FROM THE TELEGRAPH OF 20 JUNE 2006
A dummy watches
football
On Friday a fortnight ago, I was
strolling around KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens, or the west’s shop). It is at
Wittenbergplatz, a stone’s throw from the Gedächtniskirche, the bombed ruin of
a church which is the symbol of West Berlin. It is also close to what was once
the border between East and West Berlin. It was supposed to be a showcase for
western capitalism. Even today, 17 years after the fall of the Wall, it is my
favourite department store. It certainly has all the wonders of western
capitalism – 35 different coffeemakers, 23 shavers, 3400 perfumes, and so on.
But it is also a showcase for Germany. Today, the Germans have become civilized
and started drinking wines. KaDeWe is the only place where I can find an authentic
Kümmel, a quintessentially German aperitif. Not only that, the salesman will
ask me which of the three original brands I want. KaDeWe teems all the time
with discerning Germans and foreign yokels.
But that afternoon, I suddenly found the
store empty. Bomb scares are unknown in Germany; and if there had been one I
should have heard the warning – Achtung is a word everyone understands. And the
saleswomen were still around, quite relaxed, exchanging notes on nail paints.
So I thought I would try the Mövenpick
café outside the Europacenter. This open-air café, next to the
Gedächtniskirche, is the place to have a cappucino and Sachertorte, the
original Austrian name for black forest cake. Sitting in the sun, one can watch
the humanity flow by – and nowadays humanity comes in great shapes. Usually it
is impossible to find a seat in this café; one hovers around it, and grabs a
table as soon as someone leaves. But that day, half the tables were empty.
Then, as the coffee hit the palate, the
realization hit me: It was the first day of the World Cup, and everyone had
gone home. I rushed home too. Poland was playing Ecuador. That was my first
football match in decades, perhaps centuries.
I have always thought football was a game
played by men pretending to be kids: they get into funny little shorts and kick
around a ball. Cricket is the game to watch. Its uncertainties create suspense
in measured doses over a long period. Pitches come in so many variants; they
behave differently in the morning and afternoon, and they change as a match
progresses. Bowlers have so many ways of exercising guile; you would never know
from Shane Warne’s amiable grin which way his vicious spin was going to turn
next. A batsman has less than a second to decide how quickly the ball will be
coming, where it will touch the ground, how much it will bounce, which way it
will turn, and how it can be prevented from hitting him, the wickets or the
edge of the bat. After working all this out he may hit the ball, get it past
the 11 enemies surrounding him, and send it off to the boundary. It needs skill
– and as is characteristic of all rivetting games, it needs luck.
Whereas football is all about
obstruction. The basic aim to obstruct a ball that might get across the goal
posts; but most of the game is about obstructing players – from getting the
ball, from getting it close to a goal, from running with it, or from moving.
Admittedly, cricket is also about obstruction – about obstructing batsmen from
scoring, and really, preventing them from staying too long at the crease. But
the techniques of obstruction in football are far more advanced – more blatant
and brutal. The only thing that is apparently not allowed is maiming an
opponent, though much of that goes on too. But some of the best teams specialize
in intimidating their opponents. Brazilians, for instance, from what I have
seen of them till now, move very aggressively towards whoever has the ball;
they convey implicitly what would happen if the opponent moves too close or too
fast.
Naturally, a threat is ineffective unless
it is actualized from time to time. Every once in a while it is translated into
an assault, and someone is carried off the field on a stretcher. One would
think that players in the circumstances would aim to maim before they get
maimed. That would not be a good idea, however, because a referee runs about
the field trying to catch people trying to maim. A much better idea is to make
contact with an enemy, collapse on the ground and double up as if in pain. The
chances that the opponent will be shown a yellow card; with luck, he may even
be expelled from the game. The technology of blaming opponents is almost as
advanced as the technology of maiming them. So much of the skill in football
lies in learning what forms of obstruction are kosher and what are not.
The other important skill is in passing.
You cannot score unless you kick a ball into a goal. You cannot kick it unless
you possess it. And if you possess it, a pair of opponents will swarm around to
deprive you of it. The thing to do therefore is to pass it to one of your
colleagues. Passing can be most sophisticated; you think that a player is
hopelessly surrounded, and suddenly he will kick the ball in a completely
unexpected direction, where one of his colleagues will just happen to
materialize. Clever passers are not all that common, but they are a wonder to
watch. Passing opens up a game. If a player is good at it, players in the other
side eventually realize the futility of swarming the possessor of the ball.
Then the ball begins to move around the field, and the game becomes mobile.
The two standard techniques of assaulting
and crowding opposite players work better in the middle of the field. If a
player is at the edge, he cannot be approached from the outside and has to guard
only the other side. So some of the best players specialize in playing near the
edges. Unfortunately, the goalposts are closer to each other when targetted
from a side than from the middle; and the closer a player gets to the goal, the
narrower the target that the goalposts offer to him. So to score, he has to
pass the ball to a colleague in the middle, who must then shoot quickly before
he is surrounded.
The middle swarms with opposing players;
the closer the ball gets to the goal, the more defending players get crowded
in, and the greater their power to obstruct. So what an edge-play specialist
does is to kick a ball against an opponent’s leg in such a way that the ball
goes off the field. That gives the specialist a penalty kick into a small area close
to the goal in which both sides huddle together; with luck, one of his
colleagues will receive the ball and kick it across the goal.
Whichever way it is scored, a goal
happens seldom. That keeps the spectators longing for one; they go into a
frenzy when one is scored. And frenzy is what this funny game is about.
