Footballing Einstein

The Eu­ro­pean foot­ball cham­pi­onships, or Euros, are upon us and once again the Span­ish na­tional side is turn­ing heads with its free-flow­ing foot­ball com­pared to the turgid, guile­less fare of­fered by some other coun­tries, such as Eng­land for ex­am­ple. Now, I’m well aware that many Cata­lans have lit­tle or no in­ter­est in the Span­ish na­tional team, favour­ing the idea of a Cata­lan na­tional side, but, al­though fewer than in the past, La Roja does have some Cata­lan com­po­nents, in­clud­ing Marc Cu­curella (Alella), Lamine Yamal (Es­plugues de Llo­bre­gat) and David Raya (Barcelona), as well as Barça play­ers in Fer­ran Tor­res (born near València), Fer­min Lopez (Huelva) and Pedri (the Ca­nary Is­lands). As a side note, Al­ba­nia’s right back, Iván Bal­liu, is from Caldes de Malavella, where his fa­ther is a pro-in­de­pen­dence mayor and sup­porter of Car­les Puigde­mont. Ap­par­ently, he would have played for a Cata­lan na­tional side, had there been one, and jumped at the chance to rep­re­sent Al­ba­nia when ap­proached by the Al­ban­ian FA. Given that his sur­name is one of the most com­mon in that coun­try, they did the nec­es­sary re­search to find an­ces­tors that would allow him to play for them.

Any­way, in my ca­pac­ity as the Eng­lish match com­men­ta­tor for Barça TV for sev­eral years, I had the un­en­vi­able task of di­rectly in­ter­pret­ing live in­ter­views from Cata­lan and Span­ish into Eng­lish with Barça play­ers and coach­ing staff, al­though mostly Head Coach Xavi Hernández. On more than one oc­ca­sion I was left strug­gling to in­ter­pret what Xavi had said in a press con­fer­ence purely be­cause we do not have the ter­mi­nol­ogy in Eng­lish to talk about the game in the same way. It al­most sounds like a sci­en­tific field of study when dis­cussed in Cata­lan com­pared to the Eng­lish words and terms I have been so fa­mil­iar with for so many years of my life. An­other quick aside: the game in Eng­lish is now being in­vaded by US sports ter­mi­nol­ogy, which is be­com­ing un­palat­able for an Eng­lish­man with such a long his­tory of watch­ing the game. The use of stats is un­bear­able at times, and basic terms like a player being “in/out” of the game as op­posed to “on/off” the field when a sub­sti­tu­tion is made is ex­as­per­at­ing.

But that’s di­gress­ing from my point, which is that the ways in which Cata­lan and UK foot­ball play­ers, coaches, pun­dits and com­men­ta­tors think about the game are worlds apart. This is brought into dra­matic focus when local play­ers ap­pear on UK TV. One of the more elo­quent of these is for­mer Barça player Cesc Fàbre­gas (Arenys de Mar). Cesc has been in­vited into the BBC TV stu­dio in Berlin to con­tribute his analy­sis on games dur­ing these Euros along­side for­mer Eng­land play­ers like Alan Shearer, Mikah Richards and Frank Lam­pard. For any Eng­lish­man, the com­par­i­son is a painful one, as Cesc’s Barça pedi­gree com­bined with a near per­fect Eng­lish after leav­ing Cat­alo­nia to live in Lon­don from the age of 16 make him a ver­i­ta­ble Ein­stein com­pared to his coun­ter­parts, who come across as foot­balling lud­dites.

While Cesc waxes lyri­cal about for­ma­tions, space and con­trol­ling the game with and with­out the ball, the likes of Shearer can be heard rant­ing about whether play­ers have “got stuck in”, i.e. em­pha­sis­ing phys­i­cal ef­fort over tech­ni­cal abil­ity or tac­tics. Add that to the unin­spir­ing and unin­spired pre- and post-match com­ments of Eng­land Head Coach Gareth South­gate, and the feel­ing of foot­balling in­ad­e­quacy is com­plete.

Opinon