The less we see, the more we say
Three minutes of highlights in return for 24/7 access to direct messaging feels, at this point, like a stupid exchange. It makes footballers feel less like players, more like online vessels for receiving anger about other things.
Marko Viduka scored 72 goals for Leeds United, but one stays in my mind clearer than the others.
4th May, 2003. A high pass that Dominic Matteo chipped over the grass of Highbury finds Viduka, in all blue, onside or not, just outside Arsenal penalty area. It's the 88th minute. He controls the ball with his chest, backheels it inside, then hits a powerful shot into the far top corner, and the score is 3-2 to Leeds, and Leeds are staying up. Everybody goes wild. The goal is never forgotten.
The record books show that Viduka scored four goals for Leeds in the Champions League, at the pinnacle of club football. I can't really remember them. Not the way I remember this one, anyway. The goal that helped Leeds, who with Viduka had been so close to the Champions League final, stumble to 15th in the Premier League. The goal that, in the end, only postponed relegation for a year.
For a generation of fans this goal was their, 'Have you ever seen a better goal? And have you ever seen one better timed?' moment. Gordon Strachan drove that shot into the Elland Road nets in front of the South Stand at the end of April 1990. Unlike Viduka's goal, it helped Leeds go up, although Leeds needed another week and a header by Lee Chapman in Bournemouth to make sure of that. But like Viduka's goal, it wasn't the highest level, it wasn't what some people would tell you was success. It was only Division Two. But it meant the world to us.
A win is a win, is a win, is a win. One of the equalising pleasures of football as a sport is not only that it can be played by anyone, anywhere, with enough people, two goals and a ball, but that it can make each result as important as you want it to be, whether it's the Champions League final or the local park. Heroism is determined according to need, case by case, game by game. Anyone who sneers at a celebration by saying, 'You'd think they'd won the World Cup', doesn't understand that, in the right circumstances, the game in front of you can be worth a bigger celebration than even that.
But all this requires an understanding of football as a grammar, play as a language. And you might be able to tell from this bend in my thinking that I watched Marcelo Bielsa's first press conference as manager of Uruguay this week. He attracted headlines for repeating a message from his time as Leeds manager: that the people in charge of football, the coaches, journalists and executives, are destroying football, which is a game for the people and the players.
The specific problem he referred to this week is that only presenting people with brief 'three minute' summaries of games creates a disproportionate value on 'highlights' players, while the ninety minute version deteriorates:
Football increasingly has more fans, and increasingly looks less like what allows a fan to fall in love with the game. Because the three-minute summaries are not football, much less. It is as if one lived with his wife only on Saturday nights. If one lives with his wife only on Saturday nights, there is no marriage that [can] fail, right? And if one only sees football in highlights, how will you not like football?
...
...there are fewer and fewer players worth seeing. And why are there fewer and fewer players worth seeing? How do we know this? By the exorbitant values that are paid for those who play well.
If you reduce a marriage to three minutes every Saturday night, that marriage will be 'successful', because all the difficulties of a real all-day every-day marriage don't apply. And if all you see of football are the highlights package, of course you will like football, because you will only see the best players scoring the best goals.