Just read the following in David Goldblatt’s monumental “The Ball is Round” (it’s almost a thousand pages long, which is why I’ve referred to it as work in progress over so many months):
Touch is everything, from the spine tingling, hair raising reflex that football brings to the back of the neck, to the soft precision pressure that brings a high swirling ball to a stop. Johan Cruyff would judge the quality of a shot or a pass by its timbre. His team mate Gerrie Muhren hated high winds because ‘You have to hear the ball during a game. You can hear from the sound it makes on the boot where the ball is going, how hard, how fast. If there is a big wind you are angry with the ball. You kick the ball but it doesn’t listen to you.’ It is amazing that they could hear so much, high winds or not, for football’s crowds have not merely cheered and booed and sung, chanted and roared. As Arthur Hopcraft put it: ‘The sound of a big football crowd baying its delight and its outrage has no counterpart. It is the continuous flow of football that excites this sustained crescendo.’ That flow is based on motion, on the continuous making and breaking of patterns and spaces that so dazzled the man from The Times* under floodlights; no still photograph, no graphic, no painting can do justice to this.
*he’d mentioned a Times correspondent at the start of the chapter
Bit of a ‘wow’ moment for me, that. Isn’t this what football’s all about? I remember last year Jamie saying how he’d heard the ball hitting the net at Eastlands when Diomansy Kamara scored. It must have been an astonishing moment. The flow, motion, making and breaking of patterns: this is what draws us isn’t it? The almost infinite variety, knowing that of all the hundreds of possessions, only one or two will count, but being transfixed nevertheless. True, I’m guilty of selective memory here – it wasn’t long ago that Fulham forwards were there to try to control bouncing balls or to head on high punts – but the stuff we’re seeing now is bloody entertaining isn’t it?
Aesthetically pleasing too. Players like Simon Davies aren’t just good players, they’re good to watch. There’s a natural athleticism, a fluidity of movement that makes their work interesting. Dempsey is the same, and Murphy’s economy of movement in his new role is fascinating to study. Bullard and Johnson are less fluid, more busy in their running style perhaps, but they’re good to watch too, magnetic sometimes. Zoltan Gera makes me laugh: a friend of mine suggested that Gera runs like a marionette, and I can see that. But he has his moments too, those surging tackles or those surprise soaring headers. All good stuff. Easy to like this team Roy’s assembled isn’t it?
England: sadly Jimmy wasn’t required by England tonight, but hopefully he had a nice trip. Watching Carrick and Barry out there may have been instructive. They looked pretty good whenever I was watching.
