A Football Report

By Eric Beard

“Pelé doesn’t know sh*t.”

That was Sid Lowe’s response to James Richardson’s teasing statement on The Guardian’s Football Weekly Podcast. Richardson, of course, was referencing Pelé’s opinion that Neymar is better than Lionel Messi. With Pelé getting up there in age, Sid might be on to something. But that’s neither here nor there. The fact is that Neymar couldn’t do sh*t to stop Barcelona from winning the Club World Cup.

Player comparisons are far too often full of intangibles that draw upon the weak base of power that language possesses. Language is expected to casually unveil a dramatic truth when poetically expressed. However, according to Pep Guardiola, “there are no adjectives” to describe Messi. Language is sh*t next to Messi.Words are sh*t, next to a 24-year-old from Rosario. He is “extraordinary” in dozens of matches every year, and yet his brilliance is invariably unique from one match to another. But if you describe dribbling nine players and chipping the keeper with the same superlative as a hat-trick at the Bernabeu, you need not fear the wrath of Señor Guardiola.

Rather, Pep should understand the deficiencies of human linguistics. But this is not about Messi. It’s not about Neymar, either. The question we’re faced with is the power of an individual, even a phenomenon. Before we go any further, let’s recognize that “phenomenon” is a word football fans can comprehend and associate with Neymar and Messi. But let’s also recognize that it’s a word that doesn’t mean sh*t in defining Neymar or Messi. The subjectivity of definition is clouded by the illusion, the false formation of a collective consciousness. If this were the case, if we could adequately identify the essence of brilliance of another through millions of opinions, then we would not be left speechless listening to Messi being described as a “wonderful salmon [rising] out of the stream.”

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By Sam Blakeley, writing from London

To the uninitiated, the ‘number 10’ in football is that archetypal player who links midfield with attack, floating between the two and becoming the playmaker of the side. He must be blessed with vision, composure, awareness, and an incredible range of passing, culminating in an almost extra-sensory ability to control the game and be within and without everything that happens going forward for the team. Historically these players have also been ground-breaking skill players, popularising and even inventing their own incredible pieces of flair, from the ‘Cryuff Turn’ to the ‘Flip-Flap/Elastico’. The ‘number 10’ moniker is due to the fact that this positon was traditionally given the number 10 shirt - in the days when a number would denote the position in which the player would operate.

Notable examples are Zidane, Pele, Ronaldinho, Cryuff, Maradona, Bergkamp, Messi, Cantona…essentially those players who are seen as the best of all time. Very rarely will you find a player from any other position winning the prestigious awards. Fabio Cannavaro (a central defender) made waves in 2006 by winning the Ballon D’or (basically the world player of the year). I would submit that the only reason Zidane didn’t win that year was becase of that headbutt, but nonetheless the point is there: we love the number 10, and we fully appreciate their generous talents.

Many argue that England doesn’t really produce this kind of player, and really this is a lamentable omission. I can’t help but hear the distant cries of ‘Paul Scholes?’, ‘Matt Le Tissier?’, ‘Steven Gerrard?’, ’Paul Gascoigne?’, ‘Wayne Rooney?’. Frankly they were my own cries, distant because I’m currently sat on a mountain (for illustrative purposes). They perhaps do raise a good point however. There isn’t really a big name that springs to mind as easily as the Ronaldinhos and the Zidanes. Maybe this is because we have lumped those five examples (and many others besides) into either a midfielder or an attacker. Somewhere in our English conception of football there must be two central midfielders and two strikers; whoever plays in that general area of the pitch who isn’t a striker must be an attacking midfielder, and those who aren’t midfielders are just a striker who plays a bit deeper but who is still essentially a second striker - more on this later. Whether this is still the case in ten years time, once Rooney has fully established himself as one of the best number 10’s, not to mention best players, of all time is up for debate. Moreover, perhaps the reason we overlook these players is simply that none of them fulfill the real attribute that singles out the number 10 from an attacking midfielder or a second striker: the flair.

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While a few members the AFR team were caught up studying with final exams or sprinting away from uni faster than Aaron Lennon to get home, Oli Sparrow and Eric Beard were keeping things cozy at the AFR quarters to talk the footy. Because Sepp Blatter wouldn’t approve of two guys hanging out alone together, we were lucky enough to have special guest Jeff Livingstone, the editor of the flourishing new site entitled “In Bed With Maradona”, join us from Newcastle. If you haven’t had a look at the site, do so right away. If possible, listen to this podcast while reading about Juve’s travels to the Intercontinental Cup in Tokyo.

Anyway, on this AFR podcast we started things off with our favourite football adverts thanks to the inspiration of a recent spark of brilliance that has Iniesta befriending a bear. We then moved on to talk about Jeff’s hometown club Newcastle while contrasting Chris Hughton’s sacking with Big Sam Allardyce’s at Blackburn Rovers. After that we moved on to the Club World Cup taking place in the United Arab Emirates, chatting about the competition itself, the surprise that has been TP Mazembe, and the pressure on Rafa Benitez. We closed things with a quick dialogue on the upcoming transfer window, which included reasons why Iniesta isn’t leaving Barça, why Tevez’s transfer request didn’t help anything, Shay Given to Arsenal, and even why Newcastle just isn’t a likable enough club despite an interest in Landon Donovan.