TAKING A POSITION

The easiest place to watch or play a game of football is your local park on a Sunday morning. However, advice to those thinking of playing park football is simple: don’t. This is not because the other players will be better than you. It is precisely because they won’t. Where skill is absent, violence finds a home.

It should be noted, though, that watching park football appeals to the romantic in every football fan. Standards are much more relaxed than in the professional game, so participants wear whatever kit they want to. As a result, you will frequently witness bizarre events like a Crewe Alexandra striker scoring against a Barcelona goalkeeper. These sights help to keep alive the fan’s dream that every underdog will have its day.

If you insist on playing the game yourself, we strongly advise that you eschew park football and stick to more solitary displays of footballing skill, in particular ‘keepie-uppie’. This is where you bounce the ball off your feet, knees, head, shoulders and (if you’re really clever) off the chest and the back of the neck (not at the same time, obviously), so preventing it from hitting the ground. But be warned: it is deceptively difficult. Professional footballers, as they warm up before a match, give the impression that keepie-uppie is easy. Try it yourself and you will realise why they are professional footballers. (The question does arise as to why English players can perform incredible keepie-uppie during the warm-up, then fail to hit an open goal from three yards during the match itself.) Never try keepie-uppie near a window.

There is film footage of the great Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona playing keepie-uppie with a golf ball (when he wasn’t quite as rotund as he is today). Do not watch this clip if you have recently been practising your technique. You will, as hundreds have before you, weep bitter tears of frustration.

A footballer’s high physical intelligence comes at a price: it tends to intrude into the pathways used for verbal skills.

Happily, you need never apologise for your poor footballing skills. Instead, refer to your relatively low PIQ (Physical Intelligence Quotient). Scientists now suggest that agility of the kind displayed by professional footballers is due to their brains being wired in such a way as to maximise the coordination of intention, muscle, motor and perception skills. However, this high physical intelligence comes at a price: it tends to intrude into the pathways used for verbal skills. So while they are adept at stringing lots of passes together (unless they’re from the British Isles), you prefer being able to string sentences together.

POSITIONS

GOALKEEPER

This is the player who stands between the goalposts, attempting to stop the opposition from scoring. Often referred to as the ‘goalie’ or the ‘keeper’, he differs from outfield players in two respects. He is:

• the only player allowed to handle the ball (as long as he is inside his own penalty area); and
• normally the only player near enough to the crowd behind the goal to be pelted with small household objects.

Two principal characteristics are needed to be a successful goalie. You must be tall (so that your outstretched hand can reach the ball) and clinically insane (so that your concentration on putting outstretched hand to ball isn’t disturbed by opposition players’ knees rearranging your facial features). The Coventry City goalkeeper Steve Ogrizovic reportedly had his nose broken no fewer than 12 times during his career. Fortunately his looks to begin with were such that this did not greatly matter.

The most famous case of goalkeeper bravery came during the 1956 FA Cup Final, in which Manchester City’s Bert Trautmann played the last quarter of an hour with a broken neck. (Get bonus bluffing points for knowing the name of the Birmingham City player whose knee did the damage: Peter Murphy, known – with typical footballing ingenuity – as ‘Spud’ Murphy.) Although Trautmann was in great pain (he had to play on because this was the era before substitutions were allowed), it didn’t become clear for a couple of days that his neck was actually broken. Nonetheless, his discomfort was clear even as he collected his winner’s medal from Prince Philip, who expressed noticeable sympathy. Trautmann was in fact a former German prisoner of war, and a recipient of the Iron Cross for his bravery as a Luftwaffe paratrooper on the Eastern Front. Declining repatriation to Germany at the end of the war, he worked as a farmhand in Lancashire before joining St Helen’s Town and then Manchester City as goalkeeper. Stoically withstanding initial protests from fans, he eventually became the most popular German in Britain (and has arguably never been eclipsed), and in 2004 he was awarded an honorary OBE. It’s an odd thing about football; despite being full of overpaid preening prima donnas guilty of the most inexcusable gamesmanship, it can still remind you that it once valued things like valour and nobility.

A useful piece of information for the bluffer to slip into conversation is that both Pope John Paul II and opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti were quite handy goalkeepers in their younger days. One of them had to move around considerably more than the other to stop the ball getting past him. In fact, there are quite a few celebrity keepers you can throw into the mix. Spanish crooner Julio Iglesias stood ‘between the sticks’ (as the position is sometimes called by fans). Arthur Conan Doyle played under the pseudonym ‘AC Smith’. The philosopher Albert Camus played in his native Algeria, saying: ‘All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.’ Vladimir Nabokov kept goal during his time at Cambridge University, while Che Guevara also reputedly occupied the position as a university medical student. (Those who would have dearly loved to see him playing on the left wing were denied by the charismatic revolutionary’s health – he chose to play in goal because of his asthma.)

Those who have kept goal professionally before going on to find fame in other fields include self-professed ‘Son of the Godhead’, conspiracy theorist and former co-presenter of Grandstand David Icke (Coventry City youth team, then Hereford United), and Gordon Ramsay (Glasgow Rangers) – although this is disputed by the well-known Scottish second-division football club, which says he might have briefly been a triallist (but don’t bank on it).

CENTRE BACKS

Also known as centre halves, these are the two players who stand immediately in front of the goalkeeper, in the centre of defence. In long-standing pairings, centre backs can develop an almost telepathic ability to operate as a unit. The taller one jumps up to head the ball, while the shorter one stands on the toes of the opposition player to prevent him doing likewise.

Centre backs often make good team captains – the Chelsea and England player John Terry, for example. (Any problems he had with hanging on to the England captaincy were due to off-the-field ‘incidents’.) This is partly because their position on the pitch is a good one from which to command players, and partly because they are usually physically imposing and often psychopathic. These latter qualities also help explain why they never get shouted at by teammates when they make mistakes.

FULL BACKS

These are the two defenders who operate outside the centre backs. They are also referred to as ‘left back’ and ‘right back’. Their tactics for countering the opposition usually fall into one of two categories. There is the ‘No One Ever Scored from Row Z’ approach, where the ball is kicked into the crowd at the earliest opportunity. And there is the ‘Player or Ball’ approach, which dictates that full backs are happy for an opposition player to go past them, or for the ball to go past them – but never both at the same time.

WING BACKS

An alternative defensive arrangement is to have three centre backs and two defenders outside them who are referred to as ‘wing backs’. Their role is twofold. They push forward and attack down the wings (the edges of the pitch), and are the players whom the rest of the team blame when the opposition get past them and cross the ball in for a goal.

MIDFIELDERS

These are the four or five players operating between the defenders and the attackers. They assist both in equal measure in that they give the defence someone to criticise for never running back to help them, and the attackers someone to blame for never getting the ball forward so that they can score.

In addition, midfielders tend to be the players nearest to the referee, which means they have a crucial intimidatory role to perform should the ref be thinking of sending anyone off.

CENTRE FORWARDS

These are the players who hang around in the opposition penalty area ensuring that their hair remains neat enough for tomorrow’s promotional photo shoot. Occasionally, and if they happen to be in the right place, they might deign to knock the ball into the goal, as long as doing so doesn’t get mud over the sponsor’s name on their boot. They are also, to a man, proficient divers (see ‘Glossary’, page 109). Especially if someone hits them with a feather.

OTHER FORMS OF THE GAME

To enjoy the excitement of playing the game competitively without risking life and limb, many football fans opt for the tabletop game Subbuteo. This has also been used by real-life managers to illustrate tactical theories to their players. Obviously, wooden figures with limited movement and zero intelligence have their limitations in this regard – but the footballers do their best to understand.

If you want to be a manager rather than a player, the ‘fantasy football league’ schemes operated by many newspapers and websites provide the ideal opportunity. These allow you to construct an imaginary team from real professional players whose performances on the field then earn your ‘side’ points. This exactly replicates the experience of being a football manager – apart, that is, from:

• the constant calls in the press for your resignation;
• the need to conduct your team talks in seven different languages so your foreign stars can understand you; and
• the frustration of dealing with a chairman who wants to spend all his money on the stadium’s new hotel and leisure complex instead of giving it to you to buy more players.

The oldest way for football fans to indulge their passion for the game is entering the ‘spot-the-ball’ competition in local newspapers. (Hint: This gives them the chance to place the ball exactly where they want it to be – something very few of the players can manage.)