A game lost in translation
It’s the international language of nearly every field of endeavour and enquiry, to the extent that English speakers often don’t bother to learn any other language.
The world’s biggest international sport is an exception to the rule. America only got interested in football recently and English thinking about the game has always been slow to embrace ideas from abroad.
Most of the progressive thinking about football continues to come from Europe, and is originally expressed in Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
The discussion about football in these countries — all of which have specialist football publications — is at a higher technical level than in Britain or Ireland.
Those of us who speak only English are left out of the conversation at the cutting edge.
Recent evidence of this came in the form of articles translated from Portuguese and Spanish, in which two leading members of the new generation of educated European coaches held forth about the game in a manner alien to those used to hearing managers talk about football in English.
Around the time of Chelsea’s first league match of the season, excerpts from a 2009 Andre Villas-Boas interview with a doctoral student appeared in English translation in The Daily Telegraph. Amidst the characteristic Villas-Boas torrent of words were several concepts central to his philosophy of the game yet rarely spoken about in English football.
Speaking about how to create chances against teams that defend deep with tightly-massed ranks of defenders, Villas-Boas explained: “You have to provoke them with the ball, something most teams can’t do. I cannot understand it. It’s an essential factor in the game... it’s the ball they want, so you have to defy them using the ball as a carrot.”
Luring opponents after the ball then striking quickly into the spaces they’ve opened up. A simple idea, but not one that often comes up in the English discussion of football. Pundits talk instead about “breaking down” a packed defence, which suggests the defence is something to be battered into submission.
Around the start of the month, the website totalbarca.com published a translation of a 2007 article the then Barcelona youth coach Pep Guardiola had written for the quality Spanish daily El Pais. Two things came across. The first was the almost visionary intensity that animates Guardiola’s thinking on the game.
“In Barcelona it is also understood that you can never win and repeat in a way that does not feel right to you — that does not feel right to the directors, coaches, players, friends of the press and the people who go every week to see them.”
The other interesting thing was the extent to which Guardiola, writing for a newspaper audience, takes as axiomatic certain technical points almost never made in the English-speaking football world.
“[Barcelona] understand, as all good collectives should, that when you start on the right, it is better to finish on the left and a back pass does not indicate fear, but the beginning of another, better play... [they feel] it is better that the ball reach the extreme end of the pitch via the centre rather than from up the sides.”
You have only to watch a match in an English stadium, to see the long punts by the full-backs up the line and to hear the grumbles of the crowd when the ball goes back to the goalkeeper, to know these ideas, understood as fundamental by the best team in the world, have yet to find wide acceptance in England.
When Villas-Boas managed Porto, he was in charge of a group of players open to his ideas not just because they previously achieved little in the game, but be cause they came from Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries where his kind of geeky obsession with the technical and tactical aspects of football is considered normal, not suspect.
England is slowly converging with the rest of the football world in recognising the importance of tactics, but the game there has always been more of an entertainment than a science. If he wants to command the respect of his players, Villas-Boas must first teach them to understand the game on his terms.
It will take time to judge whether he can succeed in that but we can see that already some journalists are getting a bit tired of Villas-Boas’ wordy answers and wondering if he is maybe a little too fond of the sound of his own voice. They are interested in funny one-liners and human drama, not technical analysis. So when Fernando Torres suggested in a Spanish interview that Chelsea needed to play with more verticality, the media focused on whether he insulted his team-mates.
When the underrated Ramires scored two good goals against Swansea, all the focus was on Frank Lampard, who walked away from Chelsea’s bench after realising he would not be brought on as a sub.
Asked about Lampard’s omission, Villas-Boas shrugged: “This is nothing to speculate about. They are team players and the players want the team to perform, and Frank is like that.”
That’s consistent with Villas-Boas’ intellectualised view of the game, which he likes to think of as a group of clever people working together to solve a problem. As he told the BBC when he took over at Chelsea: “I see the game as the getting-together of collective ideas and good players.”
Some players might agree and they will be easier for the likes of Villas-Boas to work with, but many others understand the game in more visceral, emotional, ultimately selfish terms. Their careers are a perpetual struggle to win and preserve status. A match is not a problem to be solved but a confrontation to be dominated. To dominate opponents in matches you must first dominate your team-mates in training. Team-mates can be your friends but they are also your biggest rivals. If they are selected at your expense, their triumphs are hateful to behold.
Gore Vidal spoke for many of us when he said: “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” When Lampard saw Josh McEachran sent on as Chelsea’s third substitute on Saturday it was no surprise he wanted to go to the dressing room to suffer that little death out of the public gaze.
A competitor like Lampard, who once set a record for consecutive Premier League appearances, who took pride in his willingness to play through injuries to get in the team, will surely not quietly accept this collapse in his status. Villas-Boas insists Lampard remains an important member of the squad, but it’s hard to see how that can be true since he doesn’t fit into Chelsea’s new Torres-centred style. An unpleasant decision has to be made and it is better for Villas-Boas to make it now, while his credit remains high and before Roman Abramovich tires of him.
