BfB

Every story told says more about the Raconteur than the Reality.

We live in a cynical world. A breakdown of trust in institutions and an age of fraud. As this game happens in Mexico across the border FIFA were in the process of suspending the suspension of USA forward Folarin Balogun in a move which scythes away their credibility.

Without institutions people look to be presented with objective standards. They want an authority to tell them how to value things. They look to be told what is, but there are no facts outside of a Physics lab, there are just stories.

You, personally

Football is a story which started before you were born and will carry on after you have died. Your part in football is to watch a team or teams of players who you will see the debuts of and the last games they play be that as sixteen to forty-year-olds, or just some guy who plays for a month on loan.

Football is permanent, you are transient, but in being transient you are a fixed point, and the players and the projects come and go in front of you. You are part of a story, and you tell the story.

And the secret of football, the thing that no one tells you when you are five, or fifteen, or twenty-five or whenever you get interested, is that what matters is not the people in the stories but how you – you, personally – tell that story.

What matters is how you judge the characters within your narrative, who is hero, who is not, and why. Everything else is trivia.

Harry

Describing the events of Mexico 2 England 3 is both necessary and irrelevant. Necessary because it sets a vital context for the game in which the co-hosts lost to an England team which struggled to find its feet until this evening. Irrelevant because the events are part of arcs which started before and will finish long after, with this moment which – while it shines out – is no more conclusive than any other point.

Harry Kane is England captain, coming off after 89 minutes and watching the imperious Dan Burn head the ball into the Mexican half with the rest of us, but he is also the person taking corners ineffectively for Roy Hodgson’s England against Iceland at Euro 2016.

He is the quiet man who married his childhood sweetheart, might be the man who picked up former England manager Gareth Southgate when Southgate was at his lowest. He has a World Cup golden boot, he was at Leicester City on the bench as they were promoted. He is both England’s best player and someone who some people think should not be playing at all.

Does it matter at the final whistle as he races onto the field littered with exhausted Englishmen who are strewn over the glorious Azteca Stadium Mexico – the place where “Fue un poco con la cabeza de Maradona y otro poco con la mano de Dios.” – which Harry Kane it is?

Does it matter that Molly Bloom only remembers Howth Head? That the ball bounced one side of the line? That Odysseus is not able to acknowledge Argos? That here is Rhodes? “What’re you up to, lads, eh? Trainspotting? In Leith Central?“. “Just write them the way you say them. They’re funny. I would like to read them.”

Tell the story

1999

Following the 1999 Champions League where Manchester United had beaten Bayern Munich Salman Rushdie observed
“In victory, the players suddenly stopped looking like rich, pampered superstar athletes and became, instead, innocent young men bright with the realisation that they were experiencing a great moment in their lives.”

Arrogant

There is an end to this story in which Jude Bellingham emerges as a Zinedine Zidane figure in world football. His talent, like Zidane, seems limited only by his capacity to harness it. His confidence grows, and that has been called arrogant, and the difference is for you to decide.

The linguistics about Bellingham are borrowed from the Frenchman. Bellingham glides around the field, he is balletic, he ghosts into position. Two goals in two minutes continue his journey from the skinny boy at Birmingham to something unrecognisable.

What would it mean for Bellingham to achieve the status which tantalises? What would it mean to have this man talked about in the same tones as Sir Bobby Charlton, Sir Geoff Hurst, or Bobby Moore? Or Sir David Beckham, or Gary Lineker, or Gazza? Most of the Englishmen who we talk about in the same bracket as we put Bellingham into have Knighthoods, and if the World Cup reveals what a country actually is, not what it tells people it is and so something seismic shifts.

Against Mexico Bellingham put in a performance as good as any ever played while wearing an England shirt. He is both commanding and demanding in his play, but supplicant to his teammates. His discipline to continue the actions his position demands is as good as any, but his capacity to define games with his individuality is unique.

After a second half of sending-off and goals and eleven minutes of injury time the whistle blows and Jude Bellingham sobs on the floor. When everything is done, and every blade of grass burnt up, and no ball is ever kicked again people may say that this was the greatest performance by a player wearing an England shirt.

Or they may not.

Thrive

How does one describe this game? It is a triumph of system over adversity. The altitude, the home support, the hostility of the crowd which turned to affection and recognition at the final whistle. If every supporter was so full in support and so deep in respect as the Mexicans of the Azteca, football would be better.

Thomas Tuchel’s systemic approach toyed with the home support, preventing them from reaching the intensity that has fueled Mexico’s progress to the round of sixteen. In defence Tuchel’s team pushed the Mexicans wide forcing cross after cross but allowing them to only create low quality chances. That one of those chances gave them a life line following Bellingham’s two first half goals illustrated the dangerous margins Tuchel works in. The opposition will have some of the ball, but you decide where that is and what they are allowed to do with it.

In the second half the system was scrapped following Jarell Quansah’s sending off for a foul on Jesus Gallardo but the intentions of that system were not. Dan Burn joined a line of central defenders in Ezri Konsa, Marc Guéhi, and John Stones with Nico O’Reilly in support, in heading the ball away time and time again. System or no, Tuchel offered the Mexicans a low percentage option and they took it every time.

Systems

Much of modern football is systematised, and controlled, and based on passing, while this England of Thomas Tuchel is of moments, chaos and players breaking lines by running at defensive opponents.

The line between Tuchel and his predecessor Gareth Southgate is that the German has looked at Bukayo Saka and Anthony Gordon, at Marcus Rashford and Noni Madueke, at the effortlessly balletic Jude Bellingham and rather than have them working the ball past lines instead told them to embrace the chaos and beat men with the ball at their feet.

“Beat the man, take him on, you’ll never give up, it’s one on one”

After five games in the World Cup England’s passes have hardly been intercepted at all. England rank alongside teams who are low on this particular scale, because they struggle to get the ball. England are low because Tuchel has his team avoid attempting line splitting passes, and favours carries through the lines.

Runs, if you will, “Beat the man, take him on, you’ll never give up, it’s one on one”.

Having created a multifaceted England team The FA, and Southgate in his work on EPPP and the England DNA as well as as Manager, presented something to Tuchel. The outlines of a very successful team and an instruction that the new manager adds a specificity to the play. The German has done that, focusing on a way of playing which steps beyond system football and into something which may be a decisive difference.

Concise

The stories we tell define us, and we tell stories about football, and so football defines us.

The twelfth cross which was headed away and the realisation that this achievement was in grasp, the thirteenth, the moment and then the pause. “Where does the hand become the wrist? The watershed and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that razor’s edge between something and nothing, between one and the other?”

I could have told him this, but didn’t bother.

1929

Writing in his 1929 novel The Good Companions J. B. Priestley observed
“To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.”

Proud

There was a time that we did this together and a time that we did this apart, and how do you pick up the threads of an old life? What is this anyway? What does it mean, if it does not mean this?

Driving my brother back the distance between our homes, it was morning, and light, and cars were on the road and people around the pubs at 5am and for a moment everyone in England was proud of the same things.