Did you know that Sir Alex Ferguson still doubts his tactical nous? The headline leaves no room for doubt: “Sir Alex Ferguson: I still doubt my tactical nous”. I find this sad. Sir Alex would seem to have it all: a long record of championships, a range of expensive outerwear, a ruddy Glaswegian complexion, a knighthood—but if you can’t trust in your own nous, what is it all worth, really?
On the other hand, if you have your nous, you have everything. It’s probably obvious to all that “Jose Mourinho’s tactical nous shows his Nietzschean qualities”, but it helps to have it stated in the pages of the Times. The author of that article slyly leaves unmentioned the decisive point that Nietzsche was a classical philologist by training, and early in his career worked on a book called Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Late in that work Nietzsche speculates on the creation of the world. What created the world? Why, a vast nous. And how does the nous think of its creation? Why, as a game, a children’s game, a game of kicking a ball perhaps. Astonishing that so young a thinker would come so close to the ultimate truth of things—and yet he abandoned his book, leaving it unfinished. Though he could not have known it, the time was not yet ripe: association football had defined itself but a decade earlier, and nearly a century would pass before the birth of Mourinho. Nevertheless, we must give Nietzsche credit for being the first to intuit the deep structure that links soccer and nous.
This can be of little consolation to Arsène Wenger, whose “lack of tactical nous” is well-known, or so my Google searches indicate, and seems to infect his team, which, wise analysts say, is often nousless, or anyway nous-impaired.
I have also discovered that while tactical nous is much discussed, little is said about strategic nous. (The only sport-related reference to it I can find attributes that quality to Lance Armstrong.) It seems to me that, should one be so fortunate as to possess nous, one would want to use it in developing one’s overall strategy as well as one’s particular tactics. But I know little about such things, being an American to whom such terminology is utterly foreign. The Oxford English Dictionary indeed confirms that my people aren’t in the nous business: in the sense that I have been using the word, it is “colloq. (chiefly Brit.)” and means “common sense, practical intelligence, ‘gumption’.” Puzzling, since “common sense” and “gumption” mean very different things, and one might say that Arsène Wenger lacks one without denying him the other . . . but who am I to challenge the OED?
I like the examples the OED gives: One G. Jackson, in his Diaries & Lett. (1819), writes, “They would not send Oakeley. He has no nouse.” Alas, poor Oakeley! F. A. Kemble, in his Rec. Later Life (1847), opines, “I think his doing so exhibits considerable nous in a brute,” which surely must be an anticipatory reference to Gennaro Gattuso. Someone wrote in the London Evening Standard in 1959, “He has enough political nous not to wish to carry the can for people like Aneurin Bevan.” Replace “Aneurin Bevan” with “Sam Allardyce” and all sorts of possibilities suggest themselves.
I have lived without this word too long. Here in America we lack Bovril, barley water, Marmite, nous. One of those deficiencies I shall remedy.
Read More: American Notes
by Alan Jacobs · March 17, 2011
We Americans substitute an adventurous recklessness and independent spirit for nous, a la Alexi Lalas’ choice of beard and hair vintage 1994.
Sometimes I think that Wenger doesn’t know the meaning of ‘savoir faire’
This article is a product of a lack of organizational nous.
Taking off from poor Oakeley, are we sure that “nous” and “nouse” are the same thing? At the very least, when we’re talking about Rafa Benitez, we should always add the e.
That’s assuming we should use the word at all when we’re talking about Rafa Benitez, obviously.
Barcelona has a whole camp of Nou
I know for true that Alexander Netherton does not know the real definition of “spendthrift”.
I surmise this article is hinting at the ambiguous usage of the term ‘nous’.
But I’ve always lacked article nous.
Yet I surely am never a snous.
Any history of Nous really ought to go back to Anaxagoras.
Ah, but do you fall on the ‘nous-from-experience’ or ‘nous-as-an-inate-ability’ side of the debate? Genaro Gattuso would suggest the latter, whose transcendental brutishness has a certain primordial, Titanic quality.
On a slightly related note: Imagining Gattuso as Prometheus works rather well. A lowly contender to the throne of Olympus, challenging the more skilled, effeminate Olympic gods of the game with wits, grit and nous, rather than skill. Chained to his midfield position, in retribution for his reconquering of the ball from the deities…
On the subject of the OED, I was delighted to learn yesterday that the first edition was compiled with the assistance of a criminal lunatic who later cut off his own penis.
What this teaches us about nous or football I wouldn’t like to say.
Nous is more or less the noun equivalent of the savvy adjectival suffix, inasmuch as” having tactical nous” is pretty much the same thing as “being tactics-savvy”. I don’t much care for that OED definition much, at least not in Fergusonio-Mourinhian contexts. It usually refers really the ability to perceive situations astutely and act on them promptly – “thinking things through” or, to define it by what it’s not, “being difficult to pull a fast one over”. I suppose its closest US-English cognates would be “guile” and “shrewdness”.
Alan, here, displaying nous-nous.
Wenger is a Frenchman.
nous.
hehehe.
I would like to imagine Nietzsche’s term paper on the creation of the world was titled, “Start Spreading The Nous; Ich Lebe Today.”
@Snap Wilson That’s the most pain inflicted on me in a long time.
I think, as usual, that the entire question hinges on how this relates to Steven Gerrard. Is he in possession of an excess of nous, or do his wayward 70 yard runs/passes/furrowed-brow-glares into the corner flag indicate an utter lack thereof? I’m inclined toward a third option; that he is the sole nous savant in football; that he possesses an excess of nous in spite of his utter lack of knowledge about nous itself. Zarathustra, basically, sans the crippling self-awareness. Nietzsche would break into a coughing fit at the thought.
Either way, I propose the following: that the more inclined one is to nonchalantly pass the ball sideways regardless of position on the field, the greater the possibility that the word ‘nous’ will be used to describe their play by Martin Tyler while commentating on games in his gilded sound studio in Cornwall.
Nous is the kind of knowledge you gain through doing. For example, a builder may have nous, but an architect will never quite reach such a revered plane. It’s the highest level of English wisdom, in direct opposition to those dirty foreign tricks like abstract thought and pushing-in.