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Jonathan Wilson is a football writer, more futuristic levitating brain-in-a-jar than a man. If you haven’t heard of him or read any of his stuff, you should. He’s great, even if a bit verbose at times.
He writes for a lot of publications (e.g. The Guardian, Sports Illustrated), edits his own football journal The Blizzard, and most importantly wrote the football tactical opus Inverting the Pyramid.
His pulsating football noggin also makes him a nigh-authority on eastern European and Argentine football matters, as well as his own team Sunderland, but he mainly focuses on tactics and trends in football culture.
In one of his latest articles, he ponders how tactical analysis has entered into the football journalism mainstream, a wave he’s pretty much ridden for a living.
Despite its new found popularity, Wilson believes talking tactical trends in football is still a controversial subject.
“There are many ways of consuming and enjoying football and there is… a strange antagonism between them,” he wrote.
“There are those who want, above all else, the team they support to win. There are those who want to be entertained. And there are those who want to take the game apart and understand why what happened, happened.”
As I’ve grown up, I’ve begun to enjoy sport more for its meta-properties than for its actual content. Of course, watching the action is always exciting, but I’m always equally thinking and trying to see what the teams’ strategies and tactics are. Not only what they’re trying to do and how well that’s going for them, but also how it is being reported on by the commentators and then the post-game editorials.
It is always reported who scored the goals – after all, they dictate the result, and that’s perfectly normal. However, what I find troubling is that the narrative always follows who scored the goals. For instance, “Diego Costa saves Chelsea”, or “Lewandowski denies Dortmund”.
First of all, yes, forwards can and do put in match-winning overall performances, winning every challenge, completing most of their passes and harassing the other team when not in possession. Or perhaps they are thrown on in the last few minutes of a game, and do something magical like score a header with the back of their head like Javier Hernandez.
Regardless, the goalscorers almost always remain the narrative of the game despite the natures of their performances. I remember watching Fox Sports News once and they were pronouncing Fernando Torres the saviour of Chelsea in one game, as he scored two goals.
They then showed the highlights, and both his goals were tap-ins. No discussion of the build-up, no discussion of the tactical approach to the goalscoring (maybe they were targeting the opposition’s high line or weakness to corners). Just the fact the ball was in the net and Torres kicked it last. As Jonathan Wilson has been quoted as saying (although he claims he was misquoted), “Goals are overrated”.
For me, when Wilson says goals he means moments and events. Events can be things like red cards, penalties, comedy own goals or goalkeeping saves. Tim Howard was lauded for playing out of his skin for the US in their World Cup round of 16 clash with Belgium. Howard was the target of a media and internet love-in, rather amusingly being christened the ‘Secretary of Defence’ in an edit on Wikipedia.
Belgium in that game had 38 shots at goal, and 26 of those were on target (the US had 14, and nine respectively). In addition, they had 19 corners to America’s four. What these statistics show is that Belgium were peppering the American goal and final third. The failure or weakness of the defence – because that in essence is how you concede 38 shots on target and 19 corners in 120 mins – was handily smokescreened by Howard, both physically and afterwards, too.
On the contrary, how many questions were asked about the efficacy of Belgium’s attack? In that game, their strikers were Romelu Lukaku and Divock Origi, who have a combined age of 40 and eight international goals, and while Belgium is flush with exciting attacking midfielders (Kevin Mirallas, Eden Hazard, Kevin de Bruyne to name three), their talents lie in creation.
The answers to or discussion from these questions may not provide us with an explanation to the game’s events, but they were never considered in the editorial of the game. It was all about Howard.
I’m not trying to say that Howard was worth his dues or that one isn’t allowed to think he played well, he did make 15 saves after all. I am using his performance as an example of how the football discussion – and, I guess, sport media in general – veers towards the simplistic and high visibility.
But what is bad about this, you might ask? Well, there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, simplification and bold statements are a feature of humanity, something increasingly apparent in our falsely-enlightened modern multimedia connected times.
However, there is so much more to football than just the action. Indeed, the people who think about the game past the action tend to be more successful at it.
In the past, Dutch football introduced the philosophy of total football, which has spread and influenced countless football cultures and clubs. In the present, Swansea have adapted and maintained an approach to their football.
Furthermore, it could also be argued that the identity of the scorers, key performers, or others who are involved in highly-visible events, is already well known. So is the media just repeating what we’ve already seen? What addition is such media ‘analysis’ then making to the football discussion, other than just assuming the place of an irrelevant middle-man?
Of course, though, when I say media I mean the big wigs, not us amateurs. We’re not scrimping a living because we’re not getting paid for our tripe in the first place.
In the end though, game events are merely specks in the grand scheme. Boiling football games down like this obfuscates, ignoring most of what makes football so incredibly vibrant and interesting.
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