The Tuesday Portrait: Zlatan Ibrahimović
People who say that soccer is boring and people who say that soccer is beautiful are usually talking about the same thing, which is that the game makes it hard to tell the difference between intention and accident. The game takes very graceful people and makes them clumsy; you’re an acrobat, it says, now be one with no arms. Moving the ball around the pitch becomes so difficult and is so easily disrupted that from a distance a match looks like a war waged against blind chance: which way the ball bounces, where it deflects off an unknowing face or shin, whose foot reaches it first in a scramble, will do more to define long stretches of play than the most careful coordination and planning. And yet: when something works, when the ball finds its way into the net, so many contingent forces have to cooperate that it can look like the world’s randomness falling into some kind of unanticipated agreement with human will. For a few seconds every difficulty yields before the attempt and with a startling suddenness you see something happen that’s implausible and inevitable in just about equal parts.
So it’s boring, and it’s beautiful. Even when it works, there’s often a threshold of doubt. Did he know the ball would bend that way? Was it really just luck after all?
I’ve been thinking about the adjectives I use to describe my favorite players. I keep finding my way back to words like “clear,” “simple,” “coherent,” “lucid,” and “plain.” I think the word I actually want is clarifying; there are players who are clarifying—players for whom the accidental and the intentional are further apart than they are for anyone else on the pitch, and who can therefore function as a kind of fixed point by which you can measure the relation. Steven Gerrard is a great midfielder, but he isn’t the least bit clarifying. Pirlo is clarifying. Messi is clarifying. Thierry Henry was clarifying, until he wasn’t.
It’s not a real portrait this week, it’s just an idea, and here’s the last chapter: at his best—a designation that extends over most of this season—Zlatan Ibrahimović is the most clarifying player in football.
Exhibit.
Exhibit.
It sounds undramatic to call a great player clarifying. It sounds like a dry ideal of greatness. But I’m not talking about technical skill or the ability to dribble precociously. I’m talking about a way of playing the game that can only function when a player’s capacity to gain control in chaos is a matter of such certainty that it begins to be an assumption that feeds his instinct. So that he can go into chaos with such a refinement of skill or understanding that he can take inspiration for granted. So that we can watch, and see that all the moving pieces of the game were in someone’s mind at once, and chance wasn’t able to stop him.
Once again, I’m in awe of your ability to put these vague feelings and impressions into words, Brian. And you picked precisely the clips I would have, they shows all his outrageous ability is just a few, concise minutes. (My god, that goal against Roberto Carlos, it’s like time stands still.)
And a beautiful idea it is indeed Brian. A great post.
Ibra the body should not be able to do what he can do (a la Zidane) and yet I get the feeling that only he would be capable of doing it.
Clarifying, yes. Maddening, sometimes even more so, but heroes without flaws aren’t really heroic.
How bittersweet it was to see this on the top of the page the morning after Ibra failed to show up in Inter’s most important match of the season. He does that sometimes (and this morning he was snapping at Materazzi, which he also does sometimes), but he is also capable of doing things on a football pitch that I have never seen anyone else do. Things that I couldn’t even conceive of until I saw him pull them off.
And for that reason, he has another transcendent ability. He stops time.
One of the essential elements of football is its near-constant movement, with virtually all of the players being in motion (no matter where they are on the pitch and what their relation to the ball may be) and with time being kept by a clock that doesn’t stop. In an almost relativistic way, Ibra is capable of suspending that time/space continuum. It doesn’t really stop, of course (or at least I don’t think that it does), but to those of us who have the honour of seeing him, time stops just as surely as it did for Michael Jordan hanging in mid-air or for Barry Bonds in the split second before his bat made contact with the ball.
There is a tangible break that one could characterise in poetic, musical or visual terms, depending on one’s proclivities, and it changes the breathing patterns of the up to 80,000 people in the ground. What often follows is a collective sigh of disappointment, and more than a few cries of invective aimed at his disdain for the simple, but it is the potential inherent in the break that makes us all come back, and allows us to suspend belief in the laws of physics the next time the ball is played to him.
Ursus, I saw the same body language in Zlatan yesterday that I saw in him in Turin, in the Serie A match against Juve: It’s somewhat illogical, but I think the pressure gets to him in the massive matches, and the way he deals with it is by switching off emotionally. In both that match and last night’s, you could see a lack of urgency to everything he did. There’s an acceptance of the situation, and a strange comfort with it, I think — he nods and applauds all efforts to get the ball to him, but he seems relieved that he can’t get to them, and doesn’t have to actually produce something.
It’s strange, given everything he done to this point in his career, but I think there’s still a little boy inside him that needs, somehow, to grow up and take responsibility; I have no idea what can make that happen.
I think the observation is spot on, but would argue with the cause. I don’t think it is pressure; he’s never lost a Derby and there is no more highly pressured match for a Nerazzuro. And to pick just one other recent example, there was a very tangible sense of pressure in the last five minutes against Parma last month, especially given the context in which that game was played.
Rather than pressure, I would say it is adversity that triggers the switching off (an excellent description of the phenomenon, another form of breaking the continuum, but without any of the potential for magic). It happened in the loss at home to Roma last year too, and last night it seemed as if it began as the ref gave the impression that he was applying diametrically opposed sets of rules at the two ends of the pitch, and was completed when Materazzi went off and Ibra realized that it was not going to be a night full of chances.
As to your last point, I found him a completely maddening player when he was with Ajax and Juve, and sometimes was among those hurling invective at his failures at the beginning of last season. What I’ve realised since is that no external force can ever change him, he really doesn’t give a flying what anyone else thinks, says or does. He doesn’t even always want to be a footballer; he just wants to be Zlatan, on his terms, and his terms alone. And given how breathtakingly sublime those terms can be, I’m very much at peace with that now (not that he cares).
I like your explanation better than mine, Ursus, and I think you’re right — the example of the Parma match is a very convincing one. My way of thinking was taking me down a path that ends with him not being ready for the responsibility his abilities have brought him and, while yours might end there, too, it seems less … final than mine does.
He doesn’t even always want to be a footballer; he just wants to be Zlatan, on his terms, and his terms alone.
This is wonderful, and absolutely right. And, like you, I’m ok with it. (It’s odd, I don’t get angry with him in these moments, I just worry about him. Surely a sign I’ve gone around the bend.)
[...] Zlatan is the most clarifying player in football (Run of Play) [...]
I actually considered delaying the post after the match yesterday, but I decided that even the best player in the world will have a bad game every now and then, and that Inter’s tactical adjustments after losing Materazzi weren’t exactly designed to play to his strengths. (The announcers kept invoking Helenio Herrera, but the formation was so squashed that at times it looked like ctnccio.)
That said, Martha, you’re right about his tendency to switch off (and Ursus, I think it’s a brilliant observation to connect that to his tendency to break continuities) and it’s something that a real portait would have to represent. One of these days I’ll do a sequel. I wanted to use him to represent the idea about accident and intention, but there are so many other things to say about him (among them the great points that you guys have made here) that this barely scratches the surface.
Marvellous post and comments, and I’m so glad you didn’t delay the post, Brian. I can’t remember the last time I saw Zlatan actually perform in a big game, but it has never stopped me from considering him a wonder and a marvel all the same. For all the talents we’re fortunate to see in world football today, I think there are still only a few who genuinely make the sport an art, and Zlatan is an artist, for me: he always makes football more than it is, the way he plays it. And I love that.
I do hope there will be a sequel.
He didn’t have much choice in the Liverpool game. Inter were boxed in at the beginning and when the pressure started to fade from Liverpool the ref sent off Materazzi.
After that it was difficult for the Inter forwards and not helped with Inter midfield’s total relinquishment of control of the ball.
Not that he did much when he did receive it and I am with roswitha in thinking he’s not a big match player.
There are a few of those around actually.
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