From Brendan:
Thanks for publishing Dan’s excoriating summary of the Ostersund game.
I read it, and you can tell he felt it. Really felt it.
Once, taking my son to an academy training session in a taxi driven by a wise old Nepali gentleman, the old man – who drives a people carrier – said, pointing to the top of his head – “Remember, this is the most important part of the body in football.”
It’s an easy cliché, but that doesn’t diminish its essential and unforgiving truth.
I wanted to mention one other point, about Tottenham. They have a lot of intensity and drive in their play, but the plaudits they have been getting still stick in the throat a little, considering their rather terrible habit of diving and simulating. Their last 3 away games – Liverpool, Rochdale and Juventus – how many dives and clear instances of cheating did we see? Quite a few, and in at least 2 of those games (Liverpool and Rochdale), these were decisive in the result.
Not knowing what their manager says to their players, and what he asks of them, I wouldn’t want to say whether he is encouraging it or not – but I do think his comments after the Liverpool game were bizarre, suggesting that it ‘spoiled’ football to discuss things like this too much. No, Mauricio, we will keep talking about it, and you won’t shut us up.
Some of us are quite attached to the idea of playing fair – playing hard, sure, but playing fair. I would never defend a player in the youth team I coach if he dived or simulated, and I would make sure that he knew that if he did it again, he wouldn’t play.
Football, like everything else, has its ugly side.
In the Liverpool-Tottenham game recently, that was typified by Eric Lamela’s foul on Virgil Van Dijk, which was given as a penalty to Tottenham. The referee and the linesman were not to blame, because the speed of the action would have given them virtually no chance to see how Lamela, instead of trying to go for the loose ball Van Dijk was shaping to kick, instead threw himself into a position that made it inevitable that Van Dijk would make contact with him with his leg.
That sort of thing is despicable.
But, another example of the earlier mentioned truth that football is 95% in the head.
Myles says:
Lovely to hear from you, Brendan.
You must be psychic, as I was thinking about you when I got up this morning.
You’re right about Lamela’s dive. South American gamesmanship didn’t start in 1966.
And you’re right about Dan, he does feel it deeply. As many supporters do.
Dan Ferguson is a real gooner who knows the game, a fan who’s seen superb Arsenal teams and mediocre ones.
I ask him to cover certain matches, or he offers to do so.
Dan was central defender as a teenager and captained Senrab Under-16s. I heard that the club was named after John Barnes. After a bad knee injury Dan gave up playing, preferring to watch as many Arsenal games as possible. He became an art teacher in North London. Then he moved to Northern Ireland with his wife and kids and became a painter.