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It was as inverse a relationship as that of Dorian Gray with his portrait. For decades, Italy played cold, defensive football that brought down the splendor of its own nation. The computer is now one of the easiest to see. In addition to the obvious doubt, is Italy about to become a landfill? – I cling to these clemencies in an innocuous time for the game.
Euro 2020 is the first big tournament that hasn’t caught my eye since 1986, when I was four and there was no television at home. If it weren’t for the risk of making you laugh in your abdomen, I would claim to have been working too hard.
The real problem has been pregnancy for the better part of a decade. He started with the cult of “squeezing” (running to get the ball back). He continued with the NFL-style rehearsal of attacking plays. Pep Guardiola once sitting Thierry Henry for having moved out of place in a sequence of passes. The fact that he had achieved a goal was scant mitigation.
Add levels of fitness from astronauts to this micromanagement and you will have the mechanization of a game whose central point is the anarchic expression. Without being divided into “sets,” “throws,” or “phases,” football at its best is as formless as a big city. The modern game has something of Canberra.
A proxy measure of change is the fitness of the players. Once they were up to Rolling Stone, better than lighting one cents and spin sinuous passes. Now, even the most mobile positions (backs, midfielders, wingers) look like the tight, inflated shirt of a certain type of city trader in one night.
I especially welcome the Americanization of football: the data, the granular analysis, the ease for the consumer. The only question he questions is the idea that athletics is intrinsically compelling. The place for that is athletics.
To say something good about the new game has taught me to be patient for the idea that development is not axiomatic progress. For the most part, I’m what Canadian writer John Ralston Saul would call one of the “Voltaire bastards”. I find LA modernist to be more beautiful than Prague. I am wary of the historical laundering of what is no longer intended to be called the Dark Ages. It’s all I can do to keep dinner on my stomach when some fool sells the closure as the way to a slower, more soulful life. Here I am, however, scouring the artisans of football as the new race of revolving jennies revolts them.
Younger readers will diagnose here the average age of early onset and nostalgia. The older ones could comfort me that sports trends are cyclical. There was a moral panic in tennis when Pete Sampras and other ballistic servants first emerged. What followed them was a constellation of genius that is still among us.
The green shoots of a stylistic renaissance have spread in this tournament. There is the Spaniard Pedri, the youngest holder of the competition. Dutchman Frenkie de Jong is another who bears the revealing stamp of the old school: he seems to run faster with the ball than without.
In the end, though, I feel like his clear promise will come true. It is a sport that now gives the time of day to those statistics that offer the soul: the distance traveled.
One examiner once said of the dazzling scholar Jeremy Wolfenden that “he wrote as if everything were beneath him; he wrote as if all this was wasting his time ”. From George Best to Ronaldinho, big and small nations had footballers with the same majestic language. Italy, in its smallest measure, still accommodated Roberto Baggio, even when a ruined knee made him motionless.
The point is not that skill and ingenuity are gone. Given the speed of the game, players need to be better than ever at controlling the ball and spotting opportunities. Only England has a couple of young teachers.
Only that all this style joins a corset of defensive duties, clockwork patterns and – oh, vulgarity – current. At the club level, Kevin De Bruyne, perhaps the greatest talent left in the tournament, is an example. Watch him retrieve the ball, find his station wide and whip a steep cross, to infinity. It’s beautiful, but so is a caged blue cage.
Send Janan a janan.ganesh@ft.com
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