My Joga Bonito World Cup--Part II

The other source of the beautiful game, one which seems more relevant to the 2010 World Cup, dates to the late 60s. At that time the Dutch soccer team Ajax under manager Rinus Michels created what it called total football or in the Dutchese totaalvoetbal. In brief, because I have limited understanding here, the essential tactical innovation of total football is player interchangeability. While players fill nominal positions on the field—defender, midfielder, and forward—they are selected and trained to seamlessly replace each other as they move out of position. On a totaalvoetbal team only the goalkeeper has a fixed position.

Reading the comments of Ajax players of the day, the emphasis is not on trading places for its own sake; rather it’s on creating and using space on the pitch. Interchangeability was simply the key to exploiting the space.

Players in this system must possess exceptional technical skills and field vision. So it was serendipitous that Ajax promoted an unusually gifted 18-year old player to its senior team in 1964. His name was Johan Cruyff (he of the eponymous Cruyff Turn) and he was born to play totallvoetbal.

In Cruyff's first season Ajax finished 13th in the Eridivisie, the Dutch premier league, one position above relegation. The following season Rinus Michel joined Ajax as manager and brought total football with him.

Cruyff’s extraordinary skills and Michel’s totaalvoetbal meshed completely. Whether it was the system or the quality of the players Michels selected to fit the system, or most likely both, Ajax quickly became the dominant team in Europe. In 1965-66 Ajax won its league championship. The next year Ajax won the league title and the KNVB Cup (Dutch equivalent of English FA Cup). Then it was off to the races, with Ajax winning among other titles the UEFA Champions League in 1971, 1972, and 1973.

[As tactical innovations goes, the success of total football is reminiscent of the introduction of the T formation offense by George Halas in the late 1930s, leading to the Chicago Bears 73-0 destruction of the Washington Redskins in the NFL Championshp of 1940.]

With Ajax’s success it wasn’t long before Michels, Cruyff, and totaalvoetbal migrated to the Dutch national team. In 1974 Cruyff and company reached the World Cup finals without losing a match, scoring 14 goals against one conceded. Playing home team Germany in the finals the Dutch took the lead 80 seconds into the match, kicking off and passing the ball thirteen times before Cruyff carried the ball into the box and was fouled.  The Dutch scored on the subsequent PK.

As serious soccer fans know (this is a test) the Germans prevailed 2-1 in this World Cup final and the Dutch are still looking for redemption. Reading accounts of this match, I cannot help think it was the high-water mark of Dutch totaalvoetbal.

While creation and exploitation of space was the focus of totaalvoetbal, the game as played by the Dutch was a thing of soccer beauty.  The team displayed fluid player movement, precision passing, and fearless attacking—in short, everything that defines the beautiful game. The Dutch team earned the nickname Clockwork Orange. What is ironic is that totaalvoetbal wasn’t created to be beautiful; it was created to be effective (are you listening Brazil?).

Andres Iniesta (in Barcelona Uniform) at 147 lbs 5' 7"
the World Cup 2010 Finals Man of the Match and
 Quintessential Player of the Beautiful Game

Both Michels and Cruff eventually moved to FC Barcelona, Cruyff as a player and, later, a highly successful manager. Here they planted the totaalvoetbal seed, where it found fertile soil, and spread to the Spanish national team. The Spanish team that defeated the Dutch 1-0 in the World Cup 2010 can trace its playing roots directly to the Dutch team of 1974.

So in wonderful World Cupian irony, the beautiful game that the Brazilian Dunga eschewed wins the World Cup; and the Dutch team of 1974 is redeemed by the Spanish team of 2010.

Long live the beautiful game.

My Joga Bonita World Cup--Part I

The big story during World Cup 2010, besides the competency of the officiating and the French team tantrum, was whether or not the winning teams properly represented the beautiful game, or in Brazilianese joga bonito.

Ronaldinho in a Nike Ad

The phrase itself is suspicious. It sounds like something Madison Avenue cooked up to sell the sport to hausfraus around the globe. I mean… might you not reasonably conclude that only beautiful people play the beautiful game? Anyway isn’t it a bit presumptuous for soccer to proclaim itself the beautiful game? What are the rest of the world’s sports? Presumably lower on the athletic aesthetic scale. Is bowling then the ugly game?

Seminal Moment in Evolution of Bowling as a Sport

Not surprisingly the phrase appears to have emanated from Brazil in the 50s, where soccer is a quasi-religion. Brazilians celebrate the idea that the game, well played, is an expression of their culture, and as such, must be won with style and flair—skill and inventiveness winning out over defensive caution and rude physicality. A Brazilian sees soccer as much art as sport.

A joga bonita moment occurred in the Brazil vs Ivory Coast match. Luis Fabiano took the ball out of the air with apparent guidance from his forearm, nudged it forward with his right foot, ran through defenders, flicked the ball into the air with his right foot, collected it with his chest and maybe an assist from his shoulder, and finally volleyed the ball with his left foot into back of net. It is an astonishing sequence displaying superb foot skills and athleticism. Was Fabiano in the least abashed that his brilliant score was likely abetted by two handballs? In response to this query, he said,

"But in order to make the goal more beautiful, there had to be a doubtful element. It was a spectacular goal and I believe it was not a voluntary handball. It was a legitimate goal and it was one of the most beautiful goals that I've scored in my career. Where better to score such a goal than at the World Cup?"

Ahhh...to be young and Brazilian.

Notwithstanding Fabiano’s "beautiful" goal, the word on the street is that the Brazilian team disappointed its nation. It wasn’t simply that the Brazilian team lost to the Dutch in the quarter-finals but that the team didn’t consistently display artistry and creativity. In short, it didn’t play beautifully.

Apparently this was in large part a reflection of its coach, Dunga, a former defensive-minded midfielder, who brought a no-nonsense, pragmatic style of play to the Brazilian side. He favored unusually robust players—his squad averaging a shade under six feet tall, one of the largest teams at the World Cup. Not that his players didn’t have skills…just watch Robinho, Kaka´, and the aforementioned Fabiano work magic with the ball at their feet. Still, the consensus is that Dunga would rather have a clean sheet than a beautiful game, and when, ultimately, he didn’t deliver either in the quarter-finals, he was handed his walking papers.

[Dunga responded to his critics that they are guilty of collective selective memory, i.e,, that they overrate the  artistry of past Brazilian teams.  The key thing was Brazil won World Cup titles.]

Circling back to my starting point…it seems FIFA, or perhaps Nike, would like to co-opt the beautiful game as a marketing slogan to promote the sport around the world. Among the soccer cognoscenti, however, the phrase has a much more selective meaning and most soccer teams don’t measure up—apparently the beauty of the beautiful game is very much in the eyes of the beholder. In any case the Brazilian game--beautiful or not--didn't make it to the World Cup finals, whereas the decidedly unartistic Dutch game did.

C'mon Ref!

Alright…Let’s pile on: the World Cup referees deserve it.


As a newly-minted soccer ref myself—OK I haven’t actually ref’d a game, but I own the uniform—I feel well-qualified to speak on this subject. Given the status of the World Cup, and all the hoops the refs jump through to qualify for it, I expected better. The invisible foul that nullified Maurice Edu’s goal in USA v Slovenia, Tevez’s offside goal in Argentina v Mexico, and Frank Lampard’s obvious goal (except to the ref) in England v Germany stand out among the officiating screw-ups. Oh… let’s not forget Luis Fabiano’s double handball goal against Ivory Coast, unquestionably the most technically skillful and sublime non-goal of the tournament.

I watch my share of professional soccer. I can’t recall officiating errors as egregious and numerous in a similar period of European league play. This makes me think that World Cup refs as a group may have the credentials but not the requisite “big game” experience. Kouman Coulibaly, the ref who negated Edu’s goal, is a Malian bank auditor by day. With all due respect to Mali and other small nations of the world, is Mali’s professional soccer league, where Coulibaly earned his referee stripes, the logical proving ground for a World Cup ref?

If TV’s talking heads are correct, part of the officiating problem lies with FIFA’s boss, Sepp Blatter, who has, to date, resisted the use of either extra refs or goal-line technology. Apparently Blatter believes such changes would upset the natural purity and flow of the game and otherwise cause a great disturbance in the Force. He also thinks some controversy is “good” for the game. Given his recent statements Blatter may be relaxing his stance on this subject. I guess he’s taking a lot of heat.

Much is made of the low scoring nature of professional soccer. While I’m not one who thinks low scoring equals boring, I assert that a low scoring sport elevates the importance of officiating. A bad call in football (American) may result in a touchdown, but unless it occurs in the final minutes of the game, it's unlikely to change the way either team plays the game. In soccer, however, going down a goal often forces the losing team to adopt a more attacking style, which conversely makes it more likely to be scored upon.

Personally I’m willing to sacrifice a little natural purity and flow in a big stakes match if it means the right team wins.

Beginnings

OK…let’s begin.

Regarding the game of association football, aka soccer, I have rarely played it and never owned a pair of cleats.

My first encounter with the sport coincided with my matriculation at Shady Side Academy, a toney Pittsburgh-area prep school. The year was 1967. I was a 7th grader. Many of my new Shady Side friends played on the middle school soccer team.

At the time soccer was largely the domain of private schools in the USA. How and why it evolved this way I don’t know. Throughout most of the world soccer is a game of the masses. In the USA it is a game of the microbrewery-drinking class.

Jurgen Klinsmann, former German player, World Cup coach, and sometime US resident (he’s married to an American) observed after the US loss to Ghana in World Cup play that this aspect of our soccer culture undermines the quality of our player pool, i.e., we need more hungry players from the barrios. In the same vein a July 10th Wall Street Journal article observed that South Africa's finest professional soccer players emerged during the apartheid years, suggesting that the combination of racial oppression and poverty produced über-driven players who perfected their skills as a “way out,” and whose like hasn’t been seen in the post-apartheid era.

 [The same article also notes a curious irony: South African soccer in the apartheid 70s was much more integrated than today, as South African soccer today is largely a black game whereas rugby and cricket are white games.  Maybe there's another lesson buried here.]

I encountered soccer again in 1972 when I started college at Brown University. At the time Brown was a soccer powerhouse, which, again, speaks to the upper-crust character of the sport in the US. As an Ivy League school, Brown did not offer athletic scholarships. Its players came from New England prep schools, the St. Louis area—a soccer hotbed at the time—and various soccer crazy countries around the world. I remember seeing Brown’s best player, a product of Europe, score on a bending corner kick against Cornell. At the time I didn’t know such ball skills existed.

USS Charleston (LKA-113)

During a deployment to the North Atlantic in 1979, my ship, the USS Charleston, made a port visit to Emden, Germany. German officers from the local army base invited the ship’s officers to a) fire automatic weapons, b) play soccer, and c) drink alcohol. Of these three important life skills Navy officers generally only demonstrate competence in drinking. Fortunately the ship’s company included a contingent of Marines whose officers helped preserve our national honor.

As for the (West) Germany v USA soccer match...I started at left back in a pair of running shoes. At the time I was an avid 10K runner and my relatively high level of fitness was the only positive attribute I brought to the match. As it began I prepared my ass to get kicked. It didn’t happen. The Marines had played college soccer and their collective skill was sufficient to put the Germans on the defensive. The anticipated whupping became a sporting competition. I forget the final score. Eventually the German team prevailed, but both teams came away feeling pretty good about themselves. The drinking afterwards was unusually collegial—and so, I concluded, soccer helps bring nations together.

Eventually I had children of my own. Like most suburban kids of the last generation they joined youth soccer teams and I joined the fellowship of soccer parents yelling from the sideline. By the time my third child started his soccer journey I began to feel I had achieved some understanding of the game.

Recently I completed the referee course. I haven’t ref’d a game yet, however, having watched a number of the World Cup matches, it doesn’t appear the job requires much skill.

Given this set of soccer-related experiences I think it is appropriate that I start writing about the game.