The Meaning of All Those Goal Fests

Crushing scores have become strangely ubiquitous in top-tier soccer lately. Manchester United, which last year embarrassed Roma in the Champions League with such a score, this year got a taste of the same horrible medicine at the hands of Liverpool, which also dispensed it to Real Madrid – then nearly succumbed to the same treatment against Chelsea. Bayern Munchen gave my favorite Portuguese team, Sporting, the drubbings of its life in both legs of their recent Champions League encounter – only to suffer much the same fate at the hands of Barcelona. Porto was humiliated against Arsenal, only to come back and outplay Arsenal’s proven better, Manchester United. To fans of the winning team, of course, such inflated scores are the stuff of fantasy. Yet these are indeed inflated scores, more fantastic than real. They make the losing team look like utter crap, forever vanquished, and the winners like invincible supermen who will rule forever. If soccer were truly war, would not such routs mean the absolute conquest of a nation, even annihilation of a race? In fact, though, Roma is neither crap nor vanquished, nor is Sporting Lisbon in danger of vanishing or even of just ceasing to be a top European team. And that Bayern and Manchester United and Liverpool are not the godly teams that their goal fests would make them out to be was recently demonstrated by the humbling results they obtained against Barcelona, Porto and Chelsea, respectively. Scoring routs, then, may be spectacles especially pleasing to fair-weather fans mainly interested in seeing their team win, by the more crushing a margin the better. But the game’s true aficionados know such scores between well-matched teams are fairly meaningless, no more than aberrations that do not truly reflect the history, character, quality or future performance of either team and arise only in weirdly dysfunctional matches in which one team acts as if it had somehow been crippled by a sucker punch. After all, even in war, easy routs are not to be trusted, usually meaning far less than they at first appear to: consider what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Value of True Reporting in Sports

In the Manchester Guardian, Duncan Castles offers an example of something that is in short supply in sportswriting – true, post-mortem reporting at the level of individual games. How was Germany, until then lacklustre, able to pull its act together, move into high gear and viciously upset talent-laden Portugal at Euro 2008? One suspected that something unexpected and mysterious, a sinister coup of sorts, had occurred. But the usual commentators and supposed pundits were in no way enlightening about it, as they usually are not, with all their opinion-mongering and makeshift pseudo-expertise. With Castles, true reporting comes to our rescue: He goes behind the scenes and gets the scoop from coup leader Michael Ballack, who speaks about his private meeting with other players, his protracted strategy session with the Joachim Low, the secret rehearsal the day before the game. (No doubt Ballack is going to be one great manager when he retires from play.) Now I would like to hear the Portuguese side of the story. Why did they fail to anticipate German preparedness? Why did Scolari not have any tricks up his sleeve? Or even a thinking leader on the field, good not only with his feet but on his feet? Why would he even go so far as to announce that he did not, and to let the Germans know whom he would be fielding and in what formation? Why was Portugal not better prepared to defend the deadly deadball plays and to counter Schweinsteinger’s threat, which was old news to Scolari? Why was he rather too sportingly embracing Ballack (whom he had repeatedly praised before the game) after this shock defeat of the Portuguese team? And what of Russia’s snuffing out of Holland’s orange fire? How did treacherous Guus Hiddink engineer that? Reuters had coach Marco van Basten denying his team’s loss had anything to do with his deciding to rest his best players the game before (something which, notably, Scolari also did, for the game against Switzerland.) But van Basten was not asked to advance his own theory of what occurred. Yet these are upheavals of historical significance to the sport, so they ought to be thoroughly and intelligently reported. Why have we never found out why, last year, Manchester United played so badly, so strangely heavy-legged, against A. C. Milan in their second game in the Champions League? These are the stories most worth reporting in the football pages, stories that can serve to illuminate the workings of the sport. Yet, because they are also stories that require actual leg work, they mostly go unwritten, their absence camouflaged from readers by the proliferation of the cheap, thumbsuck blather of columnists and bloggers who know little more than the average TV-watching fan.