Michel Di Capua on how watching football is like reading fiction.
A story,” said the American writer Flannery O’Connor, “is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way… You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.”
There is no substitute for the experience of seeing an entire football match. What makes football compelling for its most ardent fans is what emerges from the complete game. It is the lulls in combination with the outbursts, the ebb and flow of control, the sweep of the field taken in at over infinite glances for ninety minutes of play. It is, in one word, the rhythm.
Rhythm cannot be summarised. And it cannot be excerpted. Take, for example, Tuesday’s match between Portugal and Ivory Coast. It would be possible to put in words some of the key moments of the match, such as Cristiano Ronaldo’s rocket from outside the box bouncing off the post in the 11th minute, or Drogba’s rousing entrance. But these are points, not plots. They do not tell what happened in the game any more than “man sleeps with mom” tells the story of Oedipus. The latter omits the hubris and the anguish. The former omits Ronaldo struggling through the game without being able to get the ball inside the box and Ivory Coast’s flurry of thrusts around the box in the game’s final four minutes.
If this is true, then the idea of getting at the gist of a match by watching its goals and near-goals isn’t just inadequate, it’s perverse. In fact — because the goals are the crumple in the fabric — perhaps the only adequate summary of a football match, short of the match in full, would consist of everything except the goals.
Which brings us to the counterpoint: what makes football compelling is the imminent sense of upheaval. The tension that gives the rhythm of the match its gravity. The possibility that, at any moment, the game can be transformed. The awareness that the possibility of that moment occurring in this minute is slim but the possibility of it not ever occurring in any of the other 89 minutes is slimmer still. It is the fact that the moment can yield one of only two results: ecstasy or calamity. It is, in one word, the edge.
And here’s the thing about the edge. While the rhythm of the game should and usually does tilt towards the better of the two sides, the edge can easily fall on either’s neck. It is, fundamentally, not about justice. Sunday’s match between Serbia and Ghana was a pairing of two roughly similarly talented teams. The game appeared to be on its way to ending in a 0-0 tie, until Zdravko Kuzmanovic, the Serbian midfielder, brushed his arm against a cross into the box, resulting in a penalty kick for Ghana. Asamoah Gyan scored with six minutes left in regulation, giving the African team an improbable 1-0 win. It was an accident. And surely there are many who resent a game where the fortunes of a player and a team can crash so manically, so instantaneously, so aberrantly. Now Serbia fights an uphill battle as it next brushes against a polished and powerful German team. But fairness isn’t the thing. Fluke moments — handballs, red cards, own goals, goalkeeper lapses — do not threaten the integrity of a hard-fought game.
They are the lining that gives the game its edge.
Michel Di Capua is a New York-based writer. He will write every week for the duration of FIFA 2010