(Continuation of the series of essays on football. For the beginning, see “NG” dated 04/10/25).
In the summer of 2018, Russia hosted the FIFA World Cup and gave its maximum: new stadiums, reaching the eighth final, an exemplary organization of the tournament, a celebration of peace and sports.
The human race… For two weeks it was impossible to get through Nikolskaya. Filled with guests from all over the world, it reminded me of Venice in the days of carnival. Only without masks. There is spontaneous joy everywhere. The hats and baseball caps of northern Europeans alternate with the rhythmically swinging shady sombreros of the south. Spain and Mexico. Portugal, Chile, Peru… It’s a pity that there are no Italy and Argentina (Messi)! It’s a pity that Brazil took off early! And Nikolskaya sparkles with glass garlands above their heads, and everywhere girls, girls, girls are scattered like fancy candy wrappers, like swirling confetti…
Football divides and unites. That’s how we used to be in childhood at the dacha in the “Testaments of Ilyich” along the Yaroslavl Railway, dividing into teams, hugging each other in pairs, and approaching the captains who chose us.:
–The moon or the sun?”
– Argentina or Brazil?
–Friend or footcloth?”
And it wasn’t necessarily “footcloth” that played worse than “friend.” And after the game, both teams sat on the edge of the groove, dangling their tired legs into it, and indulged in stories about the heroes of the sport.
Football is a hot business, a matter of honor and a battlefield. Football has proved that, even in two thousand years, the Colosseum has turned into Wembley, Maracana, Luzhniki Stadium, and gladiator fighters into forwards and midfielders. The stands raged as Mbappe glided over the lawn at the speed of a water bike. Luka Modric used his filigree passes to bring the Croats into scoring positions. Stadiums roared and were covered with goosebumps when the Belgian national team attacked and it seemed that, except for de Bruyne, Lukaku and Hazard, there was no one else on the field: there was so much precision, power and beauty in their unstoppable surges across the field.
Football cuts through knots and ties ties.
I’ve watched a lot of games on TV without really thinking about how they’re built. Bright details, distracting details masked the essence of the matter. Since FIFA did not take our FOF into account for all the years from 1955 to 2018, the “three corners” did not give anyone the right to a penalty; and such an interesting innovation as “pendal on goalkeeper’s lapels” remained in vain, not allowing the free kick point to be moved further away from the goal. Nevertheless, it was the championship that encouraged me to accumulate the previous experience of the country’s “sloping lawn” and the current one of the best teams in the world in order to develop another football formula that conveys the dynamics of the game unfolded over time. Moreover, the universality of the formula covered not only 90 minutes of a particular match, but extended to any match in generations – I would say it was rooted in the length of days. No, I’m not claiming that my formula takes into account all aspects of the game, all its innumerable nuances; that when peeling the core, it also takes into account the shell fragments, and they may contain their own truth. No wonder my mature observation was not appreciated by FIFA in the same way as our children’s innovations. I’m just talking about how to express the mechanism of the game in the shortest possible form: what kind of repetitive motif does it consist of? And variations are impossible to take into account. As commentator Vadim Sinyavsky said, “the ball is round,” which means: expect anything from it.
Here’s the goalkeeper of the other team, Yurka Filimonov, putting the ball into play. The midfield and both forwards clearly control it. There are passes across the field in their own half with a gradual advance towards the center. Finally, someone gets bored with all this unpacking, and he rushes into the attack, showing the ingenuity, speed and dexterity of his feet available to him without any fuss. We don’t have a referee, but all pairs of participating eyes monitor the fairness of the game.
The enemy is rushing to our gate. I won’t say that we remain unperturbed. No, we’re panicking. We are surrounded by horror. Our goalkeeper, Mishka the Red-haired, usually a bossy, confident, sturdy second–grader who looks like a little general, nervously jumps in the goal, relying on the only bar – a pockmarked birch.
Confusion in the penalty area. A stockade of legs. The ball ricochets in all directions.
Screams:
–The hand! The hand! A penalty…
Outrage:
“Which hand?” The shoulder!
Damn it. Blows. The long-awaited goal. But more often, they miss us or we fight back.
Mishka pulls the ball out of the bushes and throws it into the field. It’s our turn to prove ourselves on the offensive.
Passes are being played across the field in their own half. Full control. Everything is accounted for. Accounting and control.
But it is impossible to take into account and control indefinitely without taking any initiatives. Someone gets nervous, and he rushes to the attack. If he knows how, he feints. If he doesn’t know how, but he wants to screw it up, he starts fixing it until he loses the ball. Everyone has to fight for him. The ball is returned, and the attack continues. Now the enemy is retreating to their own gate in a panic. The commotion in the penalty area. A stockade of legs. Where’s the ball? Ah! Here he is.
– Guys, Klim is forging. Penalty!
“I’m not forging. You’ve forged yourself…
Hit. Philemon digs in and covers the ball in the bottom left.
And then everything repeats in the same spirit, both for us and for adult football players according to the formula:
control – improvisation – chaos.
Control – shuffling in your own half.
Improvisation is an explosion of attack.
Chaos is bedlam in the opponent’s penalty area.
Of course, improvisation can end with a goal kick, or even a goal, so that it doesn’t get to chaos, but this doesn’t change the mechanism of the game, it only shortens the moment. And the difference in the class of the game affects the fact that there is more improvisation and less chaos in the actions of the best teams. In other words, football is an alternation of control and chaos through a layer of improvisations. All the beauty is in them. Control is necessary to catch your breath, and chaos is necessary to introduce a dose of randomness into the game. It seems simple. But this simplicity has so many variations that it has been in the hearts of many of us for 100 years.