of Robert Falcon Scott. “Great God,” he said, so memorably that for once I don’t have to look it up, “This is an awful place!” Yes, even a football pitch in an awful place. And learning to lose with gentlemanly dignity is part of the art of football. Even learning to appreciate a bit of skill from the other side.
I am not, like Tuchel, saying it is anything about DNA. No, it is the chastisement of our pagan gods (the Green Giant, Mrs Gamp, Mr Grumpy) as they look down on our woeful vanity.
I think our attitude to football should be a bit more philosophic.
Look, everything one says, after the miraculous events and unpredictable reversals are finished, is simply description after the fact. So Tuchel says, “We got too passive within our structure,” and Messi says, “They didn’t want it any more.” Well! Say what you like. I watched the game, and then, the next day, watched the highlights, and watched it the same way I might watch Hamlet, half expecting it to turn out differently this time.
James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to the Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Everyone could see the nonsense of England’s play after they scored – hugely mistaken .and wrong headed. How much was the players themselves, how much was Tuchel instructing them ? But Tuchel should have stopped it.
Millions like me must have been shouting ‘stop doing that you morons’ at the TV.
Southgate spent years getting England to be able to retain posession not kick or head it away. If Tuchel instructed the very opposite he should go.
Any England manager faces a shortage of players to pick from since their are so few English players at Premier League clubs these days. If any get injured or lose form these are not many others to choose from especially as some may have been tried before and found wanting. We have been down the route of taking injured players before in the hope that they will contribute and it has rarely worked. Tuchel had Saka, James and Rice all not fully fit. He was criticised for not taking Palmer or Foden and yet both were in dire form that did not justify selection. Arnold provokes a lot of debate but he has a record of struggling defensively in big games which is why Southgate did not fancy him much. Morgan Gibbs White is one who should have gone. Jordan Henderson’s role in the squad was important to Tuchel and with 26 players he could afford to take him even though he would likely not play much. Neither Eze nor Madueke played well and Gordon only came to life against Mexico.
Time and time again teams go into defensive mode when ahead. And it almost never works. You only need one little mistake or one brilliant shot and your advantage is gone.
And not playing Saka…
So yes, I do think Tuchel got it wrong.
In common with most professional sport, there is absolutely nothing beautiful about football, the first quarter of the match between England and Argentina being a case in point.
Frankly, in the graffiti of an anonymous Southern African: ‘Who cares who wins?’
The win against Argentina by Spain probably demonstrated that Tuchel had the correct (not beautiful, dull) tactics but did not have English players available to him that could effectively implement those tactics.
Stick with Tuchel, at last a manager who knows what he is doing, because professional football, with all its shouting at the referee, spitting, feigning injury, diving to obtain a penalty, sobbing at perceived injustice and general boorishness, will never be beautiful…
Viva Espana!!! Justice has been done.
One commenter said, “Thank God and Spain!” 🙂
Low scoring games are subject to noise a.k.a. luck
The Guardian and the BBC are ecstatic, they have been telling us for years that ethnics are our salvation, and not just football.
So, Prof. Alexander appears to be a Scotsman gloating that England lost again, after Scotland lost to Haiti because there were “too many whites” on the Scottish team, as Pakistani Muslims Humza and Anas Sarwar would say, and FIFA punishes all those kinds of teams.
But not to worry, because the Haitian “French” Goalkeeper at the France vs. England Wooden Spoon Match made sure that all of the Useless Nigerian of the Yoruba Tribe’s goals went in, as instructed, and Traitor Tuchel made sure to pack the England team throughout with Ethnic Africans to get the goals and the glory, to rub all our noses in diversity, as Andrew Neather would say, and make the white people bow down to The Great Replacement.
Thomas Tuchel is a FIFA-chosen Traitor to England and the English People, and did such a good job at it that FIFA are keeping him on for more years as a reward. One commenter said the players at Chelsea were happy to be rid of Tuchel after his stint there, but then he “failed upwards”.
The Great Replacement celebrating the Wooden Spoon Award:
I disagree. Of course the game is not a precise science and attributing blame to a single person is probably not completely accurate. But Tuchel is paid a lot of money to do a job, which can be done well or badly. The consensus seems to be that he did not do all that well.
Let’s remember that people who do the same or similar jobs for various football teams/clubs are frequently sacked, paid off in exchange for contract termination and then rehired elsewhere at some later date to do the same job again. Rinse and repeat.
It’s all a total con.
Beautiful game? Just a load of boys (mostly) and their balls. Never have had any interest in it.
I used to enjoy going to matches when you could turn up on the day and pay cash at the turnstile and stand behind the goal. These days I spend very little time watching professional sport, spend most of my spare time playing sport or watching tutorial videos – much more fun.
I believe he was hired to win the World Cup and in that he has failed. He did manage our best finish since winning the cup in 1966 by beating France and now faces two years with the Nations League and friendlies before the 2028 home Euros so no qualifiers. But as we have seen the qualifiers mean very little these days as England’s performance showed. It was odd that the FA rushed to give Tuchel a contract extension prior to the World Cup – allegedly due to a fear that Man United would appoint him. A lot of countries would have expected Tuchel to leave.
I’m not really invested in the whole business but it seems to me that he’s not very popular with fans and I wonder how much the players like and respect him. On that basis I think we should get rid of him, or he should quit – there are always going to be different views on who should play and manage but surely the point of a national team manager is someone that most people can get behind. As you say, every match from now until the very late stages of the next big tournament is fairly meaningless.
I thank you for the time spent writing the article, but it’s complete nonsense I’m afraid. There is nothing philosophical about football. That’s the beauty of it – as it is with most sports – there is something fundamental about it, something that is separate from philosophy and reaches to our more instinctive, intuitive, self. Tuchel is to blame exactly because he replaced intuition with philosophy, not excused by it. My love of boxing doesn’t come from believing it is a war, my love of boxing comes from knowing it is not.
Rugby, it used to be said, was a gentleman’s game played by hooligans; football was a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen.
The other way round I think, but, yes. Sport is primeval, with rugby being more primeval than football.
i totally agree, but what do you expect from an academic writing about football? It’s like Wayne Rooney writing a critique about Nolan’s Odyssey.
At least Rooney was spot on in labelling the World Cup Final half time show ‘crap’.
I totally agree, but what do you expect from an academic writing about football? It’s like Wayne Rooney writing a critique about Nolan’s Odyssey.
Or maybe Nolan trying to interpret Homer? Not seen it tbh, but I’m not a massive fan of Nolan and I rarely watch anything I’ve read – it’s always a massive disappointment.