Comments

Excellent essay sir. Wish I'd seen yr talk at Aula. BUT! Welcome to the play ethic... you'll never turn back. Nice Cage quote - will get added to the pile.
Foe found this for me: "these are all the influences that made parkour born here in lisses, in half urban, half-natural space where David and Seb could do what they wanted. the parkour, is then a children games that become an art, an art of living, of moving. what is shameful is to believe that, once grown up, we shall stop playing. like Bruce lee said: “play, but play seriously”. we could talk about art of jumping, art of overcoming obstacles, art of moving." http://www.parkour.ir/eindex.aspx
Posted by: Matt June 20, 2006 at 04:18 PM
Argentina's celebrated goal made me think about writing something on the notion of beauty in football, mathematics and architecture - in each field (among others) there are certain methods of achieving a given objective that are subjective and debatable, while simultaneaously generally recognised as beautiful by even non-football fans, non-mathematicians and non-architects. While the objectives usually aren't subjective (or necessarily beautiful), the methods can be nevertheless.Anyway, congratulations & thanks for writing this excellent piece.
Posted by: Norman Blogster June 22, 2006 at 01:08 PM
Thanks Norman. Interesting.
There's a great deal in Winner's book on different - subjective - sense of beauty in Dutch football.
"Rudi Fuchs, director of the Stedelijk Modern Art Museum in Amsterdam and also one of the country's most influential art critics and historians, argues that every country and culture has its own way of seeing. 'The psychologists deny these differences exist, but it's there in the [Dutch] art and culture. Ask any Dutch person to draw the horizon and they will draw a straight line. If you ask someone from Yorkshire or Tuscany or anywhere else, it will have bumps and hills. A Scandinavian blue is cold and steely, completely unlike a blue in Italy. Italian painting is rich in warm reds, but when red appears in the work of a northern artist like Munch, it's blood in the snow.' Furthermore, these climatic and geographically shaped aesthetic differences are inevitably reflected in football. 'Catenaccio is like a Titian painting - soft, seductive and languid. The Italians welcome and lull you and seduce you into their soft embrace, and score a goal like the thrust of a dagger. The Dutch make their geometric patterns. In a Vermeer, the pearl twinkles. You can say, in fact, that the twinkling of the pearl is the whole point of Vermeer. The whole painting is leading to this moment, the way the whole of football leads to the overhead goal of Van Basten. The English like to run and fight. When Gullit tried to transplant this Dutch art to Newcastle, he was trying to do something impossible. He was bound to fail.'"
Which does explain Ruud Gullit neatly. Winner goes on to explore how Dutch landscape has influenced the art and football in the Netherlands. Fuchs goes on to suggest this is why:
"The Dutch instinctively revere the 'architect' on the pitch, the one who has a grasp of the overall picture and every detail in it ... There is a Dutch way of seeing space, the landscape. Cruyff sees in that Dutch way and he is admired for his innate understanding of the geometry and order on the pitch."
Linked to this is a particular sense of beauty. Winner quotes artist Jeroen Henneman here:
"Perhaps it is to do with the sense of beauty that goes with the football in Holland. The beauty is in space and in the pitch. It is in the grass, but also in the air above it, where balls can curl and curve and drop and move like the planets in heaven. Not only on the field. The folding of the air above it also counts. The Dutch prefer to work out how to beat someone with intelligence and beauty rather than power."
Additionally, a particular kind of beauty, based around the pass and the collective space contained within the overall shape of the team on the pitch at that point, rather than individual brilliance. Henneman again:
"Open the pitch by crossing the ball with a curve: a simple pass to the other side and suddenly the team have all the room in the world. The idea is quite Dutch I think. I was so disappointed when I went to Brazil. I thought: finally I will see the great Brazilian football! I expected to see a very 'roomy' football. But they play in the most boring way, on technique, only to show off. A personal beauty is of course also valid. But the passing was very short all the time and the game was slow. Not slow in a Dutch way. The progress was slow, like gridiron football. So slow! They go forward, they go back. Some do little tricks, nice little things. But it is not football."
A little harsh perhaps, and a generalisation. The great Argentine goal mentioned earlier is a wondrous passing move, finished by a defensive midfielder, Cambiasso, which shares something with this Dutch sense of beauty. European-based Brazilian players like Ronaldinho are amongst the great passers in the game, and have a highly-developed sense of space in particular. But there is clearly something in the differing styles here. The Argentine goal above is based on short passing and revolving movement around the number 10; not the curved space-creating passes Henneman covets. The dribble is a part of the South American sense of beauty in football; it isn't in Dutch football (despite Arjen Robben etc.)
The great Argentine striker Jorge Valdano writing in Thursday's Guardian, about his colleague Maradona's classic 1986 goal against England, his slalom through the entire English defence:
"If he had passed me the ball as it seems Plan A called for, I would have grabbed it in my hand and applauded. Can you imagine? But let's not deceive ourselves, I am convinced that Diego was never going to release that ball. Throughout those 10 seconds and 10 touches, he changed his mind hundreds of times because that's how the mind of genius in action works. That celebration that put intelligence, the body and the ball in tune was an act of genius - but also in the most profound way, in footballing terms, of being Argentinian. What Maradona was doing was making Argentinians' football dream a reality: we love the ball more than the game and, for that reason, the dribble more than the pass."
The Argentinians see beauty in the player with the ball, hence the dribble; the Dutch in the space the ball and players move through, hence the pass. The sense of beauty - whilst recognisable in both - is different across these places, thus the football is valued differently too.
Posted by: Dan June 23, 2006 at 08:20 AM
An excellent post and comment. On my flight over to Amsterdam a few weeks ago the KLM in-flight magazine had an article on Dutch football by Jane Szita, "Great balls of fire" that made similar references to the Dutch use of space in football, art, and land use. There is creativity in the teamwork and the use of space. This article had me thinking of Total Football and the use of space in art and society that whole trip and beyond.
At university I took a tutorial on the early Northern renaissance painting (Flemish, Dutch, and Northern Germanic), which began working through perspective, symbolism of objects and space, detail (both foreground and background), light, and texture. The final paper was a comparison of the Northern renaissance and Italian renaissance, which showed vastly different light, colors, detail, and use of space.
Football, as in art is about space and options. What can be done with the space and the options. Closing space opens other options. The more objects in the space the more variables, but also the more limitations to when one object occupies a space. With art and a painting of St. Jerome we need a medium (paint, ink, woodcutting, etc.), a lion, Saint Jerome, books, and writing implements as important elements of depicting that the subject is in fact Saint Jerome. Other objects, such as windows, doors, tables, etc. are not essential, but are common objects to an artists depiction of Saint Jerome. Saint Jerome is often painted or etched in a library, but he is also illustrated out of doors, which make the books and writing implements less probable, but not as improbable as a lion in a library.
In football the use of space makes a defender, much like a lion indoors not as probable. But it is the improbability that makes for beauty and art. Shifting of roles and expected uses makes a components quite valuable. It is still about limitations to space, central objects, and the other options for the remaining objects in that space. In football it is players and the ball that create options. The player with the ball is the focus, but the beauty comes in creating the options with the remaining space as to where the ball can go next. As artist move the lion into a library, a defender can move to the offensive space in the wide open to create options that were unseen before.
The tensions between expected and other options, use of space, adding and subtracting variables, creating balance out of imbalance, and shifting of roles that create the ability for people to express themselves and to innovate. Seeing alternate uses of the familiar surroundings, as Matt states, is the heart of play. Play is as much a part of art as it is sport. The rules are defined. The space is defined. But the use of the objects and all the variables is what separates the player/artist from the spectator.
Posted by: vanderwal June 25, 2006 at 06:22 PM
It seems appropriate to mention Labanotation: The Archie Gemmill Goal.
Posted by: Harry June 29, 2006 at 06:43 PM
Seems like you might want to consider jazz musicians rather than Cage. They train like athletes do and have an arsenal of tricks knowledge and experience that comes to bear in the context of a performance. Especially the musicians whose improvisations are not based on a pre-existing song. They are simply enjoying a musical conversation with their peers. Isn't that what the truly great soccer players are doing?
Posted by: visitor November 11, 2006 at 12:59 AM
Great essay.(Apologies for opening old threads, but I came across your site whilst doing research for a dissertation on the Tricorn)
Do you think it would benefit English football if the Academy system was to deal with more non-football subjects? For example, drop one of that weeks tackling drills and ask the football scholars to write an essay on 'notions of space in civic design', 'charlie parker and miles davis', or other such subjects?
Maybe this is something that should be encouraged within all schools? I am a firm believer in moving away from the current system of quanitifiable, standardised assessment as I feel it takes us ever closer to a society populated by what Durkheim would have called 'technicians' - specialists in a given area with no perception of the wider world, or any appreciation of actions not ruled by pre-ordained logic. If schools changed, then perhaps England could win the world cup again.
Posted by: Jonathan S. Bean September 03, 2007 at 05:11 PM
That is one of the greatest ways of football logic I have ever heard and yes there seems to be a way of thinking that has to do with how we play !and Countries vary
Posted by: Paul Rodriguez November 03, 2007 at 09:12 AM