Ian Boyne, Contributor
Ian Boyne
TODAY ENDS one glorious month of football. It has left many of us disappointed, as our favourite teams have been knocked out, leaving us with this grand anticlimax of a France-Italy final.
But, the lessons from the World Cup and football in general can never disappoint. "The explanations advanced for soccer's intense mysterious power, the trance-like quality of great matches, its world-wide domination over all other sports, have been many", says novelist and essayist Robert Coover in the June 2006 National Geographic magazine's special issue, 'Why the World Loves Football'.
In his article titled, 'Morality Play: Soccer as Theatre', Coover refers to the game's "inherent theatricality" "the testing of virtue, the pursuit of pattern and cohesion, the collision of paradoxical forces". Coover says soccer has often been compared to Greek tragedy or an open-ended morality play.
NEW CONFIGURATION
"The player who actually wins the game may be the one who moves into space at the opposite side of the field, drawing a defender, forcing a new configuration upon the defence and making inevitable a goal that was before impossible but no one, not even he, may be aware of this. It's all narrative, and thus subjective: Each game is a story, a sequence of ambivalent metaphors, a personal revelation couched in the idiom of faith. No game I know of is so dependent upon such flowing intangibles as 'pattern', and 'rhythm' and 'vision' and ' understanding'. Which may all be illusions."
Nobel Prize Winner, iconic former US Secretary State and football fanatic Henry Kissinger, in an article on the game in the May 8 issue of Newsweek, compares aspects of the game to ballet and the game as a kind of geometry.
Hear him: "Manipulating a ball by foot along a 110-yard field into an opposing goal requires skills analogous to ballet...The seductive quality of soccer resides in the almost intellectual focus with which the best teams move the ball down the field to solve the riddle of how, with each side moving at high speed, to get a ball past 11 opponents, one of whom (the goalie) is permitted to use his hands to intercept the ball. This turns the game into a kind of geometry of finding uncovered open spaces from which to launch an unimpeded shot on the goal. Soccer at its highest level is complexity masquerading as simplicity." Have to agree with the distinguished former diplomat this time!
GREAT LESSONS
Football has great character lessons. And great lessons for nations, too. Take the importance of teamwork. You learn through football that it is not enough to have great stars and dazzling performers. Brazil should have taught that lesson painfully again this year. Brazil clearly has the most talented and engrossingly skilful players in the world. But, pulling the team together from that galaxy of talent is something else.
It has always fascinated me that Jamaica does very well at individual sports where stars can shine, but not so well at team sports. That says a lot about our national character: We are more individualistic than we are team-players. We have done sensationally well in athletics because it allows for the flourishing of individual talent, solo effort and one-person performance. Getting us to work together as teams is something else.
As Kissinger himself says (he has a better score with football than politics!): "Teams that concentrate on individual skills, like the Brazilians, astonish with their virtuosity and abandon. On the other hand, they sometimes forget to score goals and are overcome by single-minded, strategically-oriented teams" teams like the Germans, whom I have traditionally favoured. While the quality of German football has declined significantly, their legendary determination, stamina, fortitude and confidence have remained intact.
The more skillful and flashing
Argentineans were sent home by the Germans because the Germans never say die. And Klose and Ballack work together in ways that no two Argentinean or Brazilian footballers really do.(Though the Germans were helped considerably this year by some inexplicable decisions of Argentina's coach, for whom a simple resignation is not an adequate sanction for such colossal misjudgement in leaving out Messi and recalling Crespo.)
We see what teamwork can do and how the slow-starting French got their act together and put in great teamwork to place them, in my view, in the leading position to take away the World Cup tonight.
PASSES AND SET PLAY
In football, the man who ends up scoring, while his name goes on the scoreboard, rarely has earned that goal singly. Often, he is just there to head in the ball or to slide it in. He depends so crucially on passes and set play from others. If Jamaicans could only learn to work together as teams and forget about the obsession with ensuring that one person gets the glory and the applause.
If Jamaicans could concentrate on the outcome, rather than who gets the praise, we would be much further ahead as a nation. If we could draw the lesson of the importance of team work and building synergy from the World Cup and football in general, then we could derive more than mere pleasure from The Beautiful Game. All you Brazilian fans need to learn the lesson that the concentration of skills in one place does not guarantee success.
It is the deployment of those skills which are crucial.(Incidentally, though I am a traditional fan of the Germans in football, I thought Brazil had the best chance of winning this year and was stunned at France's defeat of them.)
Football teaches the importance of performing under pressure and adverse environmental conditions. It might be too hot or the altitude might be unfavourable. But you have to perform. The crowd might be against you. You have to play on. You have to do your best under the circumstances. You can't cry in your soup. That's football. And that's life.
Sanchez lost his father at the start of the World Cup. The Greatest Show on Earth had to go on. He had to muster the courage and concentration despite his deep personal loss.
In life when we are thrown to the ground and bounced around we have to know how to bounce back and pick ourselves up, rather than wallow in self-pity. We have to learn that as a nation, too.
ADJUST
Life is filled with the unexpected. You might have practised for a certain formation when the opponent changes on you. You have to adjust. Once the game starts you have to move with the flow, with all its unpredictability. Robert Coover puts it well in that National Geographic article : "Nor , until that whistle, is there relief from the tyranny of time's ceaseless flow: Once you have fallen into the flow, there's no getting out. The player must stay with the flow, maintain the rhythm press for advantage, preserving all his skills, his mind locked into the shifting patterns".
We can't stop the world and come off in this game of life. That's suicide. We must play on. In football we learn the importance of defence and the importance of attacking. In life we have to know how to balance both. Some of us are always going forward, making plans, strategising, being pro-active but we never take care of ourselves emotionally and psychologically and so we burn out, get psychologically dehydrated and famished. Left in that state, with our defences weak, we are overcome by various opponents.
The Brazilians have never excelled at defence. But, in the game of life you learn it is not enough to attack and to strike. You have to protect the flank, too. You can't leave yourselves exposed. Great teams have found that out.
Others who spend their time defending when they should strike out also pay the price. Argentina's decision to lock down the game about twenty minutes before the close of normal play proved fatal against a resilient team like Germany. And Switzerland was eliminated early without conceding one goal. In life you have to get the balance between defence and attack.
TIGHTROPE
Successful football teams, like successful persons, know how to talk that tightrope. Football is nothing also but rules.
There are 17 rules which guide football. You don't argue with the ref. You abide by his judgement. You learn early in life that you need some firm rules to live by and that anarchy will take you to the pit of hell (speaking figuratively here, for you secularist readers). The rules of modern association football were drawn up at the University of Cambridge in the early 1800s.(Incidentally, though football was perhaps British colonialism's best gift to the world, a form of the game actually began with the Chinese 2,500 years Before Christ.)
Rules are important. Order is important. If only Jamaicans could learn this! There are many wonderful lessons to learn from football. But, for today, let us simply enjoy the game - every last minute of it. Any team which disqualified Spain, the greatest footballing nation never to win the World Cup, deserves to win. And any team that embarrassed the Germans before their own home crowd also deserves to win. Truth is, when you reach the final, after all the favourites have fallen, you have already won.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. Email him at ianboyne1@yahoo.com
