Football needs nines to shine
But only one issue of any importance remains to be settled as the dregs of Euro 2012 swirl in the plughole.
Are Spain boring?
In these hyper times of Twitter-led consensus, it’s difficult to know precisely where things stand on this vital matter. Are we still on the Spain backlash? Or is the backlash against the backlash gaining critical momentum? Doing a Lana Del Rey, they call it, in the business of backlash appraisal. What we do know is that people are saying things. And saying them out loud.
To suggest, not long ago, that anybody, let alone Spain, might be overdoing the passing a small bit, would be to invite instant disavowal by the football cognoscenti.
In terms of critical credibility, you would have done as well to go on The Review Show and tell Kirsty Wark that, whatever about the new William Friedkin movie, you were very much looking forward to Ian Beale’s return to Albert Square as a tramp.
And, while you’re at it, you could admit you had to be shaken awake before the penalty shoot-out in 2003, after Milan and Juve’s ‘fascinating tactical battle’ at Old Trafford.
Final step; go out in the garden and deny Marcelo Bielsa three times before the cock crows.
Punishment; your first edition copy of Brilliant Orange confiscated and that ankle tattoo of Dynamo Kiev’s formation under Valeriy Lobanovsky subjected to painful dermabrasion.
But things have changed a little now that Spain’s dog-in-the-manger approach to possession — we don’t want to do anything with the ball, but you can’t have it in case you do — has rather taken the shine off Xavi’s passing stats, previously recited like the times tables of the footballing hipster.
For a while, it was intriguing. In refusing to field a striker, Vicente del Bosque appeared to be engaging in a curious act of self-handicap, as if weary of his side’s brilliance. It was like Ronnie O’Sullivan playing left-handed — as he tended to do when demented — before, to up the ante, slipping on a blindfold in the shape of Alvaro Negredo.
But as it became increasingly clear that lateral possession circulation was the new attacking, some of us yawned, shrugged and, God forgive us, turned to the Germans.
Of course, when you come from a part of the world where latching onto a flick from a goal-kick is considered a lengthy spell of ball retention, you are still uncomfortable getting too sniffy about these things. We have been down this road many times before.
“The new style of football is weakened by an excess of passing close to the goal. It is a game that is more fine, perhaps more artistic, even apparently more intelligent, but it has lost its primitive enthusiasm.”
That was from Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting The Pyramid, as worries grew about dangerous ideas spreading from South America. It was the early 1920s.
But we need not beat ourselves up for our parochial unsophistication, because all the indications are that the Spanish themselves are a touch nonplussed by their side’s reluctance to go in for the kill while attempting to induce death by a thousand passes.
Their punditry’s answer to Dunphy, Tomas Roncero, dissolved into tears at the end of the semi-final, relieved that La Roja had eventually rediscovered some of that primitive enthusiasm.
“In extra time we were the Spain we know. We went for the game. We left our skin on the field. This is the Spain that we all want and that will lift this country.”
But what stands now between Spain and history is the one thing that they have decided to do without; a Mario Balotelli. Hard as it might have been to envisage a situation where you could call Mario ‘old-fashioned’, here it is. A proper striker with all the complication, insecurity, solipsism and unpredictability they bring.
It seems Del Bosque doesn’t want or trust that, fears he can’t integrate the selfish instincts of a true rather than false nine with the interminable ball-hogging rondo.
But a sport without its great, maverick number nines would be a much diminished spectacle. In part, it has been the movement of Balotelli, Cassano and Di Natale that have made Pirlo this tournament’s darling, rather than the tiki-taka merchants.
Without our number nines, in truth, things might get a little boring.
Italy tomorrow then.
