Arsenal v Barcelona and Birmingham v Stoke epitomise the extremes of the modern football spectrum, but who's to say tippy-tappy is better than hit-and-hope?
Last weekend I watched Stoke City versus Sunderland on the TV in a busy lounge area crammed with grizzled, rhino-skinned footballing types, men who eat football, burp football, and pick small, gristly lumps of football from between their teeth. It was the kind of game where the entire notion of what football is, and could ever be, seems to have been condensed into a cramped and thrashing goalmouth mosh pit. From the football men it drew delighted hoots and jeers as before our eyes a universe emerged where John Carew – great, snorting, furious John Carew – is king. Pelé, Best, Carew. For a few brief moments this seemed to be the natural order of things.
In fact this was just an appetiser. Today Stoke face Birmingham and their in-form Serbian goal-pylon Nikola Zigic, perhaps the most muscular, leaping, English-style fixture of the Premier League calendar. It seems only natural to draw an extreme contrast here. On Wednesday, four days on from Zigic‑Carew, Arsenal will play Barcelona in what might prove to be the most tippy-tappy, soft-shoe fixture of the season. We should perhaps celebrate the fact a single sport can contain such variation in style and personnel. But this being football it is also necessary to choose which is best: Barça-Arsenal, or the undiluted thrills of Zigic-Carew?
This might seem a silly question. 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. This seems a little unfair. We should at least acknowledge that this is an ideological opposition, rather than an opposition of ideology and no-ideology. Direct football does have intellectual rigour. It even has a holy book: The Winning Formula, by Charles Hughes, the long-time FA director of coaching and education. Sometimes I thumb through its pages and feel a thrill of illicit energy trailing my fingers over its many diagrams and large, aggressive pointy arrows.
This is not ancient history. My copy of The Winning Formula was published in 1996 and has a picture of Robbie Fowler on the cover. The first chapter is called "Forward Passing". It starts with a furiously detailed section on "lofted passes". "Analysis shows that possession play produces negative results," the FA warns us straight off. "Upon receiving the ball a player should instantly ask himself one question: can I play the ball forward?" And so it goes on. "A pass into space behind the opposing defence causes more problems than any other." And my own favourite: "Accuracy is not everything in passing." There is something weirdly addictive about all this dogma. It feels a little dirty and transgressive, like taking a Jacuzzi in a bathtub full of Pot Noodle. It is, above all, an explanation. Direct football has a design. It is no accident.
It is also often underrated, both as an in-stadium spectacle and as a technical operation. There are no end of rules to be learnt, albeit most of them involve "moving into the prime target area". What is undeniable is that you simply won't win anything playing like this. Instead the Barça-way is the future, a style that hurls itself with devastating abandon into the new non-contact drift of football's rules. Barcelona have exploited with era-defining excellence the fact that, at their level, football is now non-concussive, and instead a matter of pressing and passing. They are the inverse of 1970s Leeds United: a team who ride the margins of the rules, not to impose their physicality but to exploit the new freedoms and impose instead their own antic dance of biceps‑less technical brilliance.
What now, then, for the world of Zigic-Carew? For decades The Winning Formula was the thrust of every FA coaching clinic, enshrined as a set of first principles until at least 2002. Nothing has replaced it. At the very least we need a new book, something for our coaches to cherish as an ideal, perhaps co-authored by Johan Cruyff, Trevor Brooking and the ghost of Jimmy Hogan (although we may make a start by going through every sentence in The Winning Formula and adding words like "don't ...", "never ..." and "this will definitely not work").
For now we should probably celebrate what might turn out to be a golden age for stylistic diversity. It is the clash of styles that really entertains. Birmingham v Stoke and Arsenal v Barcelona may be a bit too much like chips with chips. But Arsenal v Birmingham is a great Carling Cup final and Stoke v Barcelona would be a once in a lifetime mash-up, the football equivalent of Jesse Owens racing a horse. So for now let us tolerate both worlds and also celebrate the fact that there remains a portion of the bulging, overly muscled forehead of a very tall European centre-forward that is forever England.
Source: Barney Ronay, The Guardian on 12 Feb 11
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