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The Guardian

Why Pray for Liverpool?

Prayer and elite sport require the same kind of discipline – a daily practice that demands perseverance, even when it seems so not worth it. But isn’t it absurd to pray for your team to win? “The point lies not in God’s partisan enthusiasms or capricious passions, but in the nature of prayer itself. Prayer is about growing a relationship that gradually helps the one praying to see as God sees. Any honest and free relationship encourages the parties to express themselves freely, to be outrageous in their desires and to tell the truth. That is what I am doing when I raise with the almighty the possibility of swinging it Liverpool’s way.” (Nick Baines/The Guardian)

(Image credit: Ali Brohi/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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Belodedici the Treasonous

The story of the only man to win the European Cup twice for Eastern European sides reads like an Alan Furst novel – river crossings in fog to avoid border patrols, an unlikely friendship with Ceausescu’s son, a 10-year sentence in his native Romania for treason…oh, and a stupid FIFA ruling. “If the Steaua of 86 played the Red Star of 91, who would win? ‘Which team am I playing on?’ asks Miodrag Belodedici.” (Jonathan Wilson/The Guardian)

Blame When Saturday Comes

WSC ploughed the field we all play in now — first with a literary, “unashamedly cerebral” take on the sport; first with football humor set-pieces; first with “the new vocabulary of puckish humour, critical scrutiny of football’s hierarchies and the promiscuous eliding of football with other parts of the popular culture. Cranky, and populist, it might seem a little outdated now, “like a slightly mildewed Victorian keystone buried within the sparkling bowels of a craning new-build mega-city, it has remained essentially unchanged as football has mushroomed around it.” And thank God for that. (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

Goal-bal Cooling

While actual scoring seems out of the question these days for some famous EPL strikers, there’s no adequate way to measure the severity of their goal-scoring droughts, unlike other natural-events scales such as Beaufort and Richter. Enter the Birtles Index, named after the hapless Man Utd center-forward Garry Birtles, whose infertility on the pitch stretched on so long pop stars took up his cause. Next up? Calls from environmentalists for measures to halt global scoring change. (Harry Pearson/The Guardian)

Read of the Day: What Modern Soccer Celebs Need Now

It’s not enough to have a personal chiropractor, chef or chakra adjuster — today’s soccer star needs a much bigger team to help him “pull constantly on the heavily-weighted rowing machine of modern celebrity.” Ergo: The Baby Name Selector. The Tattoo Consultant. And the Headphone Trend Analyst (although maybe not so much these days). “A nightmare that he was seen wearing Bose sound-excluders, when everyone else had moved on to Wesc plug-ins, was said to have unsettled Didier Drogba so badly on the eve of Ivory Coast’s opening game in South Africa he was unable even to fall over theatrically during any of his nation’s matches.” (Harry Pearson/The Guardian)

Take David Beckham. Please.

People used to go away; now they don’t. Take David Beckham, back giving interviews last week, before England’s latest World Cup memory could even begin decomposing. In his vampirish semi-retirement, still England’s most famous footballer, this Vegas Beckham symbolizes the failure of English football, the machinery of craven celebrity that constructed him, and “above all, a sense of congealment, of a handsomely branded stasis…and these things, you feel, aren’t about to go away just yet either.” (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

‘Fick Fufa’: Was it Good for You, Sepp?

The ghastly strong-arming of a still grieving Nelson Mandela to attend the finale. The extra-constitutional courts and wildly disparate punishments for locals versus tourists. £2.5b in tax-free profit. Etc. “Fifa’s MO is to ensure the country’s statute book has been made comfortable for its arrival, take over almost entirely for the period of time needed to siphon out the money, before pulling up anchor and moving on to the next host organism. Naturally, we all wish Brazil the best of luck – but the time has surely come to ask who regulates the regulator. Perhaps it’s one for the UN, assuming Fifa isn’t about to take its first seat on the security council.” (Marina Hyde/The Guardian)

An #Englandfail Compendium

When it comes to stylish self-laceration, the French have nothing on the English. England crashed out of World Cup 2010 because its players are soccer-stupid (Martin Samuel/Daily Mail), because it’s an island nation with insular thinking (The Ball is Round), because of the creaky old 4-4-2 (Glenn Moore/Telegraph), because they play with too much passion (Musa Okwonga/New York Times-Goal), because they’re basically Everton (World Cup College), because Capello got 10 things wrong (Richard Williams/Guardian), because of so many things (Left Back in the Changing Room). It needs to take a step backwards and play youth for a cycle or two (twofootedtackle). It even needs to get off the plane better (Barney Ronay/The Guardian).

Read of the Day: Why is it OK to Cheat?

Germany’s keeper Manuel Neuer knew that Frank Lampard’s shot on Sunday has crossed the goal line…yet he pretended that it hadn’t, kept playing — and then talked openly about it after the match. Why is that considered OK? Would Neuer have been vilified had he instead stopped play? “He could have set a positive ethical example to people watching all over the world, including the many millions who are young and impressionable…Instead he is just another very skillful, cheating footballer.” (Peter Singer/The Guardian)

Reads of the Day: Upon Further Review, England Lose

As clear as Frankie’s goal was yesterday, so too is England’s breakdown: Luke Dempsey at The Goal Post says the squad is 45 years behind other countries in terms of technical ability; The Run of Play’s Alan Jacobs argues England is plagued by “backshadowing,” the belief that one’s cause is always being betrayed by imperfect decision-making; Sid Lowe writes at the CBC’s World Cup blog that England’s tournament play has been “eye-bleedingly awful”; The Guardian editorializes that it might be time for the country to try a new national sport. (Oh, right: And Zonal Marking says Germany was pretty good, too.)

The Demons of Serbia

The long tradition of Yugoslav football neurosis continues in Serbia, surpassing expectations against superior opponents only to have “self-doubt…suppress the imagination and bring to the surface the cynicism that has always underlain [their] technical excellence.” Too bad they’re out of the Cup: for it’s this transparency of self-doubt that makes neutrals love Serbia. “When asked one said he’d decided to support Serbia because ‘they seemed to be trying to lose.’” (Jonathan Wilson/The Guardian)

Life After Bambi

Is it just me, or is there palpable relief at the puncturing of Spain’s balloon of virtue? Indeed, World Cup history is littered with the failures of favored purists and romantics — Hungary 1954, Holland 1974, Brazil 1982, etc. The lesson: Soccer is about artisans, not just artists: “Football without its grinding 0-0 and 1-1 draws, without its unpredictable collisions of mind and muscle, of beauty and bruises, would be like music with nothing below middle C.” (Richard Williams/The Guardian)

Thrust and Parry

Is offensive teamwork dead at the World Cup — murdered by defensive organization? Simon Kuper writes in the Financial Times that the rest of the world (other than Australia) now does European-style defending, and the only things that can beat it are soloists like Eljero Elia or Messi…or blunders. The Guardian‘s Jonathan Wilson adds that Cup play is swing away from attacking fullbacks and back to defined offensive and defensive roles — making Maradona look ever more the crazy fox.

Poets, Misfits, Goalkeepers, Robert Green

Poets, guardians, sentries, goalkeepers: “They maintain the final position, beyond which the unthinkable lies.” Poets and keepers are both outliers, choosing solitude and a relative lack of glamour over “the swank and celebrity of playing further up the pitch.” Of course, this leads to Robert Green, an etymologically perfect name for an English goalie, with “Robert” leading to “bobbie” and “Green suggesting Blake’s Jerusalem and England’s leafy, oaken forests of old….It’s as if he was born for it: Robert Green, England goalkeeper.” (Simon Armitage/Guardian)

Women Commentators. Put the Remote Down.

We don’t like women commentators for men’s soccer because…well, why is that, exactly? That’s true of some of the best male commentators. They don’t sound right? “In order to be taken seriously by some viewers, female sports commentators must match the incumbents without straying too far towards imitation, at the same time as their differences and idiosyncrasies are not celebrated…but amplified and classified as alien….If they still ‘don’t sound right’, I suppose that’s in much the same way as the female scholars of 1876 didn’t quite look right, having missed the first 1,400 or so semesters.” (Georgina Turner/The Guardian)

The 10 Most Irritating World Cup Products

he Official England Garden Gnome. World Cup Widow newspaper columns. The England Scoregasm. “To say World Cup merchandise can tend towards the naff always feels something of an understatement. Frankly, it can make QVC’s Dazzling Diamonique Hour look like the Wallis Simpson Collection. Yet even when you’re sure the bottom of this barrel has been well and truly scraped, some chiselling retailer always manages to discover a concealed basement to the cask.” (Marina Hyde/The Guardian)

Beyond Keep Away

Football reinvents itself constantly, and its fans trust that “players and coaches will be able to mediate their own way away from predictability or, worse, unwatchability.” So Inter’s narrow loss to Barcelona at the Camp Nou might signal the end of extreme possession football as a means to winning and the exposure of Barcelona’s passing carousel as often “simply a means of offloading responsibility.” So what’s next? Position. (Jonathan Wilson/The Guardian)

The Bluff That Saved Valencia

How did Valencia cheat certain death and live to make the Champions League — all while hanging onto Villa, Silva and Mata? By ignoring the debt piled up from building the still unfinished new Mestalla — “the second greatest white elephant in Spanish football after Dmytro Chygrynskiy” — and bluffing other investors with a worthless share sale to fans worthy of the Green Bay Packers. (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

French Sexual Discourse and Monsieur Ribéry

France goes with sex like Milwaukee goes with beer — but the French press has always been discreet about the exploits of its politicians and celebrities. So when Zahia Dehar told her story of sex with Franck Ribéry to Paris Match, did it signal that France is becoming like Britain? Perhaps…but only over the distaste of French journalists. (Claude Soula/The Guardian)

Read of the Day: Cigarettes are Sublime

Relegation time is, paradoxically, a great time for dark and bitter humor: “In football the best jokes are dragged from despair, like smoldering fruit bushes from a badly located bonfire.” Not so, though, for any fan who wants to give up smoking. A New Year’s resolution to quit becomes “a nicotine-patch…through a nine-game run of away defeats.” (Harry Pearson/The Guardian)

Stepping on the Same Pitch Twice

Monty Python’s 1972 philosophers’ football match — in which the players were too lost in thought over 89 minutes to actually kick the ball — will be remembered in a 9 May London match featuring academics and comedians. “Python represents a coherent, Anglo-Saxon take on existentialism. French thinkers…recognised the absurdity of life, but it took the English Pythons to show that the right response is to laugh at it.” (Julian Baggini/The Guardian)

The Racism of Persistent Questioning?

South Africans are starting to lash out at the persistent questioning of the British press about that country’s fitness to host The World Cup. And British journalists are getting called out for it. “Any negative UK headline or story quickly snowballs on the web and leaves South Africans feeling vexed. In short, they want to know of me, why do you hate us?” (David Smith/The Guardian)

Boy Scouts: £697

The Boy Scouts, an ambulance service, a local florist, the supporters’ club: Some of the scores of local concerns left holding the unpaid bills and bad debt of Portsmouth FC. Yet in “hideous contrast,” the Premier League requires the club to pay its transfer fees and long-gone players’ full pay packages in order to remain in the Football League. (David Conn/The Guardian)

Read of the Day: The Pointless Passion of Atlético Madrid

While Real Madrid’s fans are “prisoners of results,” those of perennial losers Atlético Madrid’s are working-class “prisoners of a feeling, of their colours” says Atleti homeboy Fernando Torres. Except that the feeling is doom, the passion curdled into a masochistic cult of collapse and martyrdom, Humphrey Bogart instead of Cary Grant. (One supporters’ club is called “The Suffering.”) “Atlético fans would follow Atlético to the ends of the earth. All too often that’s exactly where they are heading.” (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

Hillsborough, Right and Left

The Hillsborough disaster remembered last week on its 21st anniversary “delivered, inexorably, a series of lessons that tell how [England] works” — including about the country’s political landscape. The police conduct that day toward the crowds was a legacy of Thatcherism, particularly its hostility to youth and the working class; Labour is only discovering its sympathies with the bereaved in the shadow of an election, after 13 years of timidity toward vigorously renewing the inquest. (David Conn/The Guardian)

Shock Therapy for the Drop Zone

Real Valladolid’s Javier Clemente is the managerial equivalent of shock paddles: Club presidents, bathed in the midnight sweat of imminent relegation, summon him to scream and bully and electrify their teams out of the danger zone. Never mind that he hasn’t won anything in 26 years and hasn’t completed a full season in almost 20 — he gets results. And tells off everyone in the process. (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

Read of the Day: Shades of Bill Shankly

Bill Shankly was a passionate socialist — so one wonders what he would think of the boarded-up houses around Anfield, with unemployment as high as 43% in Liverpool Walton and further dilapidation around Goodison Park. In a town where the reciprocal relationship between club and community once was strong as steel, “walking the eerily derelict streets round Anfield on a match day it is difficult not to conclude that football’s current model is dysfunctional.” (Marina Hyde/The Guardian)

Getting Past Offside

The offside rule has a fascinating history of cat-and-mouse, trap-versus-goal-deluge tinkering since the first FA rules laid it out in 1863. But 142 years later, the 2005 rule changes seem to have gotten offside right, forcing defenders to defend instead of playing the trap, stretching the effective playing area of the pitch, and allowing smaller midfielders with skills and smarts (and the Barcelonas who depend on them) to excel. (Jonathan Wilson/The Guardian)

Read Madrid, Fertilizing Europe

The castoffs of last year’s Real Madrid edition, excreted in the club’s transfer window gorge of last summer, have fertilized three of this year’s four Champions League semi-finalists. “Trying to establish what has gone wrong for English football’s top four is only half the story. It is just as valuable — not to mention refreshing — to look at what has gone right elsewhere in Europe. And there may not be too many football fans from Amsterdam to Zagreb who are sorry to see this particular semi-final line-up. Except perhaps some of those from Madrid.” (Amy Lawrence/The Guardian)

Press Play

A much ballyhooed recent piece by Jonathan Wilson says Barcelona wins because they press so well — not just winning balls back and dominating possession, but also ratcheting up the pressure for perfection on every pass their opponents do get to make. But what happens when you’re too tired to press anymore? Zonal Marking notes that, in fact, three of the four CL losers this week pressed early…and then pooped out and lost their leads.

Read of the Day: The Mannerists

The strength of FC Barcelona — its privileging of aesthetic football above all — is also its weakness, an often sterile mannerism that emphasizes the refinement of its sensibility and ours rather than the point of the game, which is winning. The team’s “rhetoric of artistic endeavour” as an end in itself is also Barca’s barrier to becoming a dynasty. (Paul Hayward/The Guardian)

Dribbling Alone

Supporting the local football club is “one of the few ways left of showing communitarian endeavour and a willingness to belong” in provincial England. But the identities of these towns — the iron of Middlesbrough, the lace of Nottingham, the potteries of Stoke — have been replaced by their teams…and “this is the problem, not the solution.” (Andrew Martin/The Guardian)

Read of the Weekend: Whither the Twilight Boys?

Man City’s Adam Johnson didn’t like it when someone recently told him he looked like kd lang — but time was when the vampirishly translucent, two-dimensionally thin, dare-we-say-androgynous winger was a staple of English football. “Teeth chattering, they glided over the ground, controlling the ball with feet that moved so loosely it was as if they were attached to their hips not by bone, muscle and sinew, but by lengths of velvet cord.” (Harry Pearson/The Guardian)

Read of the Day: England’s Keepers: The Iconography of Failure

Goalkeeping is “an illogical business, a pseudo science that — despite some waffle about angles and big-making and wrist-firmness — is still bound up in an invisible world of aura and personality and luck-creation.” And in this parallel, Entacto universe, England’s goalkeepers have “a flustered, unrehearsed quality. They seem unlucky.” (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

Counting to XI

Counting to XI: The Oscar-winning Argentine film El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret of Their Eyes) features a character who can recite the starting XIs for Racing Academy throughout history, from backline to front. It’s a skill of memory that used to mark a team’s true fan — I name Nottingham Forest’s 1966-67 starters, therefore I am — and a pleasure denied today’s fans in the era of endless squad rotation. (Richard Williams/The Guardian)

Short People

Lionel Messi’s biggest accomplishment last week: Not the brace of trebles, or even zooming right past the Wayne Rooney debate and straight for immortality. For all the talk of his performance against Real Zaragosa transcending language itself, his best work is to confound one of our basic prejudicial categories — i.e., the conventional modern view that physical strength is the best measure of a player. (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

Read of the Day: The Casey Stengel of La Liga

You’re Real Valladolid, you suck, you’ve no hope of avoiding relegation — so when you sack your manager, to whom do you turn? Onésimo Sánchez — a pot-bellied, poor man’s Maradona in his day, now a mile-a-minute wisecracker who yells “I shit on God!” from the touchline…when he’s not insulting his players. La Liga, meet your Casey Stengel. (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

Mourhino Plays It Cool

Mourhino Plays It Cool: The Special One’s depressive presser at Stamford Bridge yesterday was almost anti-Mourhino…until he explained his restraint was out of respect for Chelsea. “At which point Mourinho looked so theatrically pious, as though Chelsea — rather than a football club — was his estranged virgin bride, and this very room his dear old dead mum’s mausoleum, that you started to get a sense of what he was up to.” (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

Why Can’t the English?

Harry Redknapp worries that English managers are an endangered species, as non-English keep buying EPL teams. Really, Harry: Most English managers went Euro long ago, giving up their trilby hats and “monkey-shit brown macs” for motivational psychology and Feng Shui. (Harry Pearson/The Guardian)