by David J. Lobina
It can be lonely being a football player, especially when the ball is rolling.
I live on the wing, my natural habitat. As close to the touch line as possible, old-fashioned. No-one really understands me. I think my teammates live in a completely different world to my own. I can track the movements of the strikers and even anticipate what they’ll do with the ball when they get hold of it, but it is all foreign to me. I can track the central midfielders better and more closely, as these are the people who make sure the ball reaches me ever so often, but their general motivations are equally inscrutable. The goalkeeper and the defenders are even more of a mystery; I’m not sure throwing your body to the ground like they do is always necessary, but I am sure that I cannot do it quite like that myself. The other winger is the closest thing to having a twin, but one that is the exact opposite in every way. Every player is their own person here, with movements and motivations unlike those of the others. We are a team in name only; more like a collection of 11 inlets.
It always all starts in the midfield with the opening kick. I am on the wing and do not expect to see the ball for a good few minutes. The strikers get things going by kicking the ball backwards to the midfielders, and then mechanically field towards the goal without a worry, so eager are they to reach their own natural habitat – away from it, and they look lost. The midfielders start their routine of not wanting to have any kind of responsibility by getting rid of the ball as soon as they receive it, lest they make any mistake that might need the attention of the defenders or even the keeper. Defenders patiently wait for these mistakes; they would wish them into being from time to time if they could, in fact. Goalkeepers would wish defenders’ mistakes into being, in turn; the more the merrier, in fact. One striker tends to be more artistic than the other and ventures into the midfield on occasion in order to try out things for art’s sake and with only aesthetic objectives in mind, in a trial-and-error kind of fashion; success or fail matters not, it just needs to always look pretty.
I like to receive the ball a dozen times during a match; no more than that. Sometimes I feel like Garrincha: I take on the defender, dribble past him, and either cross the ball or go for goal directly. Sometimes I feel like Míchel: I control the ball, turn around, and go for a long cross into the box. I don’t want to distribute or participate in moving the ball around. I never cut in and I would never dream of using my other leg, other than to prepare the ball for a cross. I don’t look where any of the strikers are when I cross; I send the ball over to the spot where the keeper cannot reach it, guaranteeing a successful header in case the strikers manage to get there at the right time. I typically see them arriving to the spot just a tad late; sometimes they jump and deftly do all the body contortions necessary to head the ball, but miss it by a whisker, heading the open air instead, ever so aesthetically. I curse them.
The ball is rolling and has reached me, deep into the opposition’s half, on the very touch line. I am alone. The strikers notice I am all alone and their ears perk up like pricks. I see them running towards the goal. They don’t see. They are too far from the sweet spot. They will not make their way there on time. A cross goes in, but there are no heading contortions; no-one reaches the ball, friend or foe. Strikers look dejected, but that’s simply something else that is lost in translation in a football pitch. More kicks than pricks here, boys.
I receive the ball again, and this time I’m not alone. I have a defender in front, a full back no less. They never stop running. They tend to be short. It’s either bullying them with an elbow to the chest to create some space for the cross or dribble past them with a few fakes. Never outrun them. I go for the dribble and I’m through, with space. I make the mistake of looking up as I prepare the cross. I see the strikers, and I lock eyes with one of them. I can see you, his say. I can read you, he infers and implies. But does he understand? A fleeting connection? A cross to the usual spot. He’s not there. He didn’t in the end.
A defender makes a mistake, and the ball falls to the other striker right. An opportune occasion. Nothing to do with me. I know not how either striker came to be where they were when the cross arrived. Everyone now comes over to congratulate everyone else. This is always awkward, as no-one really knows how a common structure, and a structured goal, can emerge from what everyone can see it is a very compartmentalised pitch.
Everyone knows their place, and everyone knows not to stray from their place unless necessary. Every place in the pitch has its own rules and tasks, and thus its own requirements. I couldn’t be in any other place. I wouldn’t know what to do, or what to think. I look at the closest midfielder to me and try to understand him. I put a mental spotlight on him and I zoom in. He’s always looking around, alert and moving. He receives the ball and the first thing he does is a 360-degree surveillance of his place. No other position player does this. It is a survival tactic. He wants no responsibility over the ball. He wants it out of his place as soon as he can achieve that without making a mistake. He passes it back to a defender. I put a mental spotlight over the defender. No looking around, no surveillance, no movement. Defenders rarely move, unless in desperation or retreat. He is now deep in concentration. He is looking at the ball intently and with some intent. He is preparing to kick it as far away as possible. He does. One thoughtful, the other thoughtless. The ball goes high towards the strikers; my spotlight falls upon them now; they feign interest in fighting for the ball; but know it is no use. When they get the ball, they do not survey or look around: they know where the goal is and go into practice-shooting mode, quickfire style.
No matter where I place my spotlight, I see a player on their own, which is to say a player doing their own thing, and what each player does at a given moment is very different from what the previous or subsequent player does and will do. The ball goes from one player to the other as if travelling from one island to another; or from one inlet to the next. As it does so the look on players’ faces is one of trepidation and confusion, much as a cat and a dog can stare at each other without understanding. The receiving player always has to react and anticipate the pass, as the ball never reaches ideally. How could it be otherwise? Every player sings to a different tune, and miscommunication is behind every corner kick.
There are 11 different matches being played out within each team; each player needs the ball to reach them so that they can do their own thing, and technically speaking the 11 players need not be there all at the same time for a match to play out. A football match could be arranged so that each player stands in their place on a square of the pitch at different times of a day (or a week, month, year), with the ball fed to them in different situations so that they can do whatever they have to do in each case – pass the ball to another square of the pitch, cross it, shoot, throw themselves to the ground, etc. The overall match can be put together from these fleeting instances as a collage of footballing moments and nothing much would be lost in the process. Viewers have a tendency to impose structure upon what they see, whether it is there or not. A cognitive fact. What’s more, everything would run much more smoothly thus and everyone would be at their best. I have kicked my very best crosses when no-one was around and I was alone on a pitch with my craft. Who is not a genius when in solitude? (The exception is maybe him.)
The problem with doing your own thing on a football pitch with your teammates is not only that your craft suffers, with the pressure of being in public and so on; nay, it is that you actually feel more lonely than when exercising your craft all alone by yourself. When by yourself all alone you can place the ball in the exact spot you need it in and the ball will react as you want it to be. It is like talking to yourself in your own inner speech: to every well-posed question there follows an apposite answer. You have to do no interpreting. With your teammates and not at all alone, you have to do plenty of interpreting. You look at them and do not understand what they are saying; you cannot hear their own inner speech, after all. You can only infer, naturally wrongly. A football team is a gathering of individuals forced by the circumstances, and in this everyone is alone. Not alone, actually, but lonely.
Things are different elsewhere. In tennis you have an opponent on the other side of the net who passes the ball to you nicely during warm-ups and nastily during play, but you understand each other. You and them cover the same area, which is to say the entire tennis court, play roughly the same sort of shots, and the objective is the same – to win individual points one by one, by force or ingenuity. And there is little loneliness. Win or lose, everyone knows why things happen the way they do. I on the wing very rarely know why my team won or lost a football match. I simply stay in my own corner, and patiently wait for the ball. I see my teammates in their own corners, also waiting. Sometimes some of us do not see the ball all match, and when this happens we come off the pitch with the feeling we have attended a completely different social event to those teammates who did see the ball.
It comes to the fore in the dressing room. Those who saw the ball more often speak the loudest and the most in the dressing room, win or loss. These are always the midfielders; as in the pitch, they are happy to not own up to anything and pass the responsibility to someone else. These two players would be happy to pass the ball to each other for 90 minutes if they could; force majeure often forces them to pass it to someone else; raretimes to either a winger or the artist-striker. The same applies to the conversation in the dressing room. The midfielders mostly talk to each other and do not let anyone else interrupt them, except when bringing someone else in for questioning, though they are really uninterested in the answers. Defenders never talk because they are the ones usually making the costly mistakes. Goalkeepers are usually on the verge of saying something, but given that this is always a recrimination of some kind and they are good at keeping the rage in check, they keep to themselves. Strikers never say anything; either they are satisfied with their work – and so, in a way, ‘nuff said – or they didn’t get an opportunity to do anything in the match. Similarly with myself: either I produced a perfect cross or goal or I didn’t participate.
In any case, whatever anyone says they did and saw in the match is not relatable to what anyone else says they did and saw in the pitch.
The loneliness of the footballer player emerges truly when the ball stops rolling.
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