Personal Reflections from a Left Back (Clacton 7s)

I’ve been quiet on the blog in part because I played for Hackney in the Clacton 7s tournament last weekend: What a blast! The level of play was fantastic. It was really hard. You couldn’t lose your focus for a second, you gave ground with every mistake. It was unforgiving. I can’t get enough of that sort of game – a real challenge, mentally and physically.

This was the first time I’d tried visualizing before a game. I think it gave me confidence, and maybe improved my reaction time.

I had one or two seconds of glory playing left back. There were a few moments when I could see myself clearing the ball, when I knew I was going to get my foot on it – and then I did. In one game, I could see one woman’s determination to get a shot off, and tracked her back and forth across the box until she lost the ball and it was cleared. She turned around and pushed me by the shoulders in frustration – I’d played 100% clean, hadn’t even touched her, so I take that as a major compliment.

It goes to show you – don’t show defenders your cards. In my limited experience, the best strikers are really hard to read: they have a poker face. If you can see someone really wants to get that shot off, you know they are unlikely to pass the ball. You can corner them, frustrate them, wind them up by limiting their movement. The cool headed ones won’t let you get close enough to know what’s on their mind. They’ll slide the ball into space where a teammate will pick it up, and poof, they are gone and you are looking at the back of their shirt.

Weak moments for me abounded last weekend – from being too scared to run forward and offer support to our attackers, to being so happy to block a shot that I really didn’t think I could catch that lost my focus and didn’t track the rebound – which the gal caught, and spun right into the goal. ARGH. It was a fantastic goal though, shot from nearly behind the goal’s mouth, and spun just right: it hit the ground about a foot in front of the goal line and bounced right into its target. There’s a Nike ad in which Thierry Henry does the same. At first I thought: Well, it’s an Henry-like goal, and I’m not good enough to stop a trick like that. Then I thought: I’ve seen that ad a dozen times, and I should know better – I know it’s possible, and I knew that that girl (no. 10/London Colney) had some moves. So: My bad. She's the tiny one pictured standing out of bounds.

The incident just goes to show how much attitude impacts play: If I’d approached her with more confidence, I might have attacked the ball with more force. She was stone cold ruthless, and knew she had me.

Overall our team did really well – making it into the top end of the tournament for the second day’s games. We held our own against some really tough opponents. I suspect we may have had one of the best records defensively. Alfie, our goalie was a superstar – absolutely awe-inspiring – she won keeper of the tournament in fact. Hooray!

Shameless Self Promotion

Frieze just published a short essay I wrote on some recent art about football - you can see it on their site and of course in the print issue on stands throughout the summer. I think it might possibly be a first for the magazine - I'm thrilled to be leading the charge into the world of contemporary football art criticism (right, 'ecstasy' by Yrsa Roca Fannberg, one of my favorite artworks 'about' soccer). Note: I discuss a Hellmuth Costard experimental film from 1970, Football As Never Before (due for a DVD rerelease in Europe this month). There are clips of this crazy/beautiful study of George Best at work in a match against Coventry on You Tube - totally worth checking out. I'm taking a breather from the blog until I get back from Clacton - expect a full report on the sweaty glory mid June.

Feeling It: Sentimentality, Football, & Eamon Dunphy's 'Only A Game?'

News flash: women don't have a monopoly on melodrama and sentimentality. Witness Lampard's emergence as a national icon via his admirable performances for Chelsea while mourning his mother - his eyes turn to the sky as the back of the net bulges and the crowd cheers. You can feel the whole country choke on its tears. Or, John Terry's collapse on missing his penalty - an unlucky slip of the foot unraveling a night of superhuman work on the back line.

Whose heart didn't break at the injustice, the bad luck? At the grim irony that the man so easy to love would take the burden of his team's defeat when the man so easy to hate (C. Ronaldo) would wear a crown of glory - after he had nearly cost his team the championship with his approach to the ball - an arrogant cha cha cha that itself nearly wiped out the authority of his earlier goal. If you've ever stood in goal, you know Cech felt a malicious thrill watching C.R.'s smug little dance, knowing the wave of schadenfreude he would soon unleash as he scooped up the ball. I know I lept out of my seat and shouted with joy.

We like to think that sentimentality & melodrama belong to soap operas & chick flicks like Stella Dallas or Terms of Endearment: to those of us who organize our days around General Hospital, Neighbors, or Maria La del Barrio.

Fact is, though, the emotional intensity of those programs pales in comparison with that of a big match. You will see men wrap their arms around each other in drunken tenderness, sing together as their teams go up, weep together as their teams go down. Their eyes will mist over as they remember the glory of Baggio or Garrincha or Best, and indulge a nostalgia for the days when the game seemed more honest, more real.

So when Nick Hornsby writes "what sets [Eamon Dunphy's Only a Game?] apart is its honesty and lack of sentimentality" I must ask why anyone would need to disavow this aspect of Dunphy's writing - or indeed of the game itself? The only book about football I've read that is devoid of sentimentality is the comparative economics study, National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer.

Only A Game? is a memoir of Dunphy's last months playing for Millwall in the 1973-4 season. It is a classic in sports writing - by far the most compelling book I've read about the game. Dunphy writes with tremendous honesty about how it feels to be a part of a team, how it feels to play (his writing on being a sub is ruthless and 100% spot on). He's also shameless in avowing his ideas about how the game should, and should not, be played.

He is particularly frank about the emotional, personal, and even sentimental aspects of football culture.

Take the following passage:

When you share a job with somebody in football, a relationship develops between you, an understanding that you do not have with players doing a totally different job. If you are just knocking a ball between you, on a training ground, a relationship develops between you. It's a form of expression - you are communicating as much s if yo are making love to somebody. If you take two players who work together in midfield, say, they will know each other through football as intimately as two lovers. That would apply to Giels and Bremner, for example. It's a very closer relationship you build up when you are resolving problems together, trying to create situations together. It's an unspoken relationship, but your movements speak, your game speaks. the kind of ball you give each other, the kind of passes you give each other, the kind of situations you set up together, speak for you. You don't necessarily become closer in a social sense, but you develop a close unspoken understanding. (Dunphy, 30)

I nearly dropped the book when I read this. I couldn't agree more: One the real pleasures of the game is that feeling of total communication with your teammates, with especially those playing with you on the field (the connection between left back to left wing, between the back four, midfielders to strikers, goalie to the back four, forwards to each other, etc.). It's wonderful to have that kind of intimacy with people without having to talk, really. Dunphy is writing honestly and with a shocking absence of homo-panic about a nearly unspoken truth about the game: When things are going really well, it feels like romantic intimacy. And because of this, you can "fall in love" with players via the game.

There are a hundred other reasons to read Only A Game? It is written from within the game - and is really eloquent about what makes a game feel like a great game from the player's perspective. About how certain kinds of defeats feel OK, others are soul crushing - and that in fact victories aren't always sweet.

He is most romantic about the good pro - the self-effacing, hard working, totally dedicated teammate. The person who never tires - or who pushes him/herself past the limits of tiredness, who looks after their position, but also that of their neighbors - the person who 'has your back':

If you are in the shit, having given your man that crucial extra yard or two, have lost your concentration for a minute, the good pro will often rescue you, leaving his man to get in a saving tackle or making what looks to the crowd like a simple interception. He is woven into the fabric of every good side and every great side too. (Dunphy, 13)

Now - here's my cross. That kind of person - the person who knows that their glory is only enhanced by your glory - that playing the game well involves a heavy element of self-sacrifice - that kind of person is the heart of every good tear-jerker, every classic melodrama: it's Stella Dallas, the mother who makes a terrible sacrifice so that her daughter might have a chance at a better life; it's Annie Johnson, the maid/mother who sacrifices herself for not only her daughter, but her employer too. These women make the lives of other people possible at great expense to themselves. It's why these are such problematic genres for feminists, who worry that these stories only serve to make women complacent about the myriad of forms of self-sacrifice foisted on them in their daily lives.

The stories played out for us in stadiums and on Sky Sports perform a parallel version of this: men giving themselves over to something larger - but at the expense of so much - like: it's ok to love one another just as long as you never, ever speak it. It's ok to cry, as long as it never, ever makes you womanly. It's OK to try, as long as you never, ever fail.

So we arrive at the evil flipside of masculine sentimentality: sure, men cry in these arenas - but they often turn around and "correct" that display with a punch, with a kick, with a head-butt. Worse, players and fans carry that conflicted relationship to feeling, to sentiment, off the pitch, and work it out on the women in their lives (e.g. Paul Gascoigne) or anyone who offers themselves up as a suitable target.

Dunphy's memoir is a miraculous document - most footballers who enter the public arena do so under the heavy supervision of an army of publicists all massaging their egos and their images into a Nike-worthy version of manhood, cemented, frozen expressions of rage and phallic glory.

But most footballers who take the pitch every weekend do so not because they are inspired by those kinds of images, but because they want the thing they saw their fathers enjoy with their friends: that simple pleasure of the good pass, the game well played, and that feeling of being "in it together". I don't know a single player who isn't deeply sentimental about *that*.

Sexism Hurts: ACL Injuries & Women Athletes

Sexism can be simple and obvious (e.g. the FA ban on the women's game, or Man U's Christmas 'Rape' party). More often, it's subtle, complex, and really hard to tackle. Take, for example, the impact of poor medical understanding of women in general on women athletes in particular.

We see this in the alarming frequency with which women athletes who play especially soccer and basketball suffer ACL tears. The ACL tear is a very serious knee injury, requiring complex surgery and a lot of recovery time. (Pictured, right: Danielle Fotopolous, USNWT retired in 2007 after tearing her ACL for the third time in 2006.)

The New York Times Sunday magazine just published a long, in-depth story about young women soccer players, the injuries they sustain, and the difficulty we have in dealing with them (The Uneven Playing Field). The article is adapted from Michael Sokolove's forthcoming book Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports. (Can I just say: I hate that title. It's so paternalistic! And aimed at the parent-reader, not at the female athlete. How about - Match Fit: Injury Prevention for Young Women Athletes?)

This interesting article is unfortunately wrapped in a sensationalist package. Problematically, Sokolove makes news of the fact that more women are injured as more women play (really?!). The following rhetoric, for example, makes it seem like Title IX is the cause for the increase in 17 year olds needing knee surgery - and as if this were in itself the problem:

This casualty rate [JD: no statistic here, the author just means the number of injuries suffered by a couple of high school teams] was not due to some random spike in South Florida. It is part of a national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women [No soccer teams = No ACL tears]. From travel teams [these are the club teams not based in the school system] up through some of the signature programs in women’s college sports, women are suffering injuries that take them off the field for weeks or seasons at a time, or sometimes forever. [Unlike men? I mean, of course women suffer career-ending injuries! At least they don't break each other's legs!]

The author then goes on the explain how girls develop differently - e.g. boys get more muscle, but less flexible; girls get more fat but more flexibility. The author's language flirts dangerously close to naturalizing girls and women as weaker, more delicate etc. I'm not the only one to spot this slant.

The main issue in this article, however, is women athletes' specific vulnerability to the ACL tear and the lack of understanding of the specific needs of female athletes - a failure caused not by Title IX, but by the ingrained sexism of medicine and sports culture.

Towards the end of the article, the author interviews Holly Silver, a physical therapist who has developed a knee injury prevention program that should be adopted by all footballers and their trainers.

Silver touches on some possible reasons for the high rate of ACL tears in women athletes: Girls are taught to walk and stand and move through the world differently. We curl around our chests - our bodies become shells, in a way, protecting/hiding everything 'feminine' - those bits are sources of shame, abuse, negative attention. [Ed: Found this note on Kickster, about the reception of the first women's game in 1894: "The British Medical Journal offered its professional opinion that 'we can in no way sanction the reckless exposure to violence, of organs which the common experience of women had led them in every way to protect'."]

One of the beautiful things about playing football is that it forces women to free their bodies from this shell: You can't trap the ball with your chest if you are hiding it from the world. You can't make a good play if your eyes are trained on your feet. You won't have much touch or footwork if your hips are locked.

Pointing to a player with good form, Silver explains

'She moves like a boy....Believe me, that's a good thing.'

In other words, that girl carries herself like an athlete. Girls are not encouraged to adopt this stance (knees bent, butt low to the ground). And so that posture has become synonymous with 'boy'. Boys of course aren't born moving this way - and lots of boys don't carry themselves that way (and are therefore terrorized for 'walking/throwing like a girl'). The point here is that the social inscription of gender is deep: it may be culturally produced, but it is carved into our spines, and worked into our joints. Girls need to unlearn that stuff - as athletes, they sometimes literally need to learn to walk, and run. (FYI: Philosopher Iris Marion Young writes about these issues in her collection of essays, On Female Body Experience: 'Throwing Like a Girl' and Other Essays.)

Silver describes the extraordinary consequence of the way that girls inhabit their bodies as they play sports - if you run with poor posture, your running is not only inefficient, it harms your back, hips, all your joints in fact. As any yoga practitioner will tell you, holding tension in your joints not only makes you less flexible and responsive (slowing your reflexes), it makes you more prone to aches and pains.

My sister coaches girls cross-country and track at Voorhees High School in New Jersey. Her teams have been very succesfull. Injury prevention is a big part of her program. They work on building up their strength in the gym, on minimizing strain to their muscles, on overall health and well-being. For example, she has the girls keep an eye on their iron levels - anemia is a big problem for teenage girls and young women, and can have a big impact on your development as an athlete. She's always looking for the latest information on issues like these, and keys these insights to the specifics of her sport and the people she coaches (teenage girls). Not all coaches approach their work this way.

One must recognize gender differences in order to coach/train/treat athletes well. Those differences may be physiological, metabolic, social and psychological.

For example, athletes in general are loathe to report injuries. Reporting injury or medical problems can be even harder for some girls and women. Here are some reasons why:

*We don't want to seem weak. In a world that reads all physical signs of womanliness as symptoms of the weakness of your sex, getting an injury makes you feel like your body has betrayed you, again.

*Women athletes can be reluctant to own up to the differences gender makes, because admitting to those differences has meant admitting to belonging to the 'weaker sex.' Remember: every girl - even today - will be told at some point that girls can't or shouldn't play or compete. Every girl hears that girls are weak, that they aren't tough. Or that playing a sport makes them mannish - i.e. repugnant. To all of this, players say: Fuck That, and get on with it. So, not only do we not want to seem weak - sometimes we don't want to seem like 'girls'.

*Doctors treat us differently. They don't listen to what we say about our bodies. They read everything through their ideas about our reproductive system. Our experiences with doctors tend to start off bad, and get worse. We have little reason to trust them.

*We are taught to accept certain physical symptoms as 'natural': tiredness (symptom no. 1 of anemia), especially.

*We are reluctant to talk about our bodies - sport is often the only avenue through which we get to talk about our bodies in a way that is neutral, matter-of-fact and empowering. I'll never forget listening to my sisters talk about pre-race bowel-clearing nerves and the humiliating but often hilarious situations that puts you in. As much as their stories made me laugh, I didn't really 'get' it until I started playing football and found myself at Hackney Marshes trying to act cool as we waited for the mens' teams to clear out of the damn bathrooms. Never, ever, go to Hackney, ladies, without a roll. Somehow, I associate that kind of frank and humorous talk about the body with 'jock'-culture. Some of us need encouragement to adopt this kind of attitude.

*Girls aren't always used to thinking of their bodies as something they can control. Except by starving themselves.

Add onto the above the following:

*Many girls and women play team sports on bad fields/in poor facilities.

*98% of sports stores don't carry football boots made for women - and that 2 % will carry maybe two kinds. The overwhelming majority of women wear men's boots, in other words.

*Because women were prevented from playing for so long, coaching/training is modeled after the boys/mens game, and a lot of coaches are not aware of things like the frequency of ACL tears in young women footballers and the conditioning programs which might prevent those injuries.

*We accept the differences in the way that men and women move as 'natural', and so do nothing to raise girl athlete's awareness of poor posture on the field, poor running technique, the importance of being relaxed and having a good stance.

*And, most problematic of all: we don't listen to girls. We don't take their complaints seriously. We dismiss their complaints as teenage melodrama or psychosomatic weakness.

That's a lot of crap to deal with. It's why teaching/coaching/advising girls and women can be harder - but it's also why it's so absolutely rewarding. The things we learn in such settings not only change how we play - they in fact change how we live.

Pitching Women's Football

David James just wrote another good column ("Next Time Just Ask the Women") about sexist attitudes about women and football (see also his earlier "Keeping Up With Part Time Rachel"). It's worth a look. It made me think perhaps I should share the following:

I just pitched a story to Observer Sports Monthly (the guardian's monthly magazine) about Clacton-on-Sea's 7s tournament. It is the longest continuously running women's football tournament in the UK. (I'll be playing with the Hackney ladies!) I of course think it's a great story - how the tournament came into being, who plays, the tournament dramas, etc. - and who better than yours truly to write a story about the women & girls who play for fun on the weekends, just like their fathers, brothers, etc? This is the response I got:

"Hi Jennifer,

Thanks for your pitch. We have just done a big piece on women's football in general and Arsenal Ladies in particular for our next issue ("The Invincibles"), and so I don't think we will be returning to the subject for a little while.

Best, Tim"

I can accept that my story idea might not have been right for the magazine . OSM's a monthly and space is limited. My argument is with this reasoning - that women's football shouldn't be a regular feature - and with the fact that they have no embarrassment about saying this in as many words! If mainstream outlets don't report on the game in all its variety - if we don't in fact regularly write about women athletes - we tell readers that these stories don't matter. We let reader assumptions stand unchallenged. (Pictured, Ludlow knocking in one for the lady Gunners in Monday's game.)

In that one article about "women's football in general and Arsenal ladies in particular", you'll find passing mention of a dozen really juicy, hair-raising stories: e.g. Charlton & Leeds divorce from the men's teams with which they'd been affiliated, and Man U's treatment of its women's team (see my early blog entry "Red Card" for a very polemical take on the latter).

Have we had real investigative journalism in mainstream media on the relationship of men's clubs to the women's teams they've adopted? Why ARE Arsenal so dominant even though their manager and players aren't being paid? How do clubs respond to women's involvement in the game? Which clubs are the most sexist? Which are the least? How much does it cost to support one of these teams anyway?

What little reporting we have in this neighborhood takes the hardships faced by these women and turns it all into a feel-good story about underdogs who win championships in spite of it all. But we still come away totally ignorant of how things got this way.

The story I pitched was more of a feel-good thing: A story focused on the grassroots game, about the culture of women's football here in the UK - which is, IMHO, way rock-and-roll. Partly because you have to be pretty bad-ass to put up with the crap people dish out here (e.g., the comments to James's column!).

Anyway, at the very least, I'll report on Clacton here - and cheers to David James for his ongoing work as feminist secret agent. Surely karma has something to do with the fact that the star of yesterday's match was Carly Telford - who used everything from the tips of her fingers to the tips of her toes to keep a clean sheet during the first half of the match, in spite of Arsenal's relentless attack. You Go Girl!

A Little Racism with that Champagne?: Gallas Tackles Covert Racism of Everyday France

Remember that old Saturday Night Live skit in which Eddie Murphy goes about in white face, and gets free coffee & newspapers? ("Slowly I began to realize that when white people are alone, they give things to each other for free!") It's absolute genius - when the one black man on a bus gets off, the white folks play a little Lawrence Welk, sing and clap their hands, and start sipping champagne. He goes to a bank for a loan - with no collateral, no credit. The black bank manager is about to turn him down when a white colleague takes over - "Silly Negro!" he says of his colleague, handing the money over to Murphy. Sad thing is this sort of thing isn't so far from the truth (witness: CEO's raking in millions of dollars off of their own bad loans).

The French national team player and Arsenal captain William Gallas just got a nasty taste of it. Not the overt racism of people in the stands unfurling their biggotry in hateful fan chants, but the subtle, insidious, covert racism of everyday interaction in which one's presence is greeted with the cold breeze suspicion.

The story: Gallas set out with his driver to buy eight bottles of Dom Perignon for a dinner party with his family and friends. He went to a store in the 16th arrondissement (the richest part of Paris) that specializes in champagne. When he asked for eight bottles of Dom, the store clerk looked at him askance and said he could only buy two - that it was against store policy to sell so many bottles to one client (!). He bought two of Dom, and two of another brand - and then sent in his white chauffeur to see if he could buy four bottles of Dom Perignon. Pas de problème.

When Gallas went back into the store to confront the clerk about his racist behavior, the clerk said "But you should have told me you were William Gallas!"

I am eager to see where this goes. I can't imagine a person more up to the challenge of defending of one's right to be treated with dignity and respect. Allez Les Bleus!

Beautiful Losers: From One Bird to Another

Like the Uraguyan writer Eduardo Galeano who confessed that he just plain loved a beautiful game, no matter who was playing it, I am more a fan of the game than I am a fan of any particular team. I live so close to Arsenal's stadium that I can hear the games from my living room even when the windows are closed. I admire the young Gunners - not because they play the game perfectly (obviously, they don't), but because they look like they love to play. I am, though, in my heart of hearts more partial to the Spurs. They are even more spectacular in my eyes. When they go down, it's often dramatically - after having put 4 goals in the net. Sometimes they play not just with joy, but with near total abandon.

Clearly, I love beautiful losers. Simon Barnes borrows this term from Leonard Cohen to wonder at how Arsenal fans are holding up. Tom Dunmore expanded on the theme for his site Pitch Invasion - and I thought I'd join this discussion of the affection some of us have for those who give us more than mere victory.

I love beautiful losers both on and off the pitch. The pleasure, elegance, and virtuosity of a game are paramount. There is a righteousness to the well played game - a game that unfolds between the whole team in which the skill level is so high that the team's "stars" must establish their genius with death-defying headers, with outrageous runs, or a cross so fast and so precise as to be telepathic. But more than anything, 'beautiful losers' show you their love for the game above all else.

It's one thing to talk about beautiful loser teams. This title also applies of course - and perhaps even more compellingly - to a few players. The most fabulous is probably Garrincha - Pele's countryman & misshapen teammate was never supposed to be able to run, but played perhaps the most gorgeous football in history. Garrincha never turned his genius into a "career" like Pele (who turned his name into a global brand). His last years (spent in alcoholic ignomy) were as hard as his first. That said, this end takes nothing away from the joy he gave to his fans.

I don't know what it is, but footage of Garrincha can move me to tears - they are very sentimental tears, tears of joy - a strange kind of emotional sympathy for that improbable, impossible being who seems to fall out of the sky and onto the world stage - and whose unlikeliness seems to be the very engine of their genius.

I'm more than a little tempted to link the particular nature of his legacy as a player to that of Edith Piaf - he has, I think, almost more in common with an artist like her than he does with other athletes. When Piaf (or Judy Garland or Billie Holiday) sang it was as if her entire being vibrated with some excess, some unnameable thing - it's beyond simple pleasure - and listening to them, you feel it in your bones, too. It's no accident that "Piaf" and "Garrincha" mean "little bird" and "wren". Garrincha's game was more of a song than a plan - and it seemed to lift everyone near it to another plane. But it also somehow felt like a game you could inhabit - and like the weirdest most unlikely part of yourself might be worth something.

Take Piaf's performance of "L'Accordeoniste": This is an incredible song, which in and of itself goes to the point: The story is of "une fille de joie" (prostitute) and losing oneself in the nightlife - in music - it's a tragic story of a woman dreaming of something else, dreaming of her lover and another life - dreaming dreams that will never be realized (he goes off to war and never comes back). Nevertheless, inhabiting the music she loves totally, she transports herself to another place. The music in which she once lost herself to pleasure, however, becomes a special form of torture.... The key words here (rough translation): "It goes right through her skin, from the top to the bottom. She needs to sing, it's physical: her whole being is tense, she holds her breath - she's wrapped up in the music" - "la fille de joie" is the song, the song is her - being taken over by that music is too much, and there Piaf is, signing it, channeling it all for your pleasure. It's crazy.

Every now and again an athlete does this too - uniting thought, feeling, body to make something much bigger than the sum of its parts - taking us with them in the proess. (Maradona, certainly, had this thing, I think Marta might, but it's hard to tell, since it's impossible to watch her play if you don't live in Sweden.)

Sometimes that energy spreads out to a team - it radiates out from an individual body and becomes a collective consciousness. Loving a team like this is about loving the ride. It's not that we don't care about winning - we just don't want to give up extra thing - the beauty, the sublimity - in order to win. It's just not worth it.

And with that - here is "Barcelona", sung by opera diva Montserrat Cabellé & Freddie Mercury - the most beautiful of the beautiful losers:

Fan Letter: Yrsa Roca Fannberg Paints Barça

Yrsa Roca Fannberg's quixotic blog, art versus sport is more than a Barça blog - it is what the title promises, a site pulled in these two directions - art and sport - at once. I've come down to Barcelona partly to meet Ysra, and to look more closely at the wonderful watercolors she has posted on her site. Last night, she kindly met up with me and my friend, the artist Ming Yuen S Ma.

Yrsa is an independent minded artist who works across a range of mediums - at the moment she is studying documentary film-making. She makes these gorgeous watercolors in the same spirit with which she writes - with an eye to mood, delicate questions of psychology and emotion, with an eye to not only the sublimity of the sport, but to its beauty - which is sometimes quite ordinary, and at other times quite melancholy. The tone of her writing is nearest to Eduardo Galeano's Soccer in Sun and Shadow - one of my all-time favorite reads.

It was a joy for me to meet a woman similarly engaged by the sport - for those of us whose identities are primarily bound up in art and intellectual life, an absorbing passion in football can be quite isolating. Even though many women play and become fans via their attachment to their fathers, brothers, to the men in their lives, that affection for "their" sport can make us, well, a little bit weird.

Speaking for myself, when I've tried to talk footie with guys as a way to, well, talk to them, I've come away with the distinct impression that I've trangressed some major rule of womanly conduct. A few weeks ago, for example, I sat on a London bound train with my friend Mandy, who is perhaps the biggest Arsenal fan ever (and that is saying a lot). She's followed the team since god knows when (and knows every minute detail about the French national team as a result). She no casual expert on this subject.

So, across the isle are two guys: a BBC sports journalist, and an American tourist. They were talking football - and stuck with this subject for a full two hours. They talked about relegation - a fascinating, exotic form of sport brutality to us Yanks. As it happens, I'd just read National Pastime, a comparative economic analysis of major league sports in the US and around the world - focused in part on the relegation system and its economics. I mentioned this, in a casual conversational friendly way. They both looked at me, said nothing, and then continue talking as if I'd said nothing.

I suspect a lot of women who love football have had similar experiences - my friend Mandy hadn't even bothered trying to talk with those guys, and welcomed me back to our discussion with a knowing look. Women really really love to talk about their sports, it sucks to be shut out of a conversation because you are a girl - and that sense of rejection is made worse when a guy looks at you like you are stupid. Men are fans - when women talk footie we are, well, crazy, or we must be lesbians - or, crazy lesbians.

When men talk footie with each other - when they talk in great depth and with enormous intensity of feeling about other men - it is often not just about footie, it's about their relationships to each other. It's a way to be a guy with other guys. A woman who tries to take part in this sorts talk upsets whatever delicate balance is in place that allows guys to talk with and about guys without, well, thinking about guys.

Anyway, back to Yrsa's work: Most representations of footballers are hyper-heroic, hyper masculine. When Yrsa offers a visual meditation on that ecstatic post-goal moment, she literalizes this explosive joy, as above, in "Encima 2" (I think that's 'Ecstasy 2' in Catalan). Sports photography tends to amplify the testasterone even in failure, when our sports heroes are made to look more like fallen soldiers than, well, human. Not often do we see them look like the big babies they sometimes are, like Messi here on the left.

Take this portrait of Thierry Henry (right, below): he looks weighed down by his own feet, like he gets heavier and heavier as he gets closer to the ground. If you've ever played 90 minutes, you might relate - I know that there are times when the ground feels attached to my feet - like the earth itself is holding me back. I think I see in this both an affection for Henry and a mix of hope and a fear of disappointment. But perhaps I project.

The thing that moves me most about these images - about especially "In Training", pictured at the top of this article - is that they are quite plainly made out of love. And that love isn't filtered by the requirements of macho/heroic tradition. Maybe because Yrsa's a woman it's ok to look at and see men in this way, and to paint them with this sort of delicacy. Maybe because she's half Icelandic/half Catalan - and because she played herself in Sweden until she was 14 (she says she was terrible) - she approaches the subject of Barça and football culture with an eye that is both that of an insider and that of an outsider. I think Barça fans would agree that the freedom with which she looks at this world gives us a glipse into its beauty and its emotional intensity.

When she'd spread her portfolio out on our table, the waiters in this tapas bar stopped, called others over, and pointed to the portraits - "Oh, that's Messi, for sure, look at how he holds his head", and "You can't miss Thuram there" or they'd shake their head in consternation as they identified the prodigal son: "Ronaldinho." Our faces lit up with a kind of warmth - the same warmth that animates Roca Fannberg's images: these are members of the family, and we love them no matter what.

Zidane, Corporate Robot?: From this month's "So Foot"

SO, I’m here in France – enjoying a self-imposed writers retreat, and loading up on French football writing. I came across this provocative interview in the April issue of the glossy magazine, So Foot. It’s with Abdel Raouf Dafri, the scriptwriter for La Commune, a new series broadcast on Canal +. The interview was conducted by Simon Capelli Welter. It’s a fairly generic discussion of soccer & the disenfranchised – at the end, though, he makes some harsh statements about Zidane. I'd love to know more about this - I know Zidane presents himself apolitically, but Zidane gave Sarkozy his maillot (in 2006)?! That somehow hadn't made my radar screen. Say it ain't so Joe!

Anyway, I’m hoping the guys at So Foot don’t mind my unauthorized translation of the Dafri interview – it’s rocky – I may have taken some liberties, but I’m sure I’ve the basic points right.

SF: There’s something missing from La Commune, right? It’s about the banlieu, but there’s no football.

AD: Football is the least cinematic sport you can find. All football films are miserable flops. Football’s appeal is in the direct experience of emotion, it’s the suspense. In a film, the director shows you there is a good team, and a bad team – there’s no point. To make a story out of football, you have to look behind the scenes, at “how one makes a player”. I’d love to see a film with Cantona as a corrupt agent.

SF: Who would he represent?

AD: Tibéry – I mean Ribéry! I’d love to know how one makes a guy like Ribéry. A guy who comes from the streets. He grew up in Boulogne – really, a he’s a kid from the favelas.

SF: They say it’s like being an “immigré de l’interior” (roughly, a domestic immigrant - trans).

AD: Yes, that’s a lovely expression. You should check out Boulougne-sur-mer. I dare you to spend two weeks there. […They talk here about the relationship between regionalism & nationalism.] I’ve been [to places] where there are guys who don’t know the names of streets more two steps from their house. It’s crazy…You say to them – “Look – there are chances to get out, work [in other places] and they don’t want to go. They only want something two bus stops from their place, max. The reality in that region is grim. Economically, intellectually, in terms of artistic creation, it’s bleak.

SF: There’s just football.

AD: I have a theory: the cities that have some money have very mediocre football and in the poor cities, it’s a religion. [Hardly his theory alone! - trans] In Lens, the guys in the stadium are there for the love it. But, they don’t have anything else. In any case, I don’t really like stadiums, I don’t like crows and then…One night, I was DJing at Macumba (a club in the banlieu in Lille), we were asked to put the TF1 match on the club’s screen. I turned on the projector, and I saw some sort of massacre – I thought this isn’t the right channel. I switched channels, I couldn’t find the match, and I put the images of the slaughter back on. I went back to the music – funk, or something from that time. The images of the violence played on. It took us ten minutes before we realized that it was the right channel, and that the match had been interrupted by a fight. It was Heysel….

SF: That was Brussells, not to far from here….

AD: When they had World Cup in the US, we asked an American cop, the Dallas sheriff, what he thought of hooligans. “If they make a move, we’ll hang them by the collar like the wash.” [I think] There wasn’t a single incident. Hooligans know that if they get locked up in the US, it’ll be with gangs. And that’s no joke…. But in France, guys know that the cops are nothing [there’s that word “walou” again – trans]. During the World Cup in France, there was that cop killed by English hooligans in Lens [was he killed?? JD]. The problem was simple: the French cops looked at guys who looked like them – white hooligans — and they weren’t on their guard. A group of black guys would never have killed that cop. The cop would have pulled his gun. It’s usually the black supporters who see one of their own killed. Same in Heysel. The Belgian police really kept an eye on the Italians, because they’re dark – so they didn’t really put surveillance on the English. They just let them drink.

SF: What do you make of the whistling during La Marseillaise?

AD: It’s pathetic Those guys crack me up. They were born in France. I’m Maghreb (from North Africa), and at one time, I had to ask myself those questions. With these whistles come questions about French society. But we shouldn’t indulge in self-victimization! You have to get off your ass! Most of those guys are spending 150 euros on their sneakers – and they can’t buy a book for 20? Look, these guys from the hood, they make me look at things from a different angle. Today, you can’t get anywhere without an education. You think Barack Obama got where he is because he looks good in his Nikes? He went to Harvard! You have to teach, take care of yourself. And if the system doesn’t give you a chance, too bad – teach yourself. My parents were illiterate. I went to a technical school. In school, everybody came from the same background – the poorest. 90% were children of immigrants. From every direction, from the left and from the right, Arabs and Blacks are fucked. They go on about Rama Yade and Rachida Dati. You have to laugh. It’s like Condaleeza Rice – they say “she’s black”. No, she’s not black, she’s republican. Look at Rachida Dati, or Zidane - their power is about the present but not the future [une force sur le moment mais handicap pour la suite], it derives from the fact that they think of themselves only in terms of function and ambition. Really, we don’t know where they come from. Rachida Dati, she doesn't talk about her experiences as an Arab woman because she understands herself as a woman from the political right….Zidane – what has he done for other Africans? He became the world representative for Danone! It’s the brand speaking. Not him. In terms of being human – he doesn’t exist. Zidane – he’s Johnny Halliday! [I think this might be the most scandalous bit! - JD]

SF: You have to be apolitical and compliant in order to have universal appeal.

AD: You don’t give your shirt to Sarkozy when you are Zinedine Zidane. With Brice Hortefeux as the minister of immigration, his family would never have gotten into France, and we’d never have had Zidane. As an Arab, he has to ask himself some questions! His parents come here, speak French, work, build a respectable family, teach their kids values. Their son becomes the greatest player in the world and what does this son do when he retires? He gets on the payroll for Danone?....I’d love see for the record his political position.

SF: Thuram [adoring sigh from me - JD] isn’t afraid of positioning himself.

AD: He’s doing the right thing, even if it's sometimes awkward. Karembeu too, when he addresses his roots as a Kanak. I have to give respect to the guy who doesn’t forget where he’s from. I can’t say where Zidane comes from. For all I know he’s a digital hallucination. You don’t know if he’s even real, you don’t know what he thinks about. Except how to appeal to as many as possible. That’s not how it works. You can’t appeal to everybody – you choose a camp. We are staring down some huge problems in this world, and you have to take a position on them. With these guys who come to have so much influence and then don’t do anything with it, you can be sure you know why they are there: “I just want the dough, I don’t want any trouble, so I’m not going to rock the boat.”

Note: I have my own take on this interview - on the contradictory threads in his rambling about how one needs to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps et al. But I thought these comments were great to share with those outside France, where it may come as a surprise that Zidane as seen as super vanilla.

11th? Really?: Bad Reporting in the UK on American Fútbol

This weekend, the Guardian published a bit of misinformation. Laurence Donegan's somewhat obvious bit of punditry about how the Galaxy's second season with Beckham faces the serious challenge of 'Now What?' turns on a greatly exaggerated portrait of public disinterest in soccer in the US. Donegan is the Guardian's golf correspondent, and, according to his by-line, he filed this article apparently from 'Los Angeles' but, I'm guessing that was probably more rightly 'from his Los Angeles hotel room and wi-fi connection'.

Can I just say how tired I am of reading articles in which UK journalists recycle their own common-sense ideas about football in the US? Almost every single one of these articles is written by a British journalist, based in the UK, who can't see past their own television set.

Like many American readers, I was really irritated by the following:

It is a baking hot morning in Carson, California, and David Beckham is still making his way back from Paris after his 100th appearance in an England shirt, leaving his Galaxy team-mates to get on with the business at hand - preparing for their opening fixture of the 2008 season, against the Colorado Rapids in Denver later today, and defending the marriage between football's most famous player and the United States' 11th most popular spectator sport, Major League Soccer.

Now, setting aside all that we might have to say about the Galaxy's grim defeat (4-0!), I want to draw your attention to an offensive bit of rhetorical manipulation at the paragraph's conclusion - meant to maintain the delusion that Americans don't watch football, and that the only people who play it are women (who don't matter in the eyes of 95% of sports editors).

11th most popular sport? First off - Major League Soccer isn't a sport. It's a league. What Donegan must mean is that MLS broadcasts are the 11th most watched sports league of, I'm guessing, English-language major network broadcasts. So, that's NFL, Major League Baseball - American and National League, NBA, NCAA basketball, NASCAR, NHL Hockey, etc. Oh, yeah - and USPGA - meaning, golf.

There are other bits of knee-jerk journalism in there - about how not all the seats at Carson are sold, for instance. A person with even the slightest investment in writing about the development of the sport might look more closely at the ambivalent relationship between the MLS, team owners, and the actual fanbase for the sport - and see the stadium's location as emblematic of these conflicts. If that stadium were three times as large and downtown, you'd never be able to get tickets [see, for example, these stories about fútbol matches staged at the LA Coliseum].

I could go on and on about this. But the article is just lame and totally predictable anglo/euro-centric bull and the Guardian should be ashamed of itself for publishing such a lazy bit of writing.

For the record, by many counters, soccer is the 4th most watched - tied with Hockey (some Mexican legaue games have drawn greater numbers for their broadcasts than have the Stanley Cup finals). But who is counting, how, and what they are counting varies.

If The Guardian wants some smart opining about Beckham's career with the Galaxy, and some solid griping about MLS and its half-baked ideas about how to grow the market in the US, well - why not pay someone who actually follows this shit - and can tell you about how the Galaxy's trouble began well before Beckham's arrival (Donegan's article also makes it sound like Galaxy's miserable season last year came a surprise).

How about some writing about the really interesting developments in the semi-pro circuit - like The Offside's great article about the NPSL?

Postscript: I edit the 'event review' section of the academic journal American Quarterly. Noted American Studies scholar and NYU Professor Andrew Ross wrote a great piece for us on Beckham's debut - 'The Ballad of Posh and Becks'. Academicians reading this can find it on Project Muse and in your university library.

I (Heart) Referees

We do a lot of complaining about ref's - about the ref who was surely stoned, about the ref with byzantine ideas about offside, about refs who police according not to football rules, but (in women's games) according to how he thinks ladies should behave. And then there are the refs who've been bought off, who extend the first or second half beyond regulation time for just as long as it takes you to lose the lead you'd carved out, or the refs who are too easily persuaded by theatrics. One sees a fair amount of crazy refereeing in the amateur leagues. (Pictured here, ref Kim Milton Neilson - famous for sending Becks off during a WC match with Argentina - about to eject Rooney from a 2005 Champions League game for this snarky clap.)

For all their limits, though, I'd rather have the odd crazy ref, than take the field without one.

The most complicated and dangerous game I play is a weekend kickabout - not only because it's mixed football, but because a lot of the players in that game have never been refereed and so don't have even that "internal ref" which experienced players use to curb their instincts. I must admit that when I started playing in this game I'd never played football, and started by playing defense. I would pick a player (usually this poor guy Justin, because he posed the biggest challenge and was playfully smug), and I would mark him for the whole game. I used to love this - until I learned by playing in another setting that I'd been fouling the poor guy for nearly a year. As an NCAA basketball fan, my idea of defense was borrowed from watching that sport. I was not only not very effective - I was also somewhat dangerous. It took me ages to learn that running full speed at someone with the ball - with little plan other than intimidation, or interruption of their movement - was a bad idea. I wasn't good enough to have much control over myself, never mind the ball - and a player with any experience whatsoever will, when presented with such a challenge simply pass the ball to someone else. A less experienced player might tough out the challenge, but usually the result there is some sort of collision - and the sort of contact that ought to bring a whistle if not a card.

I am to this day very grateful to my soccer-pal Ben, who took the time to explain that effective defense is more about containment, patience, persistence and good decision making, and to Mia Hamm's book Go For The Goal - a great introduction to the basic principles of the game.

In our 'friendly' game, we have players everybody stays clear of (with no ref to control them, you either back off or risk injury). I've been pulled by my arms by one of these folks - who then yelled at me (for protecting the ball in a legal manner - as an inexperienced player she didn't understand that if she was pushing at me from behind, I could shield the ball with my body and push backwards to make space). I found myself so upset by her insults that I had trouble playing afterwards, largely because no one else was willing to intervene to point out to her that her behavior (deliberately grabbing and yanking a player off the ball by the arms) was basically a red card foul.

The problem wasn't so much the foul itself, it was the feeling of exposure that it produced. With no referee - and no culture of self-refereeing - individual players are left to sort it out between themselves, to put up with or confront bullying, and to make their own decisions about how much injury they are willing to risk.

Very few people are willing to mediate such conflicts. Most people, in my experience, will put up with players who’ve broken bones of other players, or put up – week after week — with players who tease and push less confident or aggressive players to leave the game. Most don’t have the mettle to confront the problems behind such behavior and find a way to correct it, and protect everyone who wants to play. Sadly, my experience has been that in general, people are conflict-averse, and have little sense of collective responsibility towards each other. (Pictured here, Pierliugi Collina - largely thought of as one of the best refs to take the field - now retired.)

The referee turns a free-for-all into a game by taking the responsibility of setting limits and making sure people respect them. They – and the principles we internalize by playing with them - are the ones who make the game fair, and fun.

The referee also gives meaning to the outrageous act: Zidane's head butt would not have taken on the dimensions of a Greek Tragedy if it hadn't produced that red card (which became its own drama in and of itself).

Refs give us a huge gift by taking up the whistle – because in doing so, they give us a space in which we are freed from our worst instincts, and in which we gain access to something that is increasingly rare in our daily lives – fair play. I wish I could take one to work.

Residual Image: Tackling the Tackle

For the past couple weeks, the tackle that broke Eduardo de Silva's leg (and then some) has been on the minds of not only Arsenal fans, but all who follow the English game.

One of the most interesting observations regarding Martin Taylor's tackle comes from International Herald Tribune columnist Robert Hughes, in his article "A Shocking Tackle Raises Questions of Intent". He writes:

It is instructive to recall that in his younger days, when Taylor was with Blackburn Rovers, his then team manager, Graeme Souness, said of him: "For Tiny, being physical is an area where he is short. With a body like he has, I want him to be a bully. But he is too nice - he is perfect son-in-law material, but I don't want a team of son-in-laws!"

Those comments seem to encompass the ethos of the British approach to the sport it gave to the world. The emphasis on physical aggression comes at a cost of ball skills, and is a reason why England is not going to the European championships. It was eliminated by Croatia's quality, and by Eduardo's goals.

Hughes suggests that we might see this bad tackle - between a big English player and a lithe, quick Brazilian player - as an image which captures a larger problem, one with no easy solution. This clash of style is behind the more recent flurry of remarks regarding Man U's perspectives on refereeing.

Cristiano Ronaldo's complaints that he can't play his game because he's afraid of getting hurt may sound like the whining of a primadonna. And Fergie's complaints that the ref's aren't protecting his star player lose all credibility when made on the heals of the loss to Portsmouth. Wenger's uncharacteristic diatribe about the viciousness of the tackle was eventually retracted.

The fear of injury, however, is a very real and even defining part of being a competitive athlete in any sport, especially at this level. It is also a big part of getting older. CR is 23, Wenger's team is famously youthful - one has to wonder if the unfolding stories of outrage and upset aren't in part about maturing, and confronting the consequences of one's place in a football system that is notoriously brutal. This isn't to diminish the seriousness of their critiques of the brutality of the English game. CR is right to think perhaps this isn't the league for him - not because he's a wimp, but because he has a right to want to play as deep into his 30s as he can.

Hughes suggests in his article that Taylor's mistiming was not a reflection of a lack of skill, but a reflection of Eduardo's unusual speed and talent. By the time the tackle is executed, Eduardo isn't where you expect him to be - the confrontation of this one type of player (fast, ingenious, unpredictable) with this other type of player (physically intimidating, militarized) tears the game apart. If CR wants to be free from anxiety about taking physical challenges from larger players, he might do better in a different setting. That said, what league would free one of the top strikers alive from physically aggressive challenges eludes me.

This is one of football's biggest challenges at all levels - we all prefer watching players with magical footwork. But when we face opponents with those skills, we want to see those players shut down - with a tight and fearless back line. Consider the sometimes dramatic differences in the physical presence of players, and the strange vulnerability of the football player (unarmored, often running at full speed, flying, even) and you have a couple of the main ingredients for the thrill of the game. A great tackle is a thrilling thing to watch - when executed well, it is a sign of respect. (e.g. Japan's Hiromi Ikeda trying to fight off Germany - the eventual World Cup Champions - I am not sure Ikeda got the ball from her opponent here, but the image is great!) Being on the receiving end of a good tackle makes you raise your game. Being on the receiving end of a bad tackle makes you wonder if it's worth it.

Great defense is a relatively unheralded art (as in this attack from Man U's Wes Brown, on Sunderland's Kenwyne Jones - I think I've ID'd them right). Try a google image search for "tackle", "great tackle", or "slide tackle" in soccer and you'll find more images of bad tackles, violent tackles, and hair-raising injuries than you will of hard, effective, smart attacks on the ball. For example - "best soccer goals" yields 269 pages of 20 images of great goals; "best soccer tackles" yields no pages at all. Youtube is a bit better, thanks to the likes of "Chris-Ronaldo7" who puts a few of his fave's to Green Day (I think). Even here, though, youtube's "related videos" bar is basically a casualty list. It's unfortunate - a great goal makes for a great photo. A great tackle, though, is much less interesting to the lazy eyes of the mass media than a brutal assault.


A bad tackle breaks the spell cast over the beautiful game to reveal the fragility of everyone on the field. Great distress was written across the faces of all of the players and fans that day. The fear in everyone's hearts was for more than the safety of player - it was, and is, fear for the integrity and health of the game itself. Seeing a brilliant player like Eduardo brought down for what looked like forever (and is perhaps 'only' a year) puts a good deal of anxiety in everyone's hearts. Nobody wants to see injuries of that magnitude become routine.

But do we have the heart to really explore the ugly side of football culture in the UK and Europe? Like the mass impulse to brutality which underwrites ugly fan chants? Like the demand that one win at all costs? Like what it means to treat the game more like a business than an art?

Ultimately, I suppose it is the referees who must keep the horrifying image of that tackle in their heads. But it shouldn't be only up to them. If an event like this doesn't force the people running and watching the game to question where it's going, well, then we've all really gone off the rails.