Söderdämmerung and the power of the powerless

Everyone bar the upset loves an upset. So inexorable does the fastening of sporting hierarchies seem that its disruption is always at least mildly shocking. It awakens the Marxist in us: tendance Karl, by allowing us a glimpse at what a proletariat uprising might look like; and, more importantly, tendance Groucho, by showing up the pomposity of the elite, like someone egging a cardinal.

Take, as I believe is obligatory when discussing this issue, the FA Cup. The Cup is running on the fumes of its history — fumes which, were they to irritate the right set of lungs, would result in the words THE MAGIC OF THE CUP being spelled out in phlegm on a Setanta studio backdrop. The upset is an irresistible part of Cup lore, key to understanding its appeal. Yet the mantra of "That's what the cup is all about" has become all too literal and tinged with desperation. The football landscape is being reshaped by would-be gods who are little more than children with who have found the dynamite. The FA Cup was the state religion. It has now been de facto disestablished. In the new football universe, the reel of old cup shocks becomes more like a holy relic whose dust is inhaled by the faithful each January.

A Cup upset these days does not mean what it did. It cannot. It can still mean plenty for those causing the upset. But the meaning for the competition as a whole is diminished when certain of its participants have more invested in other belief systems: only attend this particular church out of habit or duty, see it as to be endured, would rather concentrate on spending time at the lodge or trying to gain entry to a church they don't even want to be a member of so that their kids might get into a decent school. And when the big clubs have so little invested in it, they stand to lose little. So, while a shock is a blow struck for the smaller club, it barely registers on the face of the bigger club. What inherent value the Cup had is waning, and the injury to the giant is ever less real and ever more symbolic. The cardinal retires to his palace and washes the egg from his face in his gold-plated sink.



On Sunday, there was an upset at Roland Garros. I was going to post about it, but all I ended up with was:

Soderling defeated Nadal?

Soderling defeated Nadal?

Soderling defeated Nadal?

Soderling defeated Nadal?

Soderling? Defeated? Nadal?

Now here was an upset that mattered, like an earthquake. The distance between the FA Cup's mythology and its reality has never been greater — not merely because the competition's value has been devalued, but because of the concomitant retreat into ancestor worship and a belief in the magical properties of the Cup upset. The downgrading of the Cup and the superstitious faith in it tend ever more towards their respective extremes. Chelsea's defeat to Barnsley in last year's competition, for example, could never mean to them what it would have in times past. It certainly meant little next to their loss in the Champions League final. (The joke is only funny when the victim has something to lose.) And their successes in the 2007 and 2009 editions of the Oldest Competition would be as nothing next to a Champions League title, because that's what Chelsea (here standing in for any club of their stature, or with pretensions towards such stature) have opted to believe in. Söderling's win, meanwhile, was a candidate for Greatest Sporting Upset of the Decade because it struck at the very heart of the sport, and was more than just a fun but sideshowy happening.

True, the Söderling-Nadal match and a typical FA Cup upset share certain qualities, provoke certain similar responses. 'Upset' and 'shock' are virtually synonymous in sport, after all, and disorder is always fascinating. The disorder in the case of the tennis match lies in what remains of the tournament: a seething pot which may spit out in almost any direction. It lies in what feels like the interruption of a line of succession: Rafael V's coronation has been postponed. It lies in seeing something we're not supposed to see, something extraordinary.

And it is because of this quality, this extraordinariness, that, for this selfish sports fan, Nadal's defeat was a bad thing. Like everyone else who watched it, I was agog at how well Söderling played, at how he made Nadal look like one of Nadal's opponents, as if he was controlling Nadal's movements (which, of course, he was to a large extent). This wasn't meant to be happening, and how thrilling it was to witness it. But its occurrence brought to a halt Nadal's run at the French Open, which was even more extraordinary than Söderling's win, even more at odds with what was meant to be. Nadal's dominance on clay has been so other, and this otherness only increased as the dominance continued. Far from being a monotonous procession, far from being bland in its apparent predictability (and a fat lot of good predictions were here, as so very often), Nadal's Parisian tyranny was more compelling than nearly anything else sport can offer. The discombobulation caused by Söderling is all well and good, but history was being written before our eyes, and now the author is dead (or winded, more likely).



The worship of the god of the FA Cup upset may be based less in reality than in wishful thinking, but that is not to say that it is beneath consideration. It still exerts a powerful force. And here we hit upon another difference between Söderdämmerung and a Cup shock — perhaps even between tennis and football themselves. The Cup draws its power from football's version of the class system, and the potential for that system's subversion, or the illusion of the potential for the system's subversion. The system is formidable because it is so deeply entrenched. And it is so deeply entrenched because the clubs are historical entities. Players are sold, managers are sacked, directors sell their sakes and fans die off; but the club remains, in some way, the same as it was when it was founded. It has, for want of a better cliché, a soul, which retains the club's essence through the generations. There is a sense in which a club's status is determined not merely by their results on the pitch, but by privilege/lack thereof, and being in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time. This sense, subtle though it may be, feeds into the delight taken at an upset.

Tennis, meanwhile, renews itself constantly. Players turn pro, players retire: the tour looks completely different now to how it did twenty years ago, and to how it will twenty years hence. So, there is no heritage, or baggage, directly attached to the players. Add to this the naked meritocracy of the sport, and the "upset=good thing" equation loses the crisp certainty it retains in the FA Cup. Seeing the mighty fall in tennis does not come automatically accompanied by a glass of Schadenfreudebräu. A player is the best because he is the best, because he has proved it time and again. He has not bought his talent from lesser entities, nor was blessed enough to be in the upper echelon of the sport just as said echelon decided to screw the rest of the game over. With this is mind, what is left is a sense of sadness when a great player leaves the stage, because (here's the selfishness again) we are most likely being deprived of seeing greatness in action.



In other words: YES I'M BLOODY WELL PISSED OFF THAT I — YES, I — AM NOT GETTING THE NADAL-FEDERER FINAL I'VE BEEN LOOKING FORWARD TO FOR MONTHS. Yep, I made you read 1250 words when I could have written all this in twenty-four. I mean, there was going to be a liveblog and everything! You'd have loved it! I think, by now, we know the custom for when our manifest destiny has been thwarted: send your death threats to Robin Söderling, c/o... Read more...

Read more...

Anger is an energy. Selective memory loss is a pathology: An FA Cup final preview, whose length is commensurate with how excited I am about the game

One of the most tedious plots of next season will be Chelsea's invocation of the injustice, oh the injustice!, of their Champions League elimination as a motivating factor in their attempts to conquer the known world (no, really, they'll actually do it this time!). Lord help us all if they face Barcelona next season...

Anyway, they're getting their eye in this weekend, as Guus "Guus" Hiddink confirms:

Of course you can play out of anger. It's good to use that. The internal motivation is high in the team. Bit by bit, day by day I'm getting rid of the anger from the Barcelona match, but if you push the right button in my soul you will find a bit of anger.

So they're going with the we-are-the-Serbia-of-football method, as opposed to the somewhat more truthful our-super-duper-genius-tactical-masterplan-um-actually-sort-of-didn't-work-and-we've-sometimes-benefited-from-questionable-refereeing-decisions-ourselves-if-we're-being-honest-so-we'll-just-have-to-take-it-on-the-chin-oh-well-tomorrow's-another-day approach.

Of course, David Moyes is not averse to a spot of referees-all-have-it-in-for-us misdirection, though it always seems calculated to have a benefit for Everton somewhere down the line. And I'll take sincere insincerity over hysterical fuckwittery at least five-and-one-tenth times out of ten. Read more...

Read more...

'Pataphysical Football: The potential banana skin

Ed.: I was recently talking to Prof. Avril Fish-Wink-Wink, Jerome Sapir-Whorf's fellow footballolinguist, and she put me in contact with an interesting chap called Anastasios Pépin, a 'pataphysicist. Said Avril: "This man could completely change the way we think about sport, if he can lay off the absinthe. Or maybe if he can stay on the absinthe, I'm not sure." She suggested that we could perhaps host one of his articles: "He's pissed off a lot of people and there aren't many places left for him to go. His voice needs to be heard."

Hmmm. You'll be the judge of that, I suppose. Here it is, anyway. And just so we're clear: this dude is, like, totally non-fictional, yeah?

*

With the FA Cup semi-finals but hours away, it would be instructive, I think, to consider the true nature of this fabled competition: the oldest competitive mass-walk-on-a-financial-district-pavement in history.

The FA Cup is a fine representation of the comedy and tragedy of the English class system. It began life as the main competition of an association founded for the benefit of ex-public schoolboys. But it soon became a vehicle for the symbolic subversion of the hierarchical structures of British society: first, as provincial working-class upstarts took over; then, as the professional game formally stratified into leagues and divisions. It is this feature of the tournament that defines it most strongly to this day; hark! the cries of that's what the Cup is all about when the second best team in League One scores early against the worst team in the Championship.

The metaphor of choice for the possibility of a team defeating a higher-ranking club in the FA Cup is the banana skin. The Cup can be considered as the efforts of a group of city gents — wearing bowler hats and carrying black umbrellas — to negotiate the distance between their final Tube stop and the large, faceless financial institution at which they work. However, the footpath along which they must travel becomes narrower and narrower as their journey progresses. Only one can finally reach the headquarters of Power and All Her Evil Accessories. The gents jostle for the ever-decreasing space on offer, and inevitably, some are nudged over the kerb and into oncoming traffic.

We take little pleasure from such an incidence because, even though one upper-class person has met his demise, said demise also represents the survival of the upper-class person who pushed him. Where the fulfillment, such as it is, lies is in the extra obstacles the poshos must dodge: the banana skins. These have been left on the pavement the previous night by merry class pranksters. When a gent encounters a banana skin, there are two possibilities: (a) the gent avoids stepping on it, by chance or by spotting it in time and stepping around it; or (b) the gent fails to spot it, or spots it too late, and treads on it, slips and falls.


In the event of (b) occurring, there is much rejoicing and hilarity to be had. The stiff, pompous snob who is trying to reach the house of oppression has been rendered buffoonish by his pratfall, and horrifically injured by both the fall and the subsequent trampling he receives. The banana skin is propelled forwards ahead of the throng, where it awaits the next potential victim.

In the meantime it is hailed as a heroic emblem, much like the carbon rod that saved the crew of the space shuttle in that episode of the Simpsons. However, the banana skin's very inanimatedness is the first component of its innate tragedy. Its function is simply to cause city gents to slip, and thus be propelled forwards. Without the gents to slip on them, they become no more than detritus to be swept up and binned by noon. This raises issues about the banana skin's sense of identity: It will only be given true meaning when it is trampled on by the upper classes, or it will be ignored and left to rot in a dump.

The second component of the banana skin's tragedy is that it will never succeed in reaching the financial institution and gaining control of a key societal apparatus. The chances of the peel being propelled forward diminish as the journey continues, as there are fewer and fewer gents on the pavement, thus providing them with an unobstructed view of any potential hazards ahead.

You can see how all this symbolises the working class anxiety about the barricades which separate them from true power and influence.


A very interesting thing has happened to the way we understand the FA Cup. Some time in the mid-to-late 'nineties, the metaphor of choice began to shift from banana skin to potential banana skin. This may appear to be a simple linguistic quirk, a mutation of a cliché. But language is never just language. The small club may be a banana skin, but equally, it may not be. The peel is no longer sitting there on the footpath — it is in a state of intermediate existence, between existence and non-existence. Much as Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead until we observe it, the banana skin both exists and does not exist until the gent approaches it.

What we have here is an additional layer of potentiality. Two things now determine whether the skin gets trodden on: the very existence of the skin and the gent's ability to manoeuvre around it. Thus is the skin even further removed from the great prize at the end of the race, and more gents prevail than before. The connection between this and the growing chasm between the haves and have-nots in football need not be pointed out, I'm sure.

The recurring angst over the FA Cup's relevance is also tied into all of this. The potentialising of the banana skin's existence is both an anxiety dream and a mild guilt trip caused by the well-testified embourgeoisiement of Britain's working class. How the ongoing recession, and the de-embourgeoisiement of the working class, will affect the perception of the FA Cup is uncertain. The anger at those who control the nation's financial health and the desire to see them topple are greater than ever. Will the hanging of effigies of bankers be a substitute for the FA Cup or a spur for greater interest? We must wait for next season to see.

Read more...