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Brian Phillips

Out of Sheer Rage

Anger is now our default response to sports: at referees, at unseen hands and secret handshakes against our club, at youth who decide not to play for our national teams…a hyperpartisanship that fills but never satisfies because, while “your club itself becomes the index of all meaning in the game,” the game often disappoints. Rage has replaced enjoyment of sport; rage is killing sport. (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)

(Image: Stadtkreis Offenbach am Main, Hesse, Germany. Image credit: Herr Sharif/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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Why You Can’t Truly See Bastian Schweinsteiger

The milky refractions of history: Brian Phillips at Slate argues all soccer romantics (i.e., lovers of Dutch soccer history) should be rooting for Holland’s true heirs Spain Sunday, saying that “great teams in other sports beat their opponents. Great teams in soccer beat both their opponents and the game.” Stefan Fatsis at The Goal Post wonders for whom Papa Cruyff will be rooting. And Charles Holland (!) at Minus the Shooting says such “myths of the near past” obscure our clarity of vision for national teams — we can’t see how boring Spain really is, or Bastian Schweinsteiger as subtle and sophisticated.

Read of the Day: The Inner Side of History’s Wind

“The sheer scale of the World Cup as an event probably smooths out our perceptions, and that’s also part of the memory problem: one game turns over onto the next so relentlessly that there’s no time to process it all, and even elevated moments start to feel like they’re part of an undifferentiated routine. One way or the other, these games sneaked up on me like an assassin who wanted a kiss…I hate this game, I love this game, I live only to forget.” (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)

Read of the Day: Within the Context of No Context

How do we know if a player is great? If Messi’s greatness depends on his winning a World Cup, how much of that quality relies on him playing for a team with a chance to win the Cup? How much of his greatness is contextual? How much what we’re told about him? “I want there to be great players, and I think I’ve seen them play. If nothing else, though, it’s scary how flimsy some of the narratives we build on the game (and care about, and invest hopes in) turn out to look when you think about them for a second.” (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)

Read of the Day: The Thriller

Switzerland temporarily saved the World Cup by writing a narrative that captured an atomic particle of soccer: “the thrill-in-prospect.” Unlike American sports, soccer rewards the near-miss, the great run that doesn’t pay off, the favorite being denied time and again by a hot goalie. To string these particles together, to watch an underdog thwart and thwart and finally steal a result through heart is the kind of theater the Cup had been missing. “I’ll take players scrambling to overcome their own shortcomings or improvising on a dime in a heartbeat over a game of exact adjustments and no drama.” (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)

Read of the Day: The Spectacular Happiness of the World Cup?

We fans not at the World Cup watch fans at the World Cup, who more than ever seem to be aware that they are being watched and revel in that happy objectification. Is this Debord’s society of the spectacle, “the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity…covering the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory”? Or should we all just relax because the World Cup is supposed to turn “frenzied nationalism into a form of global unity, and people watching people could be the best, even the only, way to make that happen“? (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)

Bring Me the Hand of Thierry Henry

Drogba, Ferdinand, Pirlo and Beckham are out. France loses to China. Riots have already begun. This World Cup is clearly cursed, and there’s only one thing that can reverse it: Removing the curse of the wee folk. “Return Thierry Henry’s hand to the sacred French burial ground at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Put the Irish in France’s spot in Group A. Let the spirits sleep. Do the right thing, Sepp Blatter.” (Brian Phillips/Dirty Tackle)

Aesthetics, Power and Brooklyn Asylum F.C.

Why write a novel about 1920s American soccer? “It just seemed so amazing that American fans were cheering for soccer teams at the exact moment that Lou Gehrig was smoking a cigarette and gazing with clear, steady eyes into a marvelous American sunset.” OK, back up: Why a novel? “I think fiction can help capture the wonder and terror of soccer because, to a greater extent than nonfiction, it possesses some of that wonder and terror itself – you invest in a fictional character in an even more intimate way than you invest in George Clooney or, God help you, John Terry.” (Brian Phillips as interviewed by Graydon Gordian/Norman Einstein’s)

If Soccer Were Dungeons and Dragons

Rumor is abroad throughout the Western Kingdoms. Men whisper of trouble in the East, of death upon the great roads, of armies massing for war. It is even said that the worm Drakorath, the dragon of the Rivening, has awakened in the Valley of Bal-Sharom and been seen in the skies over the villages to the south. But fear not, brave warden of the flame. Hope yet survives in the Kingdoms. Wayne Rooney has a 20-sided die.” (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)

Read of the Day: The Coup

The actual Champions League final has evaporated from our memories — a inconvenient puddle destroyed by sunshine, “a kind of valedictory footnote to one manager’s triumphant career move.” What Mourinho has done to football this week is probably historic — his defiant, high-wire media acts have made him not only “a Houdini of his own rhetoric, an absolutely compelling personality,” but have supplanted style, risk and flair on the pitch. Or rather: The game is now an extension of Mourinho’s heedless public persona. Football with The Special One seems at once more charged and more distant than it really is. (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)

Read of the Day: The Scapegoat

As Leviticus 16:8 (and Dictionary.com) tell us, the Jews released a goat into the wild on Yom Kippur “after the high priest symbolically laid the sins of the people on its head.” Avram Grant was that goat into the wild for Chelsea — the more he won there, the more exposed the club’s fault lines became, and the more he had to be sacrificed. “[H]e became more Chelsea than Chelsea…[and] when he left, some meaningful part of the hostility and defiance that had defined the club left with him.” Like a ghost, he still walks among us, a reminder of a more interesting Chelsea, before they purged their diabolic side. (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)

Read of the Day: The Coin Has Two Sides

Mourinho vs. Guardiola: “The contrast between these two managers is so deep and abiding that I think we’ve been slow to recognize it, almost as if it requires a leap of imagination to recognize that they exist in the same world at the same time…If Mourinho offers completely original responses in a way that suggests elaborate improvisation and contrivance, Guardiola offers canned responses in a way that serenely suggests something like lasting truth.” (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)

Read of the Weekend: Game-Time Decisions

Is fairness really the most important consideration in sports? Stop before you answer; because in America’s most popular sports, the fetishization of fairness has led to the incessant intrusion of technology, into the pauses for which advertising flows like leeches to blood. “This must not happen…the timescale of soccer, where there’s only one clock stoppage and only one cut away from the action during the entire game, generally feels like the timescale of paradise.” (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)

Read of the Day: The Beautiful and the Damned (United)

British football used to be mud, blood, studs and a genetic propensity to kick any ball as far as it could be booted. But even today, most British analysts of beautiful stylists such as Barcelona and Arsenal — however admiring — come to wish these teams would give it up and break out the brass knuckles. It’s an expression of the “vexed identity of British football,” a murmuring nostalgia for masculinity that comes through in “sudden unwarranted military metaphors or exaggerated depictions of violence.” (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)