Your hands can’t hit what your eyes can’t see. —Muhammad Ali
I’m off this week slaking a thirst for lawns and paperwork, but this can’t wait. Paul Scholes retired today, meaning that we are officially old, you and I, and children born from this day forth will never see jungles or snow.
Like Matt LeTissier, Scholes was a great English player who seemed to have no effect on the way the rest of the English played football, even as his game contained the promise of total revolution. (Not only Xavi but Zidane and Thierry Henry saw that he was the scariest thing in the Premiership during an era when the superstar English midfielders were Beckham, Lampard and Gerrard.) To some extent, that’s just a sentence about probability and skill sets, but it’s also about temperament: on the pitch, Scholes had a Pirlo-like ability to drift outside the center of your attention, dominating without needing you to notice. It took a mind for the game to fathom his mind for the game. The result was that little kids didn’t grow up wanting to be Paul Scholes; superstar footballers did.
What I love about this video, a featurette from ’95-96, is that almost all the elements of his career are already there—the thunder-of-Christ goals, the steady self-effacement (“I’ve never seen anyone with my name on their shirt. I’ve seen it once. My mate.”)—and yet no one even mentions his passing. Admittedly, he was more famous as a goalscorer early in his career, but when Ferguson calls him the “Cantona of the reserves,” it’s still a little like hearing Iniesta called “the Spanish Drogba.” Except that, again, it somehow makes sense, because the nature of Scholes’s game was always to beat you in such a way that you couldn’t quite tell how he did it. This gets lost amid all the jokes about his tackling, but he was one of the game’s true reserves of mystery, and as such, he was one of a kind.
Read More: Manchester United, Paul Scholes
by Brian Phillips · May 31, 2011
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I’m really glad you wrote this, Brian. As the perpetrator of many tweets about Scholes’s tackling, I was surprised this morning by how sad I was to hear of his retirement. You could see it coming, of course, because he had lost so much of his speed and agility — this season in particular he seemed almost immobile, especially in comparison to the still-lively Giggs (no jokes, please) — but still . . . what an amazing player. Whenever the ball was on his foot, I sit up in my chair and think, Okay, what’s he going to do this time?
It’s especially interesting to note what his peers think about him: Zidane and Xavi both say he was the best midfielder of his time. Remarkable commendations.
I see I slipped into the present tense at the end of that first paragraph. Nostalgia doing its work.
Wow, I haven’t seen this one before. Maybe because I was only 11 years old then and knew jack about anything. Still a great video to watch, love it!
I always felt a tang of dread when the ball landed at Scholes feet, knowing what the bastard was capable of. I know this is dreadfully indecent, but I won’t miss him. I’ll be sighing with relief.
Kudos, Brian. Despite being a rabid Scouser, I shall miss Scholes’ contributions to the game. He is, and will always be, the ultimate wingman on the pitch.
@Alan Jacobs At least Ferguson didn’t give him Sheringham’s epitaph: “Most strikers can’t stick around because they lose their pace. Sheringham stuck around because he didn’t have any pace to lose.” Though this is sort of true for Scholes (though his game changed a TON over the course of his career).
Best ginger footballer ever?
This: ‘It took a mind for the game to fathom his mind for the game. The result was that little kids didn’t grow up wanting to be Paul Scholes; superstar footballers did.’
Superbly put . . .
@smk73 Matthias Sammer!
“The result was that little kids didn’t grow up wanting to be Paul Scholes; superstar footballers did.”
Rubbish!
Most of the MLS wants to be just like him… they’ve just been watching the wrong bits.
@Brian Davis hey, whatever the refs let you get away with (PROBLEM NUMBER ONE IN AMERICAN SOCCER)
@smk73 John Arne Riise? (sort of serious)
@Joe A problem so profoundly disturbing to me that I started a website about just that (RefRefs.com)!
@Brian Davis I play at the semi-pro level in the United States. We have an etat with the other teams about what we’ll allow because, honestly, the refs will let you get away with pretty much ANYTHING. (If I put a nickel in a jar every time I got tackled from behind and took one out every time a foul was called, I’d need more than one jar)
@Joe I’ve watched my fair share of NCAA soccer and, honestly, I’ve only seen one game called well (I think it was Northwestern vs Ohio State or something). If that’s the foundation upon which we hope to build our domestic sport, we shan’t be surprised when the walls start cracking. The shocking thing to me is how FEW serious injuries we see in MLS.
@Brian Davis The ACC teams play at a very high level, so it’s not that the refs let them get away with much but that they’re not committing a ton of fouls, but the SoCon…. my knees hurt (oh, and I played scout team against the Women and that’s even worse in terms of fouls and physicality…. it’s a roving scrum more or less). When we scrimmage the RailHawks, it’s one thing (you expect a high level out of those guys). When we play a pub team, entirely another.
really? a piece on scholes, the finest player I’ve ever seen live and it becomes a debate on college refs
wtf!?!?
How did a post about retiring-great Paul Scholes turn into a discussion about college soccer on the East Coast? Of all the posts we will see this year, I doubt any will carry the meaning or importance of this one. I guess though, like Scholes himself, this post has the “ability to drift outside the center of your attention”.
@LC My humblest apologies. I fell for the “make a bad joke about his tackling” angle.
I think that, if anything not living is worth eulogizing, then Scholes’ casual, pinpoint, 42 yard, cross-field pass is as good a subject as any. It was rarely visually stunning because the geometry had already been done before his boot ever scuffed the turf. It was like watching (upside-down, mind you) a fat kid hurtle along a zip line.
Totally, beautifully, clinically inevitable.
And his one-touch passing under pressure looked almost accidental, but for the impossible accuracy of it. His art was in the fact that he seemed to work the hardest when he did the least, and work the least when he did the incredible.
But let’s face it: His tackling was comical.
@Brian Davis I’m as big a Scholes fan as any. I do wonder, had he not come along when he did (and Ferguson not been in the tenuous position he was) whether he would have found his place in today’s game in England. Would we be telling him to ship his game elsewhere?
@Brian Davis Don’t apologize to me good sir, apologize to Paul.
Soccer (Football) will NEVER become a good product in the college ranks. The reason is that they severely limit practice times because they actually want them to go to classes and study.
Soccer is such a technical sport that players need as much time/training as possible to develop early. Any kid who has gone the NCAA route is already severely handicapping himself against European competition of a similar age.
Good players should go pro right away and the MLS should concentrate on developing a youth system, where players earn scholarship $ for years played in the development program. That way, they have something to fall back on.
I think the beauty of RoP is precisely that a paean for Paul Scholes would descend (ascend? move sideways?) to a debate about the quality of officiating in the MLS.
Apropos of Ferguson’s back handed compliment of Sheringham, I would say that it seemed at times as though Scholes had sold his soul to the Devil for magic boots, except he had no soul to sell. What? Redheads don’t have souls. 😛
Paul Scholes, I salute you.
I first became aware of your talents in the summer of 1993, when watching England’s U18 team win the European Championship (a brilliant write-up of that team by Rob Smyth here: http://bit.ly/2QaQPF). You lookedlike the last kid to be picked for a kickabout – squat, ginger and wearing kit that always looked two sizes too big. And your face was round then. Like a big Edam cheese. But you had dynamite in your right foot and you darted around the pitch with purpose. You couldn’t have played in a less English way whilst looking more English. What a little enigma you were.
I remember there being a bit of a debate about whether you would forge a career as a ‘trequartista’ or ‘neuf et demi’, but of course you were soon plopped into the centre of United’s 4-4-2. And you just got on with it. You scored goals: http://bit.ly/kySXs8
As an England supporter, I really did think you were part of a brave new dawn. Hoddle seemed to understand you, placing you in a three-man midfield alongside Gascoigne and Ince and giving you enough freedom to ghost around and cause trouble. When England won ‘Le Tournoi’ and you did this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaCoAGfBkok against Italy, I really did think we were going to conquer the world.
But then Gazza broke down, Hod started talking cobblers and England went back to good old 4-4-2. Keegan believed in you, but couldn’t put the right team together to support you and Svennis was ultimately happy to shift you to the wing in favour of Lampard and Stevie G. On the wing! For fuck’s sake. What a waste.
Understandably, you chose to sod off. Who could blame you? Shame on England for not realising just how special you were.
@Joe I’d disagree in the sense that one of the defining characteristics of Scholes’ game at its peak was the ability to time runs into the box to finish moves. Once he lost what pace he had, he couldn’t do it.
I’m sure I can’t be the only one who thinks that some of these tributes to Scholes are a little bit over the top. The broadsheet eulogies to Scholes read like the statements that accompany the deaths of those taken too soon – young soldiers or victims of traffic accidents, where to say anything less than superlative would be unforgivably insensitive. Too soon for anything but unalloyed praise. Aside from a couple of cursory, comic references to his tackling they paint a picture so idealised that these tributes just ring hollow to me. The tributes paid by his fellow professionals are taken of evidence of his worthiness to be considered among the greats – an unappreciated genius, a players’ player. Leaving aside the fairly facile point that Zidane (who has form with eccentric praise and who would probably cite Enzo Francescoli as his favourite player) and Xavi could hardly say, as they would be entitled to “He’s good, better than most but he’s no me”. But it’s exactly the commendations given to Scholes by his fellow professionals that explain why the effusive tributes to him don’t ring true. Scholes may have been a player’s player, but for that precise reason he could never be a fan’s player, a football lover’s player. Yes, its too soon the initial phase of mourning hasn’t quite passed yet but maybe in our heart of hearts we should accept that for all his technical brilliance, Scholes was a fundamentally unloveable player who didn’t stand for anything.
Scholes was not unloveable in the sense that despite the pleasure of watching him play, there was always uneasiness that in private he might be a total dick. He was not unloveable in the fashion of a menacing weirdo like Roy Keane, a spoilt, preening brat like Cristiano Ronaldo or a manager’s lickspittle like Gary Neville. These players were and are merely unlikeable. Scholes’ problem was not likeability; rather he was a player constitutionally incapable of inspiring any emotion stronger than that.
Justified raptures at Scholes’ rare technical brilliance can’t compensate for the fact that he stood for nothing, despite his abundant gifts. There is no need to challenge the attempts to locate Scholes in the pantheon – the best English midfielder of his generation, almost certainly; the best in Europe, possibly. His talent is not at issue. Watching Scholes latch on to a ball breaking loose on the edge of the area and dispatching it with a ferocity that made commentators glad they had kept the word ‘aplomb’ in the repertoire for so long was one of the great pleasures of the last couple of footballing decades. Furthermore, unlike most such gifted players with the misfortune to be born English, Scholes actually won things – the plaudits of fellow players acknowledge, rather than substitute for, real medals and trophies. But still, Scholes’ place in the pantheon might be questioned because all this meant nothing.
This is not just a matter of Scholes’ shyness and reticence in dealing with the media. That was just a symptom of an absence of personality and charisma that was as evident on the pitch as off it. Scholes was a technically brilliant player without being a flair player, a bad tackler without being a dirty player, a winner without being a champion. All his outrageous talents couldn’t make him a fantasista – a player who makes us dream, as Samuel Eto’o described Messi. His indiscipline couldn’t make him a Byronic anti-hero driven by inner demons like a Zidane or a Cantona. He couldn’t become a symbol of his club a la Maldini or Del Piero with Giggs, Neville and even Keane having better claims to embody United’s 90s renaissance. Even his Englishness couldn’t assume any importance as a symbol of the backward looking cultural philistinism of that nation’s footballing psyche and its long history of failure to recognise the talent in its midst from Hoddle to Waddle to Gascoigne and Le Tissier. His retirement from international football epitomised this: a meaningless act, signifying nothing more than a meek unwillingness to fight his corner against inferior rivals.
Scholes could not symbolise anything broader than himself. Even at the end, he could not embody any value. The rumours that he would end his career at his hometown club of Oldham Athletic raised the prospect of Scholes coming to stand as a beacon of earthy integrity and a rebuke to the swaggering mercenary character of contemporary football – Scholes as a throwback whose reluctance to play the fame game represented , a sentimental but perhaps genuine closeness to roots that recognised the intrinsic value of football for its own sake and the communality of fans with clubs, with players, with the game. Instead, he just quit.
Scholes was almost without doubt the best English midfielder of his generation. But he will be remembered with admiration, not love. Grandparents will not mist over recounting his career to an as yet unborn generation of fans. In the end Scholes was a void, a spectre, an empty vessel, a civil servant, a player of pointless virtuosity, a Mick Taylor never a Jagger or Richards. Scholes excelled in the field of football AS football, but in the realm of football as metaphor, as drama, as allegory, as something more than 11 men kicking a ball about; he has to be considered mostly insignificant. Danny Blanchflower claimed that the game of football is first of all about glory. So how should we treat a player like Scholes who is defined, if at all, by a deliberate refusal of that glory? We should pay all our due respects, but not mourn him.
@MGoodwin You’re probably right about his long-term legacy, but for me, his resistance to easy narrativization (Byronic anti-hero, fantasista, etc.) is exactly what made him compelling. Soccer’s not lacking in characters; it’s fascinating to be confronted with a cipher.
Scholes was invisible unless you looked right at him, and seemed to want it and plan it that way. That may not make him a folk hero, but it made him awfully interesting.
@Brian Phillips See your point there, he is compelling just because he seems to be such a blank (although awfully interesting might be pushing it!) Interesting in a way that other sports seem to be full of very successful people with no apparent personality or broader narrative whereas Scholes seems to be almost one of a kind within football
Check out my take on Scholes’ retirement http://inforthehattrick.blogspot.com/2011/05/theres-only-one-paul-scholes.html
@smk73 No… Stuart McCall was, you Silly Billy
Thank goodness the thug Scholes will not shame football any longer.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the only reason he came out of retirement again was because he couldn’t stand being eulogized any more!
Even in such a wonderfully well-written way as this!