'FOOTUROLOGY': DISPATCHES FROM THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL – PART 2

1-8 down at half-time, Coyle salutes the fans 

11 November, 2013

Following a record 13-1 loss at home to Man City, slightly oikish enthusiast’s enthusiast Owen Coyle opines, earnestly (obviously): “I thought we started the game really brightly and were sharper than they were for those first 47 seconds… Anyone who was at the ground today, they will tell you we were by far the superior side in that period. But if you don’t take your opportunity to touch the ball before the opponent scores, you’re going to be in trouble. Goals change games. And four in the first 10 minutes gave us a mountain to climb, having shot ourselves in the foot. And climbing a mountain is difficult enough at the best of times, without a bullet wound in a major limb. I can’t fault the players for their honesty and we certainly came back into the game – dominating it for long periods while Balotelli, Silva and Agüero had that game of poker in the second half, as I think anyone who was at the game will tell you – but we’ve simply got to be more clinical about turning three-pass moves into opportunities to get one pass away from a speculative 30-yard strike on goal. We’ll get back to the training ground and work hard, don’t you worry about that,” Coyle finished, before nipping off to the doctor’s in his wee shorts to have his sinuses drained. A-fucking-gain.

Guus and Roman as the Dutchman's boat is about to set sail from Kiel

18 June, 2014

In the aftermath of two-time Premier League Champion Andre Villas-Boas’s acrimonious departure from Chelsea, Roman Abramovich once more tries to cash-woo Guus Hiddink for the Stamford Bridge hotseat, an appointment that gains even more urgency in the light of the easygoing Dutchman’s ongoing success in the international game, first guiding Russia to the final of Euro 2012, then getting Thrace (seceded from Greece, which collapsed in a heap of city states in early 2012) to the 2014 World Cup final. Hiddink tells ‘Red/Blue Rom’ that he’s just nipping off for a cruise of the Baltic Sea with the missus and he’ll be in touch in September. –Ish.

 The Up'ards high pressing game contrasts markedly to the Down'ards long-ball style

7 July, 2014

The clamour among the world’s oligarchs to claim a piece of the creamy, glamorous, prestige pie that is English football reaches new heights (or depths) when Uzbeki energy distribution magnate (and European government blackmailer), Sergei Smokaskov, pays a cool £165m for the Royal Shrovetide football match in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. With origins stretching back to the twelfth century, the game sees townsfolk born either side of a river – the Up’ards and the Down’ards – face off and attempt to score at millstones functioning as goals situated three miles apart and separated by hedges, ditches, and rivers – obstacles that militate against the sort of flowing, tikski-takska football presently flourishing in Tashkent.

The half-a-dozen or so rules circumscribing what is essentially a yokel melée are fairly straightforward and self-explanatory: there is to be no murder or manslaughter, for instance, while extreme violence is “frowned upon”; players cannot carry the ball in a motorised vehicle or “hidden in a bag” (the rules are ambiguous as to whether it can be carried in a bag provided it isn’t hidden); the game cannot go beyond 10pm (one in they eye for TV companies, no doubt); while cemeteries, churchyards, and the town memorial gardens are strictly out of bounds. Traditionally, the event kicks off with a dinner in The Green Man Hotel, when the bloke that starts the game (the “turner-up”, a post once bestowed upon Brian Clough, no less) is hoisted aloft the players’ shoulders and taken to the starting post – all of which Smokaskov plans to eradicate post haste.

Having been impressed with a more or less end-to-end encounter in 2013, a game he enjoyed even more once it had been helpfully pointed out to him by the correspondent of the Man2Man Marking TV channel that the Up’ards were deploying a revolutionary 923–1–786–1,235 formation (with Mayor Grenville Bozzerk-Clagging in the Makélélé role ready to pounce when the ball broke from “the hug”), Smokaskov decided there and then – impulsively, some might say – to build a state-of-the-art 4,000,000-capacity stadium, each seat kitted out with a telescope, fold-out mattress, and stash of heroin. Rumours of a Champions League have been mooted, with the claw-toothed, in-bred custodians of other similarly pointless traditions said to be keen to take some of the mad fucker’s illicit cash.

Herr Blatter dummies returning the errant ball

2 April, 2015

Increasingly bonkers FIFA supremo, Sepp Blatter, noble custodian of the game’s grass roots, yesterday flatly refused to throw a ball back over the fence to his next door neighbour, a 13-year-old whippersnapper with a bionic foot (how else would he have cleared the gigantic electrical barrier that encloses Sepp’s de facto sovereign fiefdom?).

'Arry: dog lover. And money.

24 June, 2016

CEO of the UAE FA at long last gets his man and appoints Harry Redknapp as coach, having finally allayed his fears by removing the last major reason for not taking the £750,000-a-week post: wanting to walk his dogs along the beach at Poole harbour of a morning. The ruling sheiks duly have a to-scale replica of the Dorset town constructed especially for their new ghaāfa, who thus now sets himself to what he does best: wheelin’ and dealin’ (although don’t suggest that to him). While only belatedly cognisant of the fact that he couldn’t simply buy a team, Redknapp nonetheless ducked, dived and generally improvised, and now has flunkies hanging around outside the school gates in several South American cities, offering young boys a sizeable package in exchange for accepting UAE citizenship. The sheiks’ architects, meanwhile, are busy building de luxe favelas backing on to Arry’s Sandbanks simulacrum. 

Back to Index of Predictions

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'FOOTUROLOGY': DISPATCHES FROM THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL – INTRODUCTION

It was the great Gazza himself who said “I don’t make predictions, and I never will” and up until today we would have concurred with the daft Geordie tragedy-waiting-to-happen (a description which itself could be construed as a sort of foretelling, albeit of the ‘sun will rise tomorrow’ variety). However, that was before we developed the power of divination – or rather, before we realized that we had had it all along, latent, awaiting its hour…

The powers of augury with which we have been blessed do not operate by way of dreams (oneiromancy), tea leaves (tasseomancy), sticks (rhabdomancy), palms (cheiromancy) or even excrement (scatomancy). No, our soothsaying is conducted through the obscure patterns left on tactics boards by those analysts, squinters all, beholden to the view that tactics produce football, as opposed to merely offering a schematic ideal of the coach’s, haphazardly and extemporaneously carried out by inherently creative, problem-solving players. At any rate, we call this chalkboard-based form of divination VELLIOMANCY, from the Greek for arrows. Pointless arrows…

What follows are the future truths of football. Don’t bet in play, naaah – bet now, before the inevitable unfolds. Bet your house on it. 

Illustration courtesy of Toblerone Jones

Part 1: Which speaks of Black Country ball-winning, a sportswear retailer’s contribution to his club’s embarrassment, CR7’s wilderness ordeal, some surprise trade between Mario and Rio, and ill-advised tattoos…

Part 2: In which Owen Coyle takes the positives, Guus plays hard to get, an Uzbeki oligarch buys the Royal Shrovetide game, Sepp plays the curmudgeon with the kids, and Mr Redknapp takes Poole to the Gulf…

Part 3: Wherein are contained prognostications of Wenger’s extreme youth policy, a shock title for the Potters, Messi’s military service, a Russian stadium surrounded by a moat of piss, and a psychotic delirium induced by tactical diagrams…

Part 4: About Stephen Ireland’s film career, Man City’s commercial optimization, expensive tickets for the Moscow World Cup final, WAG-ology, and Moyes vexing the Toffee Men…

Part 5: In which King Kenny goes on a spree in the North East, confusion reigns over Brazilian names, Becks’ MLS off-season sojourns to London reach a new low, tragedy befalls Argentina, and Man Utd fans become suicide bombers…

Part 6: Wherein we learn of Hansen’s obsession, of FIFA’s stance toward England, of Keano’s acquittal, of Neymar’s bank balance, and of the misunderstanding of Nigel Clough

Part 7: About Man City’s Champions League final defeat, twice, the Liechtenstein World Cup, a self-regarding Dane, and the insidious spread of Tevezism…  

Part 8: Which tells of Rio Ferdinand’s son’s career change, space-age balls, dinosaurs, the belated flourishing of Arsène’s boys, and the enduring fervour of Fergie… 

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WHAT IS FALSE 9?

I didn’t actually want the name – at least, not as first choice. For extensive reasons you’d be better off not knowing about, I initially wanted my football blog to be called Transversality (the French for ‘horizontalness’, whence le transversal being their word for ‘crossbar’). I then hoped to call it something like Between the Lines, a favourite phrase of Rafa Benítez’s for the space in which elusive footballers operate, and an obvious pun for writing aspiring to be analytical, insightful. Neither was available. And anyway, the regularity with which the likes of Jamie “Giggsy’s literally on fire” Redknapp and Andy O’Townsend were using the phrase made it about as appealing as leprosy. It was only a matter of time, I thought, before Shearer caught up.

So, after a bit of head scratching, I plumped for False 9. Nice phrase, but what, in relation to football, does it mean?

Put simply, a false nine is a player who appears to be operating as a conventional centre-forward, what the majority of British pundits think of as a “target man” (whence the number 9 in the traditional shirt numberings), but who constantly drops deep to receive the ball, essentially leaving the centre-halves with no-one to mark and thus a tactical dilemma: to pursue or leave him for a midfielder to pick up...

The term has entered common football language of late due to the phenomenal Lionel Messi’s coruscating displays as a false nine for the all-conquering Barcelona, where he’s flanked by the not inconsiderable talents of David Villa and Pedro (previously, he had played in a wide role on the right, with Ronaldinho on the left and Samuel Eto’o as an orthodox #9).

However, according to the guru of football formations, Jonathan Wilson, Guardian columnist and author of Inverting the Pyramid: a History of Football Tactics, Messi is far from the first to play that (non-)position. In fact, he believes that this sort of strikerlessness was actually a piecemeal innovation that could be seen in prototype form as early as the 1920s in South America, through the Austrians of the 1930s, but that first became discernibly systematized by the great Hungarian team of the 1950s, the ‘Mighty Magyars’ that trounced England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953, then 7-1 in Budapest’s Nepstadion the following year (both of which remain record defeats: home and all-time respectively), with Nándor Hidegkuti in the false nine role, supported by the likes of Zoltán Czibor, József Bozsik and all-time greats Ferenc Puskás and Sándor Kocsis, later to become fulcrums of Real Madrid and Barcelona respectively.

Hidegkuti scores for Hungary at Wembley, 1953

However, let’s not get bogged down in all that just now. Let us allow it to drift into midfield and be picked up by someone else. There will be time for theorizing later. For now it should be noted that the name of the blog was also chosen not solely for its cerebral tone – its hint of a philosophical approach to football beyond pseudo-profound statements about seagulls following trawlers in search of sardines – but also because it permits me to indulge in that most well-thumbed yet never tiresome of formats: the list. Not only that, I have three options as to how many items will comprise the list – nine, for obvious reasons; eleven, for the number of players in a team; or I could go with good old ten, the fans’ favourite, on the pretext of it being, well, a “false nine”…

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