Brazil 3 Croatia 1: Reaction

Hello,

One of the frequently unnoticed elements of the ‘football experience’ is the way in which it is an entirely ritualised experience; and, like most other ritualised experiences, many of its customs exist for no particularly good reason. Two of these customs that should have attention drawn to them are the tradition of the instant replay, and the tradition of pre-match and post-match reaction. I imagine that in its infancy the instant replay was a good idea, a means of briefly recapitulating something that might have been missed while one relieved themselves or picked up the phone. No more can this be said: the instant replay has long been a gratuitous time-filler, and such was evinced wonderfully succinctly today, when, in an attempt to fill a break in play – God forbid one should have a break from consuming relentless action during play – ITV decided to flash a goal-line-technology replay of Marcelo’s own goal (if anybody is using this blog as a means of learning the match’s narrative, Marcelo gave Croatia an early, surprising lead with an own goal before Neymar scored twice at the right end, before Oscar ended the game late on) up on our screens, just to assure us that the ball had crossed the line; to demonstrate the wonderful efficacy of goal-line technology. The superfluity of this was obvious to all who saw it, and, in any case, the basic mechanism of a goal-adjudication system could not escape even the most casual of armchair viewers. It was a slightly surreal moment; farcical in its superfluity. Yet football fills its breaks and lulls with these pointless intermissions, almost as though the viewer needs to be constantly reassured that something ‘actually did happen’. O’Brien, in the depths of the Ministry of Love, tells Winston that history exists only in people’s memories and records; the ritual of the gratuitous instant replay – with its novel update to include the gratuitous goal-confirmation ritual – is a strange real-life manifestation of the compulsive need to be perpetually reassured that if one forgets something, the wonders of video will ensure that they can trust in an outside source to do their remembering for them. Were it not so disconcerting that ITV, like most of our sports channels, feel mandated to ‘controversialise the certain’ by implying that there was a lack of surety about such an uncontroversial goal, it would have been (and was, briefly) incredibly amusing.

I now move onto the second part of this discussion of football’s odd rituals, which is punditry. I launch into diatribe against pundits so frequently I am sure that those who know me in person or who have followed this blog for its entire duration will be rather tired of me doing so – and yet I feel that, on a deeper level (deeper in the sense of going beyond talking about Michael Owen’s tediousness), such a thing needs to be done. For I will go so far as to say that the role of the pundit is utterly (this is, the reader will now be aware, the buzzword of this post) superfluous. It is unnecessary, and insult to the viewer’s intelligence and maturity. They are mind-numbing, cliche-spouting, occasionally foolish distractions who not only fail to fulfill a gap of necessity in the act of watching a game; they are actively pernicious to the experience. To illustrate further: before the game, Adrian Chiles and his Brotherhood of Banality went through the typical motions: talking about how excited the fans were (ironically, and with breathtaking myopia, seconds after a Brazilian fan had gone so far as to say that she would prefer her nation to fail so as not to distract from the wider socioeconomic issues surrounding the tournament), discussing whether Neymar could live up to his billing, discussing formations, and all of the other tripe. Among this tedium were insightful gems such as : ‘They’ll want to win’, ‘They want to scare the opposition’, and ‘Time will tell whether it’s right or wrong.’ These quotations do not gain greater perceptiveness or sagacity with context. They are time-fillers, redundant nonsense that do nothing to enhance the viewing experience. Had football reached a stage in its evolution at which it could become somewhat ironically self-aware in this respect (I concede that in others it has managed to do so), there would be something amusing, although equally pointless, about this charade. As it is, Chiles, Neville – to call him the best of the punditry group is rather like suggesting that ‘The Da Vinci Code’ is the best Dan Brown novel – repeat this week in, week out, without a hint of irony, without anybody bothering to suggest that they are utterly unnecessary.

This may thus far read like the diatribe of somebody who just wants to fill a blog post with words, or who just wishes that pundits were a little more ‘intellectual’ in their discussions. This is actually not the case. I feel that these points are worth making because they have a wider significance that affects, for numerous people worldwide, their daily lives. Cliches are one thing – a little irksome, perhaps, but one can always mute the screen for fifteen minutes or so – but the tendency of pundits to controversialise the uncontroversial rankles me far more. A wonderful example of this was provided by the Neymar penalty incident, in which the referee clearly made a dreadfully bad decision, showing a wonderfully charitable bent in pointing to the spot after Neymar swivelled and fell over. The commentator didn’t say, as any reasonably well-sighted and aware viewer at home might have done, that the referee was wrong, and that it just wasn’t a penalty. Rather, he felt the need to suggest that the penalty was ‘somewhat charitable’; that Brazil ‘might have been a bit lucky’; that there ‘wasn’t much contact’. At no point was the statement made that a wrong decision had been made.

And here punditry is genuinely insidious, and I shall try to illustrate why in as succinct a form as possible. Within any plausible interpretation of the Laws of the Game, it was not a penalty kick. Therefore, the pundit wishing to show ingenuousness would say so. Yet this is inimical to the way in which punditry works. These small lexical insertions – ‘ might’, ‘a bit’, ‘somewhat’, ‘much’ – completely alter the semantic import of a sentence, and introduce the notion of possibility or dubiety where none exists in reality. They are therefore a means of trying to con the viewer or listener. To say unequivocally that the wrong is wrong is to bestow closure upon an incident; to fail to do so is to remove this closure, and to create an intellectual gap where none exists that allows for further discussion. And this, in turn, serves to validate the pundit’s job; to give him something to discuss when really there is nothing to discuss. It serves to justify Alan Hansen and Alan Shearer on Match of the Day; to justify instant replays ad infinitum; to suggest that the fan at home cannot make up their own mind without a pundit telling them what to think. And, in one respect, I do not want pundits to attempt to intellectualise football because football is not an intellectual game. It is a sport. It does not require a power-dynamic of the kind that is created by the pundit, where one ostensibly knowledgeable figure bestows wisdom upon the viewer. My other objection is that it allows the football-saturation to which any lover of the game is privy: the constant highlights programs, and, more than anything, the notion that it is not enough to simply switch on when the players enter the pitch, and switch off once the game has ended. It allows the game’s trivialities to take up far too much time, and prevents people from accepting that, in Aristotelian phrase, an ‘action has been completed’, and that closure can be achieved. Yet this is not an attempt to suggest that nobody should bother discussing football, and that people should just shut up and find something else to talk about. It is merely a suggestion that those truly interesting aspects of the game do not come from the topics for discussion that post-match-reaction typically supplies: matches are just generally not that controversial. Contrary to what this post (and numerous other whinging ones) suggest, I do actually like football. At its best – Aguero 2012, Beckham 2002, Barcelona 5 Madrid 0 – it provides superb narratives, wonderful twists of fate, burlesques of tragedy and comedy. But this enjoyment is not contingent on, or enhanced by, constant focus, on constant debate. There is merit in doing, as I did today, watching a game, appreciating the entertainment provided, and just moving on. In some cases there is, of course, room for debate. The ‘Laws’ of the Game imply room for interpretation, not an attempt to construct certitude. And in cases where there is room for debate – Nani’s red card against Real Madrid in the 2013/2014 CL quarter-final, for example – it is because the incident falls into an epistemological ‘gap’ in which no certitude can be reached. In such cases a pundit is no more qualified to enlighten the viewer than the over-beered shouter next to one in a pub is.

As such, I don’t feel the need to discuss much of what happened today, because there is little to say about this World Cup opener. It is of course true that Brazil will need to improve in order to beat better sides. It is perhaps worth noting that their attacking play lacked cohesion, but that Willian was not necessarily a better option than Hulk given the way in which Croatia might have been presaged to line up, given that he is a player that thrives on swathes of open space. Credit should be given to Croatia – and Modric and Rakitic – for some excellent attacking play: the crossing from both sides was of an unusually high-quality today. Brazil will no doubt suffer against some good sides for their full-backs, who are excellent going forward but often tentative or exhibit poor positional sense defensively, as was evinced by Alves being outjumped by Olic early on, and Marcelo’s poor body shape being partly culpable for Croatia’s opener. Neymar scored one good goal, and looked potent, as did Oscar. The penalty was not a penalty. Croatia had a goal unfairly disallowed for a negligible push on Julio Cesar at 2-1 which – as our dear pundits would be delighted to tell us – would have changed the game. (The notion that the viewer needs to be told that a goal would change a game, I believe, confirms the basic soundness of what is said above). The game was entertaining and a sight more watchable than the 2010 opener; I express my hope that the tournament sees the continuation of positive football from most sides. And that is, essentially, all of interest, I believe. Reacting to football is not an art: ‘I am no pundit, nor was meant to be’.

Regards,

Jack

On Football Fans

Hello,

My day on Sunday was spent up in London watching the Marathon, which took up rather more of my day than expected, so I was unable to watch and hence comment on either the Liverpool – Manchester City game and/or the Swansea – Chelsea game. But an argument viewed on a football forum I frequent fairly frequently served as the basis for a different piece than expected, but one I feel passionately about, and one that I feel requires discussion, because it involves a breakdown of the prejudices and preconceptions that go into following the world’s preponderant sport.

This discussion is on football fans, the behaviours they routinely exhibit, and the way in which these behaviours are both pernicious and arbitrary. It aims to demonstrate that the criteria put forward by those in the ascendancy in football’s hierarchy – commentators, older fans, pundits – are not only arbitrary but genuinely meaningless. It also aims to demonstrate that these criteria result are not harmless, but result in worrying behaviours and mindsets that do nothing for the game and its supporters, and do nothing to bring the sport forward from the monotonous quagmire in which it is currently entrenched. These ideas are, like many of my posts, in their nascent state, and therefore may lack the development desired, but I reiterate my belief that they are cogent and worth stating.

My initial reaction of frustration arose from one of the tedious but recurrent discussions that so often arise between fans of football’s foremost clubs – Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, et al. According to reports on the aforementioned football forum, some of Chelsea’s fans were guilty of failing to observe the minute’s silence prior to the game in respect of the deceased at Hillsborough. This is entirely unacceptable on the part of the fans involved, and it is certainly, and lamentably, the case that Chelsea’s fans have been recurrently guilty of failing to do so, a fact which redounds entirely against the credit of the fans involved. It betrays a lack of social awareness, respect for the bereaved, and general decency in the face of tragedy. To state that this behaviour is both repugnant and unacceptable is both expected and fine. Where this becomes problematic, is when the behaviours involved become the grounds for hurling pejorative terms at an entire group of fans comprising millions of people.

Among the comments exchanged in the ‘discussion’ of this behaviour were (I paraphrase) ‘This is why I hate Chelsea fans. All scum’ or ‘typical classless behaviour from typical classless Chelsea fans’. These are, I confess, loose paraphrases, but the capture the general feeling among fans of rival clubs – Arsenal, Liverpool, etc – that the failing to observe a minute’s silence is indicative of the ethical failings of an entire group of people. In response to this, Chelsea fans cited various instances of immorality on the part of the players and fans of rival clubs: Manchester City being owned by Thaksin Shinawatra; Steven Gerrard being guilty of assault; Liverpool fans (in a tiny minority) throwing bricks at a Manchester City coach after Sunday’s game, or calling a female fan ‘a slut’. These instances were used as grounds for throwing equally pejorative terms at Liverpool fans: ‘Scouse scum’, ‘lowlifes’, ‘scum’, and other typically unimaginative terms. 

To critique these behaviours is both expected and important. To recognise that such actions forego all criteria for what the average decent human desires from their fellow humans is crucial for the maintenance of ethical behaviour; by distancing oneself from, and othering bricking coaches, verbal and physical assault, and vindicating amoral businessmen whose sole concern is the ruthless accumulation of capital, humanity stands a chance of retaining its ethical foundations. Where it becomes ridiculous and worthy of critique is the moment at which the actions of the few are used as the means for anathematising the many, most of whom condemn such actions. It becomes worthy of critique because a) it advocates the reductionist view that a disparate and multifaceted group of people can be categorised by the actions of a few, and b) it plays into the hands of those who suggest that there is something inherently admirable about supporting a particular team, which in turn plays into the troubling partisanship and other delusions that pervade football discourse today. To claim that these standpoints have wider implications beyond football is, I believe, no controversial statement.

For one of the chief delusions inhered in a statement such as ‘This is why I don’t like Chelsea/*insert name of any club’s* fans’ is that there is something either admirable or, rather, something that one can condemn, about supporting a football team. This arises as a result of the preposterous but indoctrinated notion that it is possible to be a ‘good’ fan; that there can exist any disparity between one fan and another in terms of quality; that the criteria set out to acquire this ‘quality’ are not arbitrary or false, but have any sort of value or sense behind them. Let me expand upon this further. It is promoted, from a young age, that it is possible to be a good or bad football fan. To do so requires the performance of certain behaviours – behaviours that, interestingly but not irrelevantly, indicate football’s attempt to act as a surrogate for religion (see Terry Eagleton’s oeuvre for further elaboration on this topic): the ability to be unwaveringly loyal; the ability to shout, both individually and as a group, more loudly than another person or group of people; the ability to hold intransigent opinions purely based on affinity to a certain entity; the ability to deal with all sorts of trouble. The last is particularly comical in its arbitrariness: it is impossible to be a ‘good’ Manchester United fan below the age of twenty-five or thirty, for example. No club challenging for the title undergoes the sort of hardship that is required to be classed a ‘good’ fan. To be one requires the experience of administration, at least once or twice, preferably combined with a ground share, at least two relegations, the perpetual failure to regain former glories in the play-offs, and the year-by-year loss of one’s team’s best players.

When stated thus, the criteria set out for ‘being a good fan’ (and, by implication, the converse: being a ‘bad fan’ or ‘having crap fans’) seem not only arbitrary, but also amount to nothing more than infantile and primitive phallus-waving. They rely on the obliteration – especially in the context of a stadium – of coherent thought process, and the preponderance of instinct and social pressure over cogency. Like most ideologies, they are concretised through subtle rather than strident, explictily authoritarian means. They are concretised every time a commentator venerates, in reverential tones, ‘how great the fans were today’, following this up with a praise of their noise, ability to bear tension, and hassling of opposition players. (It is, incidentally, notable that this general praise of heckling provides the basis and justification for any sort of abuse or diatribe within the confines of a match). They are concretised every time a group of fans are referred to as a ‘twelfth man’. Finally, and worst of all, they are concretised every time a commentator or pundit claims that a club has the ‘best fans in the league’, or makes a pointed comment about the atmosphere, or lack thereof, at a football match.

I posit that not only are these criterion arbitrary, they are also meaningless. I ask all readers what it might actually look like even if these criteria were to be accepted. What would be the value, as a composite whole, of being a ‘better’ fan or part of a ‘better set of fans’ that other people? What would be the result of this? Would it make one a better, more intelligent, more compassionate, ethically superior human being? Failure to come up with a sensible answer to this question should answer conclusively the question of whether this preposterous construct has any sense behind it whatsoever.

I also posit that it is only because these criteria are indeed indoctrinated into the average fans from the moment they enter football – indoctrinating being the apposite term, because the criteria cited above do indeed serve as ‘doctrines’ within the quasi-religion that football has managed to assert itself as – that this argument seems at all controversial, or that it is seen as strange that I dislike trying to critique what many will no doubt call ‘harmless banter’. Terry Eagleton, in ‘After Theory’, that anti-theorists state that theorists will never come up with a successfully disinterested series of reflections on their behaviours, because even these reflections betray the inherent biases that facilitate those behaviours. I subscribe to this view, and wish to apply it here. It is only because a football fan (or sports fan: let me not criticise football singularly) is never encouraged to step outside the paradigm that constitutes ‘fanhood’ that they do not see the pointlessness and perniciousness of this paradigm. To prove that this is not so, I will discuss the effects that this set of beliefs produces in otherwise rational human beings. To break up what is becoming an essay, however, I will halt the post here for the time being.

Regards,

Jack

Returning: A Brief Explanation and Consideration of Why.

Hello,

I find myself painfully aware that over the last three to eight months I have attempted more ‘returns’ than Eminem has since 2005, the nasal refrain of ‘Guess who’s back?’ trying and failing to distract from the fact that, actually, he hadn’t ever really left properly. As it is, though, the intermittent posts since mid-August have been a means of trying to keep this from perishing and dissolving into the depths where all the other unloved, untended, silent blogs lie, whilst considering a) what I’d want to do with this blog when I did start writing properly, and b) whether it was worth salvaging at all. After all, my Freshers year has long since passed, and I don’t manage to cover football in enough depth to make a football-only blog regular or insightful enough, especially given the plenitude of blogs on the same subject available for one to peruse. I have also recently lacked those two things that a writer simply cannot do without: time and inspiration. To quote one of my Historian friends in a middle of an intellectual and emotional crisis, I have, over the past six months or so, felt that ‘I have literally nothing interesting to say.’

The dearth of time has alleviated somewhat over the past few weeks, and some tentative, toe-in-the-water attempts at composing poetry again have suggested that I may not have totally squandered my ability to write something of a vaguely passable standard, and these happenings, combined with an impending final term of Second Year, make this seem an apposite time to make a last attempt at returning to jacknmoran (to be rebranded ASAP, incidentally). Some blog controversy which I shan’t go into here was another reason for my silence; in the wake of a transient but nonetheless tumultuous storm, I felt that a period of reflection was necessary, and that some focus on work would be welcome.  In the interim, however, I’d toyed with doing various things: this blog began by covering Euro 2012, and I’ve long been tempted to do the same with the 2014 World Cup. Book reviews, when time permits, are an enjoyable undertaking, and that was another consideration. Of course, the chief temptation was to continue the Oxford narrative that ended abruptly in the middle of last Trinity, trying to combine mirror-gazing self-absorption with rather more of actual use to those who want to know anything about Oxford. 

The final reason for my ponderous caprice over the last few months has been an expectation that this was a blog devoid of readers, one whose slow, inevitable (though flailing) death would be greeted by the silence that it had taken on in the time it took to do so. After all, a blog without a readership is as a song without listeners: a triviality; a thing of no consequence; a ‘paltry thing; a tattered coat upon a stick’. However, I have had it alluded to on occasion by other people over the past months, and a conversation at our second end-of-season dinner in which the desire to read more was expressed served to be enough to convince me that, small though my readership might be, resurrection would still be a worthwhile endeavour.

There are, of course, personal reasons for returning to this blog. I shall start with the perhaps less creditable ones. In the event that Finals do not go as expected, a career in academia will begin to seem all the less likely – as one would expect. As a result, I would probably turn to the other cliched careers of an English student – journalism, or teaching (while, of course, trying to write while doing so). This requires, often, some evidence of consistently high-quality writing throughout one’s university career (and, sometimes, beforehand). The problem is that student journalism has never much appealed to me. The main reason for this is the restriction involved: when writing on sport, I dislike the concept of being limited to four hundred words. This is true whether writing a match report (in which the brief recapitulation of events is invariably neither insightful nor comprehensive), or a debate (in which four hundred words rarely allows any writer to do more than cite the most perfunctory, expected points, and often in a rather jumbled manner). Perhaps this betrays an individual inability to embrace concision rather than an inherent flaw in the medium; however, I do not feel that this changes matters. Even if my reluctance to write concisely were indicative of a flaw in my writing and cognitive processes rather than a flaw in the medium of student sports writing, it would still indicate that it is not a place that my writing would be suited for. I can only imagine the exasperation that an editor would feel in telling me, invariably, to cut three hundred words from each piece before it was suitable for publication.

Equally, the restriction involved in writing for a Sports department is a problem for me. Football is a topic of interest for me, but it is not one that I want to be constrained to write about weekly. Equally, writing weekly is a problem; even when writing frequently, I do not write regularly, and I am just as likely to be taken by the impulse to write at one o’clock on a Wednesday morning as I am to write three times in four days, each at different times. I intend to write about a number of things here, some of which may be of interest to numerous people; I fully expect that some might be of interest only to me. In any case, I am still at an undisciplined stage of writing, one in which I may decide to switch abruptly from a recapitulation of my week in Oxford, to a mini-essay on Paradise Lost, to a piece of poetry. This caprice ill-becomes a sports writer, especially one writing for a newspaper.

So the desire to build up a portfolio is a pragmatic reason for writing, but pragmatism is still secondary to my other reasons. The last of these is the hackneyed but nonetheless true observation that writing is, above all things, cathartic. Having had a long time to reflect upon my writing habits during my absence from writing, I believe that writing helped organise my thoughts and convey them in a manner that was conducive to the relative clarity of thought I enjoyed during my first year. I believe, additionally, that chronicling and creating narrative helped maintain a sense of purpose that has been fading recently, as I have become worryingly more desultory. Of course, any interest or benefit anybody gains from any posts I write, whether they be about training for races, Oxford life or even just writing is also an excellent reason to write. These things considered, I greatly regret that I went so long without updating. As it is, I am aiming to place that in the past, and will now briefly outline what will be coming up over the next months and year. As in most endeavours, thinking in the long term is conducive to good success.

So I’m going to try and cover a variety of things as before, and generally this will be unchanged. There will be a few additions and features, however:

1. I’ll be continuing the Oxford narrative, starting in 0th Week of Trinity, which is the 20th April onwards. It’s a year without exams, so readers may hear things about punting, Christ Church Meadows, and Balls, rather than just comments on the incessant pressure of work. This will act as the precursor to a fully detailed narrative of Finals year. Of course this will be enjoyable and cathartic for me to do, but I’m hoping it will serve a useful purpose as well. To be more specific: prior to applying, I, as I imagine is the case for numerous applicants, are taught to seek a lot about what to do prior to applying, what to do at interview and during the application, and, once in, a lot about Oxford (or university) life in the general. I think that having a week-by-week, detailed description of what Oxford is like when the real pressure of Finals and the impending entry into ‘Real Life’ has arrived would be something I would have been rather grateful for, even if just for the reassurance that there is a way to manage everything. Of course, if I collapse next year, I hope that it will be of equal utility as an example and cautionary tale of what not to do. In general, I think that anything that deals with the specifics of an experience – exactly how much work, exactly what papers, exactly when do things need to be done, exactly how do people cope – will be more useful than generalities about ‘high workloads’ and ‘pressure’. Obviously, then, the Trinity portion of the narrative will be short, but it’s going to serve as the precursor for a very detailed Finals Year one.

2. Football. I probably won’t do much coverage of football between now and the end of the year, as I’m extremely behind on work and want to get ahead (the quixotry, an old reader will note, has not quite dissipated) before the start of the World Cup. This is because I want to follow up my Euro 2012 blog with a day-by-day, almost match-by-match feature on the 2014 World Cup. At the very least I will cover a game or issue per day; if work is going well then I will try and do two games. I’ll also be writing a panegyric on the death of Barcelona and tiki-taka soon. There will be tears and immense sentimentality, of that I can assure you.

3. Running. I’ll be trying to go over and above just the sporadic references to my own runs, writing race reviews, thoughts on training, and anything else to do with the sport that occurs or appeals to me.

4. Writing. This is more contingent than the other topics, because it depends on me actually writing something of merit (always a contingency!), but I’m hoping to write at least two or three pieces of poetry in Trinity, and over the summer I may even start trying to write a novel on here, updating chapter by chapter. Perhaps.

5. Literature. I think I wrote three book reviews in the first year of this blog (Middlemarch, Lolita, The Rachel Papers), and I’d like to continue this. I have Money lined up, and at some point I shall go over Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life. If the fancy takes me, I may compose the odd essay for here as well, especially over the Summer Vacation, when I’ll want to keep my essay-writing abilities sharp before Finals. If I do, it will probably appeal to a more coterie readership, as it will probably be on things between 1350 and 1760. 

6. Scrabble. Over the last six months I’ve taken more of an interest in Scrabble, signing up for a first tournament in Ayelsbury and sporadically attending a club. This, I imagine, will appeal to an even smaller coterie than mini-essays on fifteenth-century morality plays, but I’m going to write the odd piece nonetheless in the hope of conveying to others the interest that the game can hold as a literary, teaching, and amusement tool, as well as a good way to improve retentive abilities. It’s also a lot of fun, as well, so I’ll be endeavouring to convey that.

7. Miscellany. Because sometimes none of these will take my fancy, and I do like to believe I can exhibit variety.

So that’s a (not-so) brief outline of the attempted rejuvenation of the undead. I don’t have any time to write until Sunday, but from Sunday my intentions are as follows:

Sunday: A report on one of the two games being played.
Monday: The Oxford Vacation: What it is, and how to use it – I think it’s rather different from other Vacations.
Tuesday: Some thoughts on Second Year as a Humanities student.
Wednesday: An introductory Scrabble post.
Thursday: Review of Martin Amis’s Money.
Friday: Review of Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life.
Saturday: A brief resurrection of the ‘Oxford Narrative’.

I hope at least some of that will prove of interest. I also find myself rather rusty when writing, phrases and sentence fluency seeming rather difficult to come by currently. Hopefully that will improve after writing seven pieces in seven days.

‘Success is falling nine times and getting up ten.’ Or so I hope this proves.

Regards,

Jack

Willian

Hello,

I think I would speak for a great number of Chelsea fans when I say that, prior to today, I would have been perfectly content to have seen the transfer window close this morning, leaving us with the signings that we have hitherto acquired. Others may remain adamant that acquiring a striker of Rooney’s calibre is imperative if we are to challenge for the title, while I am aware that some still feel uncomfortable with a back line that contains an ageing Terry, capricious Luiz, and not-quite-top-quality Gary Cahill. However, I think it would be unanimously asserted that the Chelsea board and staff have approached this transfer window in a remarkably sensible manner thus far. The signings acquired have been predominantly young, fairly cheap, and all helped to fill a gap of some sort in the squad. Schurrle offered a more pacy, energetic option to our attacking line; Schwarzer is probably the most accomplished reserve goalkeeper in the league, and Van Ginkel seems to have the potential to take Lampard’s place upon his retirement. Thus, I doubt I am alone in feeling like the club have behaved nonsensically today in acquiring Willian for a reported fee of thirty million pounds.

A signing, as written above, should either improve the first-team side, provide necessary cover where none exists, or fill a gaping hole in the side. With these propositions in mind, let us consider the signing of Willian.

Evidence that he would improve the first team is minimal. From a simply qualitative perspective, it seems ludicrous to suggest that WIllian has more ability, experience, or productivity than Juan Mata, Eden Hazard, or Oscar. Mata has featured frequently for the finest international side of a generation, and was one of the Premier League’s finest players last season. His statistics back up his claims to be considered a regular first-team starter – twenty goals, and, according to Wikipedia, a colossal thirty-five assists. Similarly, Eden Hazard is in and around (if not quite there) the same bracket as Neymar in the pantheon of youngsters with the potential to become world class. He also backed up his potential with some impressive goal and assist statistics last season – thirteen goals and a remarkable twenty-five assists. Oscar, too, looks to have gained in stature over the summer and played a crucial part in Brazil’s Confederations Cup triumph (a time when Willian was nowhere to be seen). Thus, in both quantitive and qualitative terms, Willian looks unlikely to provide the necessary attacking figures to improve an already exceptional Chelsea front three.

The notion that he might be necessary for the bench also seems nonsensical. Once the already named players are taken out of the equation, that leaves us looking at Andre Schurrle, Victor Moses, and Kevin de Bruyne, meaning that a high-quality replacement front line is already in place. When one considers that Lampard can also play in an attacking midfield role and that Chelsea have Lucas Piazon and Marko Marin to return from loan deals, the signing of Willian seems even more superfluous. For to sign a benchwarmer for thirty-million pounds is a nonsense, the sort of smoke-and-mirrors signing regularly exhibited by the foremost proponents of transfer madness, Real Madrid. One has become used to seeing Florentino Perez throw exorbitant sums at players seemingly for the sake of it, without any consideration of how they might help form a cohesive, improved side or squad. In the early Chelsea days – think Adrian Mutu, Hernan Crespo, Juan Sebastian Veron, and, hilariously, half a million pounds for Neil Sullivan –  Abramovich did exactly the same, and has done sporadically since then with Torres and Shevchenko. However, Abramovich does seem a little more sensible than Perez, and Chelsea’s fans are nowhere near as strident as the Madristas, so one would hope that such vanity signings would have become a thing of the past at Stamford Bridge.

Readers may cry that I am missing an obvious reason for signing Willian – I may as well take a look at what these might be. The improbable notion that he will improve the first team has been discussed, and can be placed into the background for now. The only other suggestion I have heard is that the signing makes sense, because it deprives Tottenham of a player who would undoubtedly improve their side, necessarily so if Gareth Bale does complete his impending move to Real Madrid. But this again seems a nonsense. To suggest that Tottenham needed to be deprived of Willian implies that Tottenham are to be seen as serious title challengers this season, likely to overcome Chelsea. This may have been vaguely feasible if Bale was not all but certain to leave; there is certainly a formidable look to a side containing Bale, Soldado, Willian, and Dembele. But Bale does seem to be all but departed, and even if Willian were to join Tottenham, their side would still have been considerably weakened. The statistics from Willian’s career to date show no sign that he is anywhere near capable of matching Bale’s goal and assist target, and whatever he may offer creatively in other aspects, he is still likely to fall considerably short of Bale’s raw power, pace, and creativity. Thus, I would safely have wagered that a Bale-deprived Tottenham would still have fallen by the wayside in this season’s transfer race, with or without Willian.

There are also obvious financial implications. The raw sum is quoted at c. £30 million pounds, and his wages are likely to amount to a few million pounds a year, plus bonuses. It does not seem outside the realm of possibility that the deal is likely to cost us around fifty million pounds altogether. This may make sense for a club who stand to profit greatly from an otherwise unlikely Champions League place, but, given Chelsea’s consistent place in the competition, the ostensible financial gains from improved on-pitch performance seem to be negligible. Furthermore, the spectre of Financial Fair Play still hangs over all clubs, ever closer. Last summer’s marquee signings were funded – as is well known – by an improbable Champions League triumph, but I cannot imagine that winning the Europa League offers anything like the same financial rewards. Given Chelsea have made minimal sums from player sales over the summer, this seems to be a transfer that makes as little fiscal sense as it does footballing sense.

Thus, I feel remarkably exasperated with an at best vain and at worst superfluous deal. After a summer of sagacious transfer dealings, today has marked a return to a transfer policy that does nothing to ameliorate the public perception of Chelsea. I may be proved wrong, and Willian may become a regular first-team starter who wreaks havoc in the Premier League. However, all the signs suggest that this is unlikely, and today’s dealings mark a return to a transfer policy redolent of a ten-year-old playing FIFA Ultimate Team.

Jack