Sublime Zlatan has the ability to astonish
He couldn’t have meant it. Hart was out of position. Or: nice goal, shame about the setting. “It’s a very Zlatan thing to do to silence your critics by putting on an outrageous show in a friendly against an experimental English defence,” one commentator wrote.
How do you measure the relative greatness of goals? You lay out criteria, define parameters. Soon you’re looking at a graph with “magnitude of occasion” on the X axis and “difficulty of strike” on the Y, and you’ve arrived at exactly the point where Robin Williams orders his students to start tearing pages out of their English readers in Dead Poets’ Society.
Roy Hodgson described the goal as “a work of art” and in fact, Zlatan’s goal was as close as football gets to the sublime. The word “sublime” is now used by football commentators to mean “very good”, but the concept once obsessed the Romantic poets.
Edmund Burke wrote that the emotion produced by the sublime was “astonishment ... that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended... when the mind cannot... reason on that object which employs it.”
You can quibble that Zlatan’s bicycle kick was fluky, that he couldn’t repeat it, that it was only a friendly — but nobody can deny that it was astonishing.
It was the ultimate statement of the individual virtuosity that Zlatan stands for. His book, “I am Zlatan”, differs from most football auto-biographies because it is a superhero narrative. Where Tony Cascarino and Eamon Dunphy wrote about the struggle against their footballing limitations, Zlatan’s is the story of a man blessed with power to bend destiny to his own will.
He grew up playing for attention. Tricks and dribbles were his way to stand out. His domestic situation was complicated. “There was no Swedish-style civilised conversation at home,” he writes, “like, “Darling, could you please pass me the butter,” more like, “Get the milk, you arsehole!”
His stressed-out mother broke so many wooden spoons hitting him that Zlatan and his sister gave her a three-pack of the spoons as a Christmas present. She didn’t think it was that funny.
Later he lived with his father, who at that time was preoccupied with the Balkan War, Yugoslavian folk music and beer. One day Zlatan and his sister found his father passed out on the floor. “There were beer cans and bottles on the table. “Dad, wake up! Wake up!” But he carried on sleeping. It was strange, I thought. Like, why is he doing that? We didn’t know what to do, but we wanted to help him. Maybe he was cold? We covered him with bath towels and blankets so he’d be warm.”
His parents had too many problems of their own to spend much time encouraging Zlatan. Fortunately, a kid who couldn’t sit still in class had a phenomenal capacity for concentration on the things that interested him, like bike theft, video games, and football. He spent hours watching videos of the players he admired, above all Brazil’s Ronaldo — observing every detail of how they treated the ball, repeating the tricks until he could do them without thinking. “Nobody took it as far as I did. I didn’t miss a single detail.”
Maybe if there had been too much parental encouragement he would have rebelled against it. At Juventus, Fabio Capello ordered him to watch a tape of all Marco van Basten’s goals. We know he spent much of his youth avidly watching such videos, but when it becomes his job to do so he got fidgety, and reluctantly sat through the task only because he respects Capello.
The happiest moment of Zlatan’s early career was when he realised his father unexpectedly came to watch him play for the first time. “It was as if I was dreaming and I started to play with incredible strength. Shit, Dad’s here! This is mental. Look at me Dad, I wanted to yell, look at me! Check it out! Your son is the most amazing, awesome player!”
Zlatan failed at Ajax and Barcelona, Europe’s two great system clubs. He rebelled against rules, playing systems and those who seemed happy to be bound by them. He hated the way the “pompous arse” Louis van Gaal talked about players as numbers — “when the nine goes here, the ten goes there.” (He is not a number, he is Zlatan).
He thrived in the gladiatorial world of Italian football, where Fabio Capello tried to get him to unlearn what he had learned at Ajax. “I don’t need that Dutch style!” Capello roared, “One-two, one-two, play nice and technical — I can get by without that. I need goals!”
He likes managers who are openly confrontational, even abusive. Capello taught him “You don’t ask for respect. You take it.”
Mourinho is likewise hard to please — “You have done zero, Zlatan! You haven’t done a damn thing!” — so Zlatan is desperate to please him.
The tough-guy ethos he learned in Italy is woefully out of place at Barcelona, where he was bemused to find a collection of the world’s greatest footballers behaving like high-achieving pupils at a strict religious school. He scored 22 and assisted 15 and left a flop, raging at Guardiola.
Maybe an arch-individualist could never flourish in a team that total. Barcelona’s Champions League dominance tells us that their team ethic works. Zlatan can console himself with more Edmund Burke. “Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect.”
Admiration, reverence and respect are what people feel when they watch Barcelona score after a 30-pass move. Zlatan will probably never win the Champions League, but he can stun the whole world by hurling his 95kg frame into the air to score a bicycle kick from 30 yards. Astonishment will have to be enough.
