Why Goals Aren't Overrated (But Javier Hernandez Is)

Players have positions. Over a century of crooked evolution has done nothing to dispute this. Certain positions have died, but the nominative principle remains. Indeed, it is so strong, that the most innovative players (Beckenbauer, Hidegkuti, and other sepia wonders) are awarded precisely their own positions, so that their revolutions might later be domesticated into the grey and essential world of categorisation. It is pointless to pretend that we can watch and appreciate football external to this gently shifting landscape of labels; labels that derive from those imaginary positions that make up formations (and Zonal Marking’s homepage), the places where each team’s players stand rooted semantically, if not literally, to the pitch.

Some players have the fortune and the misfortune to embody a position more totally than others. They smell of their position, of the very particular chemical needed to preserve the specimen. The catalogue of these archetypal players, if collated, would be the grand project of football classification, its Natural History Museum, or else a work of overarching and bizarre structural anthropology. When positions are this potently embodied, then we are dealing with the very foundations of the game, practically mythical, and we would do well to urge caution.

Exhibition A: Last of the Inside Lefts

 

Myths cast long psychological shadows, and the intimidation that can be achieved by the astute deployment of archetypes should never be underestimated. Perhaps no department of our Natural History Museum is as unnerving to the visitor as that which houses the archetypal, the indivisible goal-poachers. Lacking the liquid biceps and sideways swerve of a Van Persie, or the powerful idiosyncrasies of the crab-walking, childlike Ibrahimovic, these specimens are almost entirely defined by their dourness. No distinguishing features abound here, only slight physiological mishaps and unprepossessing haircuts. Yet how disturbing these men, under the blank museum lights! All they do is score goals: an act that is blank, apolitical, even acultural, and thus dangerous. Two examples should suffice. Gerd Müller’s first coach, the Yugoslavian funnybone Zlatko Cajkovski, quite rightly gave him the sobriquet ‘kleines dickes Müller’ – short fat Müller (even Cajkovski’s grammatically incorrect German seems apt for this stumpy, uneven little player). This small, hairy alcoholic was deceptively underwhelming that he would seem to enact a disappearing act on the field for long, precious minutes at a time. And then, from three or four yards, he would score, score, and score some more. Short fat Müller sacked arguably the greatest international team of all time when his odd body curled itself around an uninviting cross to make the scoreline West Germany 2 – 1 Netherlands in the 1974 World Cup Final; he nestles amongst a leper’s handful of the greatest strikers of all time, regardless of subspecies. And what of his modern, Mediterranean counterpart, Filippo Inzaghi? That lank hair, grey expression, offside gait and arrogantly devoid gaze he wears like an old cloak, beneath which he hides a dagger. Do we honestly think that the Fergusons, Guardiolas, and Mourinhos of this world are not afraid to see him standing on the touchline? They would be foolish not to be. This is precisely the point with archetypal players: they provoke justified fear, since they embody their singular role to the extent of near infallibility. We should fear the dour and the lumpen when they have scoring statistics like these.

We should not fear Javier Hernandez. At most, he should provoke faint annoyance, or the kind of half-amused pity that surfaces when we see a three-legged cat, or the fatigued motions of a water buffalo poisoned by ever-circling Komodo Dragons. He wants to have it all, to throw off the accumulative cultural weight of myth and boundary, whilst still being commended for the primitivism of his achievements. He is an anthropological short circuit. Hernandez is a goal-poacher, for sure: he is certainly no great passer of the ball, or crosser, or tackler, or trickster; he is quite fast and knocks it in from a few yards out. A valuable player, undoubtedly. But dour, that he will not consent to.

The Small Fat Pea’s chosen persona, rather, is one of ‘infectious enthusiasm’, ‘love of the game’; he is, we are told, a joyful player. He loved playing in the Mexican league but it’s even more exciting to play for a big team in a big league, and he’s so happy to play for Manchester United (look, he’s kissing the badge!), and if God lets him he’ll score loads and loads of goals against other big teams, and Wigan, and oh look it’s gone in off his pancreas wow wheeeeeeeeeeeeee. Javier is confused. His young and excitable self clearly loves football in the way a child loves the game; and yet his by-now-athletically-mature body is incapable of performing almost all the actions involved in an actual professional game. Thus he is become archetypal, adept at one alone. But the child-self protests (with a degree of petulance), and continues to enact that fabled infectiousness, apparently to the delight of fans who are perhaps guilty of indulging their own inner (footballing) child in their celebrations of his latest shoulder-dropping exploits.[1]

Perhaps the Pea’s anti-archetypal, anti-mythical quest for permanent joy is indicative of the globalisation and totalisation of the game. Permanent joy in the face of draining 1-0 away wins at Everton is of course an illusion, and yet the whole point of ‘infectious enthusiasm’ (indeed, all epidemics), is that they cannot be allowed to flicker; and this is particularly true when this enthusiasm is being used to market a product such as sport, whose unpredictability and fluctuating quality go against the solid principles of profiteering. The market resolves everything, even archetypes, into a two-dimensional version of itself, meaningless but valuable, and it allows Mr. Hernandez to accessorise his grim footballing job with cheeky Hispanic grins and endearing piety. In the same way, then, that the globalisation of football has meant the destruction of clubs’ regional identities and fan cultures, so it has removed something of the semantic coherence even of positions. Soon we may find ourselves living in a world not of trequartistas and left-backs, but simply of ‘top, top players’ – a world, coincidentally, where Jamie Redknapp would feel quite at home.[2]

 

Nobel Pea Prize

No doubt the perfectly accurate and scientifically justified observations above will be countered with claims as to PeaBot’s brilliant record as a player regardless of some pretentious nonsense about the superstructure of football’s mythical archetypes. Well, sure. And yet, let us not forget those moments when the Diminutive Vegetable’s limitations have been ruthlessly exposed, his enthusiasm shown to be a shield against the essentialised nature of his career, and I have been proven gloriously right. The Champions’ League Final of last season was a remarkable game, which played out like a series of rhetorical points being quite beautifully made. As Brian Phillips noted at the time, it is very rare indeed for a team to win as Barcelona did that night, entirely in their own way, with no aid from above or below, purely as an expression of the superiority of their performance of a reading of the game. In a sense, Barcelona are doing the market’s homogenising job on themselves, reducing their game to a series of rigid principles, and thus nihilistically maintaining an identity in the face of external pressure simply to exist in a frictionless, marketable manner. This is not a promising modus vivandi, but that night it clicked into a seamless performance. It is also rare for one player to be so completely at odds with the endeavours of the match around him as Mini Sprout was that day. He did nothing, except stand offside. For once, his childish sense of entitlement (to both goals and fun fun fun) wasn’t catered for, and instead he got to see what can happen when a team is fully at ease with its own identity and naturalist classification. Do people honestly think that Dimitar Berbatov would not have been more effective? Note: ‘effective’ is not the same as ‘enthusiastic’. Are we really so caught up in the hysterical merry-go-round of ‘infectious enthusiasm’ that we cannot accept that a languid, intelligent player, who is at peace with his languidness and intelligence and the impact these can have, would not have fared better on that strange, ideological evening?

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[1] Young Master Pea’s structural deficiencies have short-wired the discourse of commentators, too. Caught up in the notion that this is joyful football, yet unable to square that with the dour actions Pea actually performs, we are told in breathless terms how skilfully he has ‘dropped his shoulder’, ‘stuck his leg out’, ‘folded his rectum’, and so forth.

[2] If this sounds rather unjustifiably dystopian, then I will say in my defence that I tried for ages to think of a ‘funny angle’ on the Señorita, but simply couldn’t: the little shit just isn’t funny.

Juanma Lillo & The Ear That Is Not An Eye

For someone lauded as one of the more intelligent men in football, it is very difficult to construct a consistent philosophy from the aphorisms Juanma Lillo. Nevertheless, I attempted just this after encountering a recent interview published in The Blizzard where, amongst other painstakingly gnomic statements, he observes that it hard to get players to play as a team in the modern game. This is problematic for Lillo since, for him, the team is the only context in which football is intelligible. He states that there are no individual actions. All actions are bound up in the context of others in a web so complex that simple claims of cause and effect are undermined, such that even ‘if a player gets the ball in his own area, the opposition players all sit down on the turf and he runs the whole length of the pitch, dribbling round them and scores a goal…that’s still not an individual act because if they don’t sit down, he can’t do that. What the other guy does is what imposes upon you this decision or that one. People talk about ‘individual actions’, but there are not individual actions.’ Lillo’s conception of the individual is one of complete pourousness. The self is entirely dissolved in the context of its surroundings. In fact, in such an understanding there is no buffer between football and any other occurrence on the planet. Why did West Ham get relegated from the Premier League? Their poor form? We could just as well blame the weather in China.

It seems to me that the problem with Lillo’s ideas is that he is so focused on the idea of the team that he cannot deal with the individual. I would claim that this because his warped idea of an individualism that has no bearing to relationship. In reacting against the modern idea of the self which he finds so distasteful, Lillo goes too far the other way, retreating into a somewhat bloodless form of monism where there is no room for the individual and everything becomes mechanised. In this sense Lillo’s philosophy can be seen as the purest form of Guardiola’s philosophy. In the aforementioned interview he questions the wisdom of training players specifically to improve their speed or fitness, claiming that you cannot ‘gain strength for football from outside of football.’ So why train your right back to run fast? After all, running fast is not football – it is running. The logical conclusion would be that the only form of training that is worth doing would be playing games of football. Of course this does not make any sense. Adapting training routines to focus on specific things such as making players faster and fitter will benefit the player and, consequently, the team. If this is how Lillo actually manages clubs then perhaps that is why his record as a coach is modest at best.

Tactics with Juanma Lillo

 What we need, then, is a middle ground where the individual and the collective are both given their due. There is no denying that football is a team sport, but it is worth reflecting on what a team is. Let us take it that a team is the eleven men on the pitch at any given time and the substitutes on the bench. Now, there is certainly an understanding close to Lillo’s where a team can be considered as a whole, as a One. This, for example, would allow us to understand the entire team in terms their special presence on the pitch. A team, therefore, would be the space between the player farthest forward and the player farthest back. At different times the extremes of this space take on different significance as the play shifts and players are played onside or offside. Furthermore, it is possible for one team to have several concurrent shapes, once again as the offside rule brings certain players in and out of the play. But as much as a team is a One, it is also a multiple of ones. There are individuals within the team. To ignore these individuals would be disingenuous since they have characteristics that cannot be reduced to the One. We cannot, for instance, pretend that, in the context of a team, the differences between, say, Aaron Lennon and David Beckham on the right of a midfield are negligible. They are clearly different types of player that offer different things to the team, with the effect of this being that the understanding of the team of which they are a part has to change (prosaically, are we dealing with pace up the right or not?). Here we see the opposite of players being abstracted into the team – rather the team is made up of the players. So a team is both One and many. We need the idea of a team as an intelligible One (a count-as-one), but we cannot pretend that each team is not a multiple.

In one sense, then, when we are talking of a team we are really talking about is an aggregate of individuals. Yet at the same time it is true that with a good team dynamic can actually amplify performances. Yet what is amplified is not the performance of the team, since the team is merely a concept. Rather it amplifies the performance of the individuals within the team. One can imagine the scene where just before a game begins the coach instructs his players: ‘Remember, there is no team. Now go out and play as a team!’

This understanding, whereby the individual and the collective are considered as part of a more considered dialectic, is reminiscent of 1 Corinthians 12. Here ‘the body is a unit, though it is made of many parts; and though all of its parts are many, they form one body… And if the ear should say, “Because I am not a eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? ... If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I do not need you!” and the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”… If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it.’ In other words, a team recognises differences in its individuals insofar as they are all a part of the same unit: they are the same and distinct. There may be no ‘I’ in team, but there might be at least one eye.

Mes Que Un Team

Throughout football there have been great players who suffered precisely because of managers (and journalists) deciding that they cannot be incorporated into teams. This has been particularly pronounced in Italy, where, after Gianni Brera ignited the abatini debate in reference to Rivera, there has been suspicion directed towards certain flair players.[1] An obvious example is the case of Roberto Baggio. It is clear that Baggio, il Divin Codino, was an extraordinary player. Across his career he played for six senior teams and can be listed amongst the few players to have played for Juve, Milan and Inter. Yet nowhere was he more valued than at the smaller, regional clubs at which he played: Fiorentina, Bologna and Brescia. There was a prevailing sense that Baggio’s coaches at the bigger clubs never fully trusted him. As his Milan and Italy teammate Demetrio Albertini noted, Baggio played at a time when second strikers were not as highly valued as they are today. Even if we admit that Baggio’s failure to have an extended period of success was partly his responsibility, it is equally true that the inability of his coaches (including famous names such as Marcello Lippi and Giovanni Trapattoni) to harness his talent represents a major failure on their part.

Of course there was something wonderful about the time Baggio spent at Fiorentina, Bologna and Brescia. At these clubs he was the focus of attention and could display his full talent. Self indulgent, perhaps, but insofar as football is a medium for beauty, these clubs were the perfect canvases upon which Baggio could work his art. Some might argue, then, that if players such as Baggio have to play away from the bigger clubs to display their talent, perhaps this is a price worth paying. I am not so sure. If we are resolved to understand a team as a body, celebrating the difference within its parts whilst at the same time facilitating their working together, then one must respect each part for its respective merits. Ultimately this is the responsibility of the manager. The greatest managers find ways to accommodate the more idiosyncratic players in their teams. We have already noted the presence of Rivera in the Milan side which won multiple domestic and European titles; remaining in Italy we could note the role of Mario Corso in Il Grande Inter or, extending our reach further, the role of Arjen Robben at Bayern Munchen and Chelsea or Laurent Robert at Bobby Robson’s Newcastle United. Great managers find successful ways to accommodate gifted individuals within their teams. Each player is a member of the team as each part is a member of the body, all performing different roles but nevertheless contributing to the whole. The attitude towards the individual advocated by Lillo is destructive, rather than constructive. The effect of adopting such an attitude is evidenced in Baggio’s career. Rather than being incorporated into a working body politic he was regarded as a phantom limb. Baggio could not just be reduced to an abstract collective. He was not an unworkable individual who could not function within a team; he was just an ear that was not an eye.

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[1] The word abatino means young priest. Brera used it to refer to the weakness brought to the side by accommodating Rivera. He saw Rivera as a half-player, whose intermittent brilliance was diminished by his lack of hard work and the need for the team to be ‘built around’ him.

Mr. Manager

A strange thing happened on Wednesday 8^th June, sometime between midday and mid-evening. At some point during this period, it was decided that Roberto Martinez was a fantastic manager, the most promising young coach in the Premier League, and as such was the first and best choice for the vacant Aston Villa position. Rent-a-quote chairman Dave Whelan admitted that it was only so long before one of the ‘Top Six’ clubs in the country would come in and snatch this precocious talent from them. Martinez’s star was, apparently, on the rise. I must admit that this came as a complete shock to me since during the two years of watching Wigan under Martinez I had always assumed him at best to be an average coach and at worst one slightly out of his depth. But perhaps I had made a mistake. Perhaps it was just that I hadn’t noticed the quality evidenced in work done by the affable Spaniard in the Lancashire rugby town. Reflecting on this for all of a minute I reverted to my original stance. A top six club? Roberto Martinez? No.

Roberto Martinez (Excellent Manager)

It isn’t that I don’t like Roberto Martinez, I’m just not sure how good a job he has done at Wigan. When Martinez inherited the team from Steve Bruce, Wigan had just finished 11^th in the league. The next two seasons would see them finish 16^th on both occasions, leaving it until the last minute to avoid relegation (unsurprising given Martinez’s underwhelming win ratio of 26% - amongst the lowest in the league). Indeed it has taken Martinez two seasons of football to win two Premier League games in succession. Why the dip in form and results since Bruce’s departure? The narrative that many subscribe to is that Martinez has done a fantastic job considering the fiscal constraints upon him. It is certainly remarkable that Wigan have remained in the Premier League for so long given their comparatively dreadful returns from match day and commercial revenue. Should Martinez be given credit for this then? To an extent. We should remember that his predecessors, Jewell and Bruce (apologies to Chris Hutchings), had similar constraints. In his final season at Wigan, Bruce signed players whose fees amounted to around £13.5 million, but sold key talent such as Wilson Palacios and Emile Heskey in order to make a profit in the transfer market. Martinez too has had to sell his top talent in order to recruit. At the very beginning of his tenure he lost Luis Antonio Valencia to Manchester United (£16 million) and Lee Cattermole to Sunderland (£6 million). The following year Titus Bramble was reunited with Bruce at Sunderland. So, like Bruce, Martinez has been forced to sell top talent. Yet, unlike Bruce, the quality of those players brought in (and, consequently, their resale value) seems much lower. All the aforementioned players who left the club for large fees were Bruce’s signings. If Charles N’Zogbia or Hugo Rodallega leaves this summer their fees will represent further returns on the investments made by Bruce. And if/when these players leave, who will replace them? Martinez’s recruitment policy has seen far more misses than hits. Whilst James McCarthy’s signing from Hamilton Academical was a good investment and additions such as Caldwell, Diame, Stam and Moses have all done ok, it seems hard to justify signings such as Boselli (£6 million), Jason Scotland (£2 million), Franco Di Santo (£2 million), and Jordi Gomez (£1.7 million). For a club that has, to an extent, depended on selling star players in recent years, it is troubling that Martinez has not better identified players with the potential to replace the departed. The Wigan team sheet looks more and more like that of a 2^nd Division Spanish team each year. Indeed, once the last of Bruce’s players is sold off, will there be much left for Wigan? Who will save them from relegation once the likes of N’Zogbia, Rodallega and Figueroa have departed? 

"Wigan is a place, A place where nothing, Nothing ever happens"

 

Now previously I said that it wasn’t the case that I didn’t like Roberto Martinez. I may have been lying. Or at least bending the truth. Whilst I don’t dislike the man, I do find him somewhat annoying. There is something about him that evokes the image of a poor man’s Arsene Wenger (although he might argue that this is only literally true). Anyone who has watched Wigan play under Martinez’s stewardship will be familiar with the sight of him hovering awkwardly by the touchline during a defeat, like a nervous schoolboy waiting to be disciplined. Perhaps it is here where he, like the errant pupil, constructs his colourful excuses for his team’s often pitiful showings. Chief amongst these excuses is his appeal to the attractive football that Wigan are trying to play. Now, I’ve watched Wigan in a number of games over the last two years and have seen no consistent evidence of this. Perhaps what Martinez is confusing is the idea of playing good football and the idea of playing a formation and style that your players are completely unsuited to in an attempt to ape teams such as Arsenal. If you don’t have passing players don’t try to play a passing game. If your defence is vulnerable then don’t leave them exposed all the time. Wigan do not play good football knowingly – they play bad football naively. I’m not saying that they don’t try to play well (or even that they don’t occasionally play well), but it would be disingenuous to ameliorate and absolve their deficiencies by appeal to (or virtuous endeavour towards) aesthetic superiority when this aesthetic is neither evidenced nor realised. I would suggest that the idea to which Martinez in equal parts appeals and subscribes is that which The Guardian’s Barney Ronay recently identified:

‘There is among some English football consumers a mildly onanistic televisual reverence for the current brilliant Barcelona team, with their possession fetish and their annihilating roster of Velcro‑touch midfield gnomes. At the same time there is no way of describing the anglophone muscle-football style that doesn't make it sound at best sweatily unglamorous, at worst an inexcusable tribal hangover, like cannibalism or the bagpipes. Hit and hope. Hoof. Punt. We simply don't have the vocabulary.

So Barça-style is in the ascendancy, not just in terms of excellence on the field, but in a perceived moral righteousness, a sense of being not just better but better, more upright, more academic.’

But neither style is more inherently fun to watch. What we should be celebrating, rather, is the diversity of styles and tactics played. As pleasing it can be to watch Arsenal or Barcelona pass the ball around the pitch ad infinitum, it can be equally enjoyable to watch the carnivalesque chaos that ensues when balls are launched into the most dangerous areas of the pitch. Indeed, one of the most entertaining games I watched this season was Birmingham 1 - West Brom 3 which, despite neither McLeish nor Hodgson being lauded for their respective styles, was a thrilling end-to-end game. So a fitting contrast to Martinez might be the man who may yet get the Villa job that Martinez turned down: Owen Coyle. Coyle’s Bolton received plaudits for their style this season, not only from the media but also from the fans who watched them week-in week-out. Despite their modest league standing and terrible latter half to the season the fans were content with Coyle and this was due to the football being enjoyable to watch. Yet as Zonal Marking has pointed out, they have not really changed their ethos insofar as they are still a physical team that are partial to the long ball. The point here, then, is that it is not just style that matters, but also the spirit in which the game is played. The spirit with which Coyle’s Bolton play the game is in no way similar to the cynicism of Sam Allardyce’s Bolton. Irrespective of results I would rather have watched Bolton this season than Wigan, as whilst the latter were merely said to play attractive football, the former were actually enjoyable to watch. Perhaps Martinez and those in his corner would argue that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. What is less clear here is who is Socrates, and who is the pig.

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