you ask, he answers

I.

Yesterday I renewed my British Council Library membership and celebrated by checking out, among other things, the December 2007 edition of FourFourTwo. Football experts will know that this is British football's matey, laddish monthly chronicle. Those with good memories will instantly recall, too, that this particular edition bears an alarming picture of a smiling Arsène Wenger who, the inner pages will reveal, is in fact a (money) plant on the part of Nike and one of their new coaching initiatives.

We can look at Arsène Lupin instead.

I am a big fan of the 'Arsène knows' maxim, mostly because of its powers to offend non-Gooners. I admire Wenger and his teams. I think he is intelligent and eloquent, much like Sir Alex Ferguson and Jose Mourinho are, in their own distinct ways. [I swear that is not a backhanded compliment.] In the absence of patriarchal club owners who run their teams as they would their families or their shady businesses, people like Ferguson and Wenger must necessarily occupy the centre of attention in English football's corporate power structures.

As a cultural outsider who is, to all intents and purposes, an Anglophile, Wenger's perspective is valued to an immoderate degree by his adoring populace, and others besides. His opinions are worthy of attention, even when he is being disingenuous, and he is that very often. I suspect it may have given more than one outraged football fan a moment's pause when, contrary to the reservations of practically every club bigwig who was asked their opinion about the 39th Game issue, Wenger actually claimed he thought it would be a good idea. Flabbergasting, from a man who one would assume to have thought of the physical wear-and-tear, the mathematical integrity of the league, and every other good argument against the proposal long before the rest of us had. Might he have seen something there that we were missing? His reasoning appeared simple to a fault: he said he thought fans in other countries deserved a chance to see their teams in action.

In this interview with FourFourTwo, presumably conducted at least two months before the Scudamore storm broke, Wenger was asked the inevitable question about the un-Englishness of his teams, and he said, wisely, that he would fight against every notion of a quota. Then he was asked, by a reader from Birmingham, about whether he thought football had lost its moral compass. His answer was:

Football has a worldwide responsibility because every big game in the Premier League is watched by 500 to 700 milllion people - sometimes a billion people. Imagine a kid sitting in India or in South Africa watching Wayne Rooney or Fabregas - the kind of influence these people have in the world is highly important. Also, I believe that in our countries that have such a history of war, multi-cultural teams can show a harmonious way to live and achieve things together. Sport has a responsibility on that front. [...]

I'm not certain whether he's lying about this, or about his discomfort with the idea of managing England because he "wouldn't know which anthem to sing" if his team ever played France [an opinion he repeats in this interview]. I get the feeling he is completely sincere about both. He is contemptuous of international football. '...because they destroyed it,' he says. 'Take Russia: once it was one country and now it's 21. Yugoslavia was one and now is six. As a result the level has dropped. Then you add countries like Andorra, Faroe Islands and San Marino and suddenly three games out of four are of no interest.'

Perhaps he believes himself incapable of the collective anti-nationalist meritocracy he seems to envision for the sporting world, but holds out hope for his charges and for all the kiddums in India and South Africa losing every sense of place and time as they watch Rooney and Fabregas being one-size-fits-all idols. He makes a clear distinction between what he perceives as 'big' and 'small' concerns - one presumes it's perfectly alright for coaches of San Marino or Kazakhstan to be of a different nationality, since they're not big enough to be awkward about their nationhood, anyway. There is a practical sense in his making this distinction, as far as the coach issue goes: countries trying to develop their football culture will feel justified in adopting ways and workers from already-established countries in a way that the big guns might not. But this isn't what Wenger is advocating - in spite of fearing his own nationalism, he seems unwilling to tolerate it in others.
There is a certain kind of libertarianism that believes that the breakdown of social controls will allow for new, less unjust ways for entities to relate to each other. I don’t think it applies successfully in sport. Wenger opposes the nationalism that creates divisions in sport, but he does it without considering the other sources of power that divide people. Money, for one. Does falling on the right side of that particular divide allow him to ignore it entirely? Is it, in fact, possible to see the glorious rise of a fandom sans frontiers without seeing how very imbalanced it would be?
I find this so frankly ridiculous a thought, the idea that the EPL going to the ends of the world to play their 39th game is "for the fans," that when Wenger came out and said just that, I did a double-take, and walked myself back through his proclamations, trying to find evidence that he is Ligue 1 counterintelligence of some order. It's an appealing sort of notion, but if it isn't the case, then I'm going to hope that everyone who says 'Arsène Knows' does so with at least a tinge of irony.

II.

Does he know, however, to beat Milan? I believe he does. I believe that Arsène does know enough to take on the entire establishment that is propping up this particular Milan team - laboratories, tactical traditions, at least a century of collective European experience on the pitch, it's absurd to to suggest that there's anything so simple as a one-on-one coach-off at work here - but it appears, more than any other tie in this round so far, to come down to the uncertainties of the night.

Inter, on the other hand (where my face is currently resting, dejected). Are unspeakable.

III.

Following on the last post about Paolo Maldini: the Telegraph did not stop there. Henry Winter, writing the day after the game at the Emirates, said

Paolo Maldini was particularly magnificent, embodying Milan's refusal to yield a centimetre.

Even in the cynical world of modern football, an opponent's brilliance can be respected. Even a man whose job it is to destroy can be saluted. At half-time, Maldini was embraced by Emmanuel Adebayor, the Arsenal striker he was paid to frustrate. At the final whistle, the great Italian defender was applauded from the field by Arsenal's admiring supporters. Maldini responded with a smile of appreciation and a brief wave before disappearing down the tunnel.

Even at 39 [...] Maldini looked like he had just stepped from the catwalk at Milan fashion week.

I'm glad he's getting his adulation from a crowd that generally finds it convenient to hate Italian football, but this is just suspicious. Does no one have anything to say against him?

... I'm a little afraid of the answer to that. Ruud Gullit has a 'My Perfect XI' at the back of the FourFourTwo, and predictably, over a third come from il grande Milan: Rijkaard at central midfield, Baresi at centre-back (Gullit plays a flat back four), Marco 'the man' van Basten in front, and Maldini at left-back. "Position for position one of the greatest players ever," he says about him.

About van Basten he says, "He was also a vicious player. If defenders tried to kick him, he would kick them back. He knew how to look after himself on the pitch." Small comfort for a man whose career was hacked away by the time he was 28? But oddly true to life, even for someone who has only ever known him as a YouTube superhero and the really unpleasant man who manages Holland.

Gullit's pick to play up front along side van Basten? van Basten's new boss, Johann Cruyff. There is a very funny novel in there somewhere. I'm sure of it.

IV.

All this talk of defenders and hair [for we talk not of defenders without talking of their hair] and Ursus' comments have made me want to write about Alessandro Nesta. Count this as prior warning, Martha.

V.

I still need a job. Recently discovered: Mills & Boon have an India branch. Could I write pulp romance? We have been reading a slew of their ghastly novellas of late. Like Baldrick hoping to marry into the aristocracy, I could look into bringing the system down from the inside.

a very long engagement

Tributes in the form of verbal fellatio are already being offered to Paolo Maldini. Yes, again. We can only presume that this is in the wake of his impending ejection from his European hunting grounds -- if Milan live to progress to the quarter-finals of this year's Champions' League no doubt there will be another round of articles, and then another, and then, on the slim chance of his arriving at Moscow, a final glorious barrage of attention.

So what kind of man is this who can dispossess Diego Maradona and force Zinedine Zidane to seek refuge on the other side of the park? Maldini shrugs his shoulders as if to say: "Just doing my job." His acceptance speech after winning World Soccer magazine's player of the year award in 1996 went something like: "What, me? I'm a defender."

Most women would risk their long-term relationships for half an hour with him. He's impossibly good-looking, even by Italian standards; he's captain of the world club champions; a euro-billionaire and a male model. If pushed, he'll host your disco.

Okay, so I'd better get *my* sentimental tribute piece in before it's too late.

The accompanying photograph to the Telegraph piece carries the caption: "Paolo Maldini has won everything in his playing career." I have always found this a very imperfect truth when describing this man among men. My first acquaintance with Paolo Maldini was at France '98 [I have memories of '94, but they are dim, and mostly of Maradona's drug bust and the slumped shoulders of Roberto Baggio] and that, and subsequent re-acquaintances, always ended in almost comic disaster: that penalty shootout, Trezeguet's golden goal, Byron Moreno, 4-0 at the Riazor. Paolo Maldini is the only man in that elite class of legends, peopled by the likes of Maradona and Beckenbauer, who can honestly claim to have lost at least as much, and as dramatically, as he has won. It's one of the reasons I like him unreservedly. He calls to mind the 'If you can face triumph and disaster/and treat those two impostors just the same' line that is one of If's better moments. Perhaps not as deserving of the plaudit as someone like Franco Baresi, since he is and always has been the child of fortune, but deserving enough.

Maradona, in his autobiography, said Maldini was too pretty to be a footballer, which I think says some very interesting things about Maradona. But I, too, have always thought that Paolo is one of the nicest-looking men we are likely to come upon in our lifetimes. Which is why it amused me when the Telegraph article made apparently innocent reference to "that trademark central parting." Fans of the inimitable James Richardson and his quips about Cesare Maldini will know why this is such sweet sorrow. I prefer the windblown curls of his late twenties myself, but the style appears, like the bandieri of Italian football, to be an anachronism.



Going back to pretending that football doesn't exist for the next little while now. It's been an unpleasant couple of weeks, even by Milan's low standards for the season, and I admit that the Milan-Arsenal tie is now giving me a clammy forehead and shaking hands. I have taken to sublimating this with neurotic Inter-baiting.

PS. How exactly does one 'host a disco' in this day and age? Do you rent out the strobe lights or something? The lycra costumes? The shady drugs? Is there money in it? I will need a job in a couple of months.

[Found the picture I was looking for - thanks, Neko.]

the morning after: the tokyo drift

That Grand Slam Sunday was possibly the most awful sustained massacre of football I have yet seen on a single weekend. No doubt it was as much of a lark for most of England as the now bi-annual Chelsea-Liverpool CL fixtures are, with all the passion and glory at stake, but for me it was as dire as your average Juve-Inter game, just without the broken bones and the nice hairstyles.

Admittedly I was spoiled by what my Times of India touted as "'the continental appetiser' to this fantastic weekend!". When I turned the TV off after the CWC final I have to admit it was in mild disapproval of what turned out to be the most pathetic defensive display on a football field in quite a while, but hindsight and the pain of what was to follow force me to admit that I was unduly censorious. It isn't often that I watch a match for which half-time feels like it's come way too soon. No doubt the Boca guys felt the same, since they appeared to send out the zombie equivalents of the men who'd challenged and confronted Milan with such intelligence and guile in the first forty-five.

The second half wasn't particularly hard on the eye, either. The fault is entirely Boca's, of course, for not having learnt what Cagliari and Torino have woken up to and letting Milan have pretty much the run of the midfield, thus not only letting them win, but win in style. No other European team would have done it quite this way. As Milan's exhibition game ['let us show you what we used to do before Italy and the rest of Europe woke up to our gameplan'] this was hilarious. The Seedorf-Kaka-Inzaghi nexus could not have been cooler had they been cryogenically preserved for a couple of those goals. [Yes, that WAS a 'they are so old!' joke.] Credit to Kaka, in spite of his giallo-incurring tee-shirt-exposive-compulsive-disorder: he is gifted with the sort of balance and precision that has been the rarely-attainable Tao of Milan for the last few years. His flair is in his economy and judgment; which is to say, he has precious little flair that hasn't been broken down and honed into a craft that is as mechanical as it is intuitive. Fond as I am of my classic rock analogies, I have to say it. The man is the Paul McCartney of the footballing world.

Boca blew it, I'm afraid. The trophy was never theirs to lose once Inzaghi whipped the first goal in. They're not a defence-minded side, but neither, necessarily, are Manchester United, who came up against a similarly cool and collected Milan at Old Trafford in April this year, and sneaked out as winners. Keeping a high line and pressing forward always wears the rossoneri out, especially in the last half-hour of the game, when they tend to panic. It takes only a moment to break Milan down; apart from the 22nd minute, when they were wandering around singing PIPPO PIPPO PIPPO GOL while Palacio scored, Boca just never took that chance.

A special moment of virulent hatred for the announcers on my telly channel, who persisted in referring to Boca's absent number ten as 'Juan Pablo Riquelme' and insisted, among other things, on this emphasising Europe's superiority over South America. I'm sorry, but no. Milan won over Boca, something they weren't able to do three years ago, and something Liverpool and Barcelona haven't been able to do against their own Brazilian opponents in the years since. And that's all there is to it unless you want to open the debate up beyond an arbitrary point-scoring exercise.

I really do think this victory meant a lot to Milan, for a number of reasons. Their ties with the bureaucratic footballing establishment - be it UEFA or FIFA - have always been close, and they approached this tournament with a seriousness that would no doubt have seemed excessive to teams that don't look beyond where the next TV rights deal is coming from. They are also a team who last won in Tokyo seventeen years ago - which is when Liverpool were still winning league titles - and are, unbelievably, captained by a man who was part of that 1990 side. The standards Milan have set themselves in terms of myth-making, and the sacrifices they've made to ensure its sustenance, will earn them a bit of ridicule in any justly-written history, but their Maldini story is going to stand the test of time.


Sometimes, I worry about these children.

[Obliged to Ruby for the picture.]

urawa reds 0-1 meelahn

The Milan Tragicomedy In Three Acts:

One. In their own box they defend sufficiently well and turf the ball out to midfield as expected [with some nice passing - these guys are good as long as they don't have to cross].

Two. The midfield is all older, more languid, more elegant Arsenal; they stroke the ball around, play it in triangles, take it to lalaland and back in an approximation of gentle lovemaking or whatever inappropriate metaphor you want to use.

Three.

Then, in the attacking third, something happens. It's like they lose all sense of actually being in the game. It's like -- like they go from being Milan's current forward line to the Class Of '07 future top-drawer international coaches. They have the ball, they see a young perky defender approach, and they go all misty-eyed and smiley-faced. "Here, little one," they seem to say, "you can have the ball."

Perky Defender: So -- I just take it from you?
Future Coach: Yes, exactly.
Future Coach: And then you play it out of your box -- that's right, turn around, find your teammate, pass--
Perky Defender: Like this, mister?
Future Coach: No no no, you must pass it along the ground, pass it along the ground, Santa Maria, who will hire you if you play ugly football like that?
Perky Defender: Oi! Pass it further upfield! ... along the ground!
Future Coach: I don't think he heard you. *avuncular grin*
Future Coach: Now bring it back and let's do it again, yeah?
Future Coach: I said bring it back.
Future Coach: Why are you all the way at the other end of the pitch all of a sudden? That's my side's six-yard box.
Future Coach: THAT IS MY SIDE'S SIX-YARD BOX.

We all like to bring our grandmothers up to compare them favourably to a team that's playing with less-than-expected pace or cohesion, but I think 'AC Creepy Uncles' is a bit more appropriate than 'Grandma FC.' Knowing more football than their opponents saved them this time. Let's see what they'll do against Boca. Who look -- young.

[Martha has a proper match report up at the Italy Offside. It is good.]

revolutions and repressions on football sundays

I was going to write about something else, but instead I will link you to Hoops fan Kevin McCarra's assessment of the faded glory of Milan, who play Celtic tonight in the San Siro. As an aggregator of every existing argument attacking the power and prestige of Milan in particular and [inevitably] Italian football as a whole* the piece has few to no equals in recent memory.

What sent me off on the tangent you're about to read, though, was the piece's subtitle:

Despite winning the Champions League twice in four years Milan have still to rival the glamour of Barca and Real Madrid.

Which put me in mind of a conversation I had with brilliant blaugrana blogger and fan Linda on the differences between Barcelona and Milan, two clubs one might find cause to link because of their long and illustrious history of Dutch influence. Just as one mightn't, given their complete opposition to each other's values and systems in the appearance of things.

Each club has its own bête noire/better half in its own league, and to all intents and purposes are rather similar in the essentials of their footballing style, but the difference between two G-14 clubs known for being attacking teams could hardly be greater in the face they present to the world. The gulf between Barca's football and Milan's may hardly be as wide as it is between, say, Barca's and Juventus', but as a comparison between equals [disavowing the columnist McCarra's proposition for the moment] I hardly think you'd find a greater difference: each taken at their best, Barca's lush, spread-out, unpredictable spontaneity and pace contrasts markedly with Milan's engineered, stately, textbook precision. If you want a reductionist argument, look at their figurehead Brazilians: Ronaldinho is pretty much the Jimmy Page to Kaka's John Paul Jones in the flair stakes.

And then there's the image, which is, a sportsman of old once said, everything. Barca, as that other pillar of the Guardian's sport columns Sid Lowe said only yesterday, have never been keener to present themselves to the world as the repository of all things romantically socialist and lefty, "a standard-bearer for liberty and democracy."

Milan, on the other hand, have long since broken with their own working-class, populist past and embraced -- and committed their own crimes of perpetrating -- a neoconservatism that aligns very agreeably with the consolidation of the Berlusconi era. When Milan market themselves, they don't fly the flags of revolution and visit [or not] Nelson Mandela. They dress in Dolce & Gabbana, speak in soft, measured tones of 'history,' and 'respect,' and insistently emphasize their notions of traditions and continuity [two words: Maldini. Dynasty.]. They keep players on their roster until retirement and speak of never showing any of 'their own' the door, even if their treatment of the Inzaghis and the Cafus of the world is more pertinent proof of this than their handling of the Gourcuffs and the Simics.

The grand gesture becomes force of habit. Their response to a grieving Sevilla, whom they played at the European Supercup in the wake of the death of Antonio Puerta, for example, was all grave stateliness. No hand-wringing or hysterics, but no stiff-upper-lip awkwardness or copperplate condolences either: the soundbytes, the flowers, the banners, the jerseys and the gestures all led to one Serie A director [whose name escapes me at the moment - might have been Zampa, though] to remark, a touch dryly, of calcio's need to 'direct' its image as well as Milan handled their response to the tragedy. When the Dida-diving incident at their game in Parkhead came up to embarrass both player and club immensely, Adriano Galliani's answer to questions about Milan taking action against the fan who ran at Dida was, "Of course not, we're European champions, we're representing this continent to the world, we don't want to create a fuss," -- an answer as disingenuous as it was sly, and one that pushed the image that the club has been working to create for the last few years; of Milan as the patricians of Europe, the old lions, the 'family.' Presumptuous, for a club that dared to be the Chelsea of the '80s to Juventus and Inter [who, I assume, must have cribbed as much as today's traditionalist Arsenals and Liverpools do].

Compare this with Barca, their almost exhibitionist lack of organisation and unshakeable contrarianism. Even at their most shamelessly capitalist, Barca will insist on marketing themselves as the heart and soul of their left-wing national ideal. There are some things money can't buy, but Barca's globalised peddling of Catalan pride isn't one of them, as Espanyol will testify. But whether or not it takes away the edge that 'more than a club' would imply in such a case, sometimes, marketing things just doesn't make them any less real. In the money-grubbing, amoral cartel that makes up the G-14, Barca's constant pushing of the symbolic values of freedom, their practically peerless contribution to developing local football with local youth, and their unquestioning shelter of the likes of Oleguer Presas in the same orbit as their galactic, global icons, is a beautiful thing to see, even when it slides into illusion.

I enjoy both. I try hard not to believe either, but I enjoy both.

What? Oh, right. McCarra's opinion piece. Well, yeah. Milan are particularly uninspiring these days, but I don't see a connection with either their dodgy history or their uncertain future to their current form. As for their lacking 'glamour,' uh. Okay?

Two things, though:

Milan have been champions of Serie A just twice in the past 11 seasons.

... and the fact that they lost most of those scudetti to a team that was convicted of fixing those championships doesn't occur to you because...?

and this:

Milan can revert to being an exceedingly fine team and the rout of Manchester United in the spring was magisterial, though the opposition were not at full strength.

Which annoys me whenever it comes up. You can plead any excuse you like to explain why England's most aggressively successful team looked like schoolboys in the San Siro this April, but you don't get to use the injury card against a team that played a fair few of last season's matches with a fully fit bench of eleven.



* - not to question the validity of some.