England played football last night, but hardly anybody watched them. What might those not watching have made of the score?
Say what you like about international friendlies, but at least nobody really has to watch them. England only half-filled Wembley last night, and while 40,000 is an excellent attendance by the standards of any other football nation, it's quite the downturn for the English, usually a population desperate to hand over sizeable lumps of cash for minimal lumps of entertainment. Television ratings were also poor -- this, after all, the most irritatingly-timed of international breaks, and nobody's really forgiven them for the World Cup yet.
However, England is now a post-Likely Lads world (whatever happened to them?) and the ubiquity of smartphones mean that whatever one's best efforts to avoid the game, one cannot help but see the score. So at about ten o'clock last night, English faces peered at English screens, and were presented with the following:
England 1-0 Norway (Rooney 68' pen)
A scoreline in isolation is a potent thing; it sparks the imagination. It's an extremely short, but sometimes extremely powerful story. Glance at "Everton 3-6 Chelsea", for example, even without being told the identities of the goalscorers, and you basically know what's happened. Somebody's scored early to blow the game open; both defences have fallen to pieces; everything's got a bit silly; Chelsea, ultimately, have handily overpowered Everton; Diego Costa's almost certainly nicked a couple. Job done. And you don't even need to watch it (though obviously you should, because three-six).
Others are more mysterious. "Germany 0-2 Italy (Grosso 119', Del Piero 120')" could be a truly appalling game of football. Two hours of cynical Italian spoiling -- stereotypes thrive in reductive guesswork -- followed by an outrageous mugging at the end. A goal from a set piece, then another on the break. Nothing about the scoreline particularly suggests that the game was one of the great modern international matches, an open and joyful affair, two hours of punch and counter-punch that provoked ITV's commentator, Clive Tyldesley, to praise both teams for their "generosity of spirit". But it was a goal from a set piece and another on the break, so award yourself half a point.
So what to make of "England 1-0 Norway (Rooney 68' pen)"? SB Nation Soccer think that hyperbole is the worst thing in the world, yet after careful and level-headed consideration, we have concluded that this scoreline, to somebody who has not seen the game, is the bleakest, least encouraging, most off-putting scoreline imaginable.
It has absolutely nothing going for it. One-nil to Norway? Excellent. Mighty England knocked over in their own back yard by a plucky (though, admittedly, not particularly good) team led by Alex Tettey. That at least could be funny. Two-nil, three-nil, two-one to England? Well, that's the expected result, but at least there were a couple of goals.
Even a nil-nil would be preferable. Not only would it be an unexpected result -- England are probably supposed to beat Norway at Wembley -- but it would also likely be an amusingly terrible game. Time and again, England fail to break down the stubborn Norwegian defence; time and again, hands meet hips; time and again, the wrong pass sails over the wrong head. Watching England play badly and fail to get any reward has become its own pleasure; a one-nil, though, that's exactly the minimum expected and nothing more. Remember England 0-0 Algeria from 2010? The only way that could have been worse is if England had nicked one near the end, and so taken the edge off the whole embarrassing spectacle.
Then there's the goal. Rooney 68' pen. Neatly timed to ensure first of all that everybody's already bored, and secondly that the last 20 minutes aren't going to be any more exciting. There are goals that set up grandstand finish; this is precisely the opposite. A goal that knocks down a small chair. And a penalty, of course, because the notion that England might have put together a slick passing move to unstitch the Norwegian defence is not an option that should be given the imagination. (That said, Rooney doesn't score exciting goals any more, so perhaps the point is moot.) When you look at a scoreline and the most positive thought that springs to mind is "oh, I hope that was an enjoyable foul" then you know a football match is truly bleak.
It had to be Rooney, incidentally, a player that with every passing game seems less a footballer, more a one-handed meditation on the poisonous power of reputation and human optimism. The pace has gone, the touch is going, the famous growling commitment seems to get more and petulant with each passing flap of the arms and carp at the ref. Yet he's been anointed as captain of both club and country in the last few months, perhaps in the hope is that if everybody pretends that Wayne Rooney is the footballer that he should/could/might have been, then -- shazam! -- that player might appear. Instead, England's officially-indispensable man looks like, well, a good player, with intermittent moments of excellence and increasingly frequent spells of relative uselessness. A man who has become, like beer, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
This isn't an assessment made in pure isolation, of course. This is one inferred from the knowledge of where England are, of their manager and his stylings and what that does to the players, and whether the players are any good, and Rooney's journey from "oh, Rooney!" through "er, Rooney?" to "oh, Rooney ...". Educated guesswork, all down the line. And here's the final guess: this was a rubbish game, that was robbed even of being an indulgently, grandiosely rubbish game by a rubbish goal scored at exactly the worst time by a player who doesn't even particularly seem to enjoy his own company these days.
Now, in the interests of science, we're going to watch it.
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from SBNation.com - All Posts http://ift.tt/1pMSiIG
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