One of the hard things about forming an outlook on the World Cup is that when an event gets this much attention, the flow of commentary is so fast and broad that every possible angle is exhausted and trivial positions develop a kind of insubstantial politics. Conventional wisdom starts to seem like an ideology, and if you’re not careful, your own feelings about what happens will be dictated by where you want to stand in relation to that ideology rather than by what you actually think. There’s a pundit position, a cognoscenti backlash, an uber-cognoscenti counter-backlash, and so on till after midnight. Your heart and the stadium get farther and farther apart.
Case in point: two opinions that put you on roughly the same line of anti-pundit knowingness would be “the first round of games was actually great” and “Switzerland weren’t that exciting yesterday; Spain were just terrible.” Maybe you really feel those things, or have numbers to back them up. But in most cases, I’d guess that the attraction of these stances has a lot to do with the fact that they put some space between you and the thousand-mile pandemonium of cliches blasting out of 
the TV studios and the pages of your favorite newspaper. It’s not only that they make you sound like you know what you’re talking about, although there’s no discounting the lure of savvy disaffectedness. They also just turn down the volume.
You can’t live like that, though, or all you’re ever doing is retreating. It’s a losing battle, but I’m trying to stay as close to the stadium as I can from eight thousand miles, twelve open Firefox tabs, and an awareness of the existence of Alan Shearer away. And from where I’m sitting, the first games were pretty dire. And Switzerland, to whatever extent this matters, saved the tournament between last night and the hat trick Messi gave Higuain this morning.
Watching these games has gotten me thinking about what we’re actually looking for when we turn on a soccer match. A 0-0 draw can be a beautiful apocalypse, but only if conditions are right. We’re accustomed to associating goals with pleasure because, honestly, it’s never boring to watch somebody score, and ten straight shatteringly brilliant 0-0 draws would leave you weeping at the futility no matter how much you appreciated every last display of well-tooled organization. This is a game of anticipation and release, and it has to come down to more than watching 
sound tactics chalk each other out, or else it’s just calculators, and “interesting.” I’m probably too hopped up on the mysticism of this stuff for my own good, but I want elevation; the best route to that is probably what’s usually called “good football,” but I’ll take players scrambling to overcome their own shortcomings or improvising on a dime in a heartbeat over a game of exact adjustments and no drama. I hate the “stats have no place in this game because it’s all about heart” line as much as anyone, but there we are.
In this tournament, we’ve been treated to hourly updates on what makes soccer wrong for the American psyche—our games make sense, yours don’t, or our games are virtuous, yours mean giving up on life and hating Israel—so this is weary ground, and fatally simplistic, probably. But it occurs to me that the thrills in American sports are almost always retrospective: something amazing happens, you process it, and then you experience disbelief and pleasure over the fact that it really took place. Or anyway, there are enough retrospective, this-really-happened thrills that the prospective thrills—a 50-yard-pass sailing toward a wide receiver—are 
essentially invalidated if they don’t produce a result. There are very few American highlight films of brilliant moves that didn’t completely succeed.
In soccer (this is obvious, but whatever) the tension of the game is a rise-and-fall punctuated by a lot of thrills in prospect. You calm down a little when the ball is around the center line, sit forward a little whenever it’s in the area, gasp whenever somebody takes a shot. If it was a good shot, it stays exciting, even if it doesn’t lead to a goal. Actual goals then become massive thrills-in-retrospect, but the biggest sign that YouTube really isn’t destroying our ability to watch soccer is that highlight videos still regularly include missed shots, runs that end with the ball being lost, and so on. How thrilling thrills-in-prospect are is a matter of feel, as much as anything; there might be ways to quantify it, but I’m not convinced that they would comprehend as many variables as our intuition deals with all the time. Again, that’s not to downplay the importance of understanding the routes and numbers, but on some level, you have to trust electricity and your own response.
The first round of games in the World Cup didn’t produce a lot of goals: fewer than ever, empirically. But they also didn’t produce a lot of terror or fire. With exceptions—Germany’s silk-spinning, Argentina’s weird, wayward probing—they largely just slid past. There were fewer chances, but there was also a scarcity of moments where the ball got warmer and the tension kept turning the screw. There weren’t a lot of thrills-in-prospect. Everything was just…interesting.
And that’s why, for me, Spain-Switzerland tore open the crust of the earth. If you’ve followed this site for any length of time, you know that as much as I venerate Barcelona and midfield playmakers and balls played to feet, I have a special place in my brain for inspired last-ditch defense. I enjoyed France-Scotland, as I might have mentioned. It’s true that neither team looked sensational yesterday, and Xavi was off, and Torres was tired, and Iniesta couldn’t hit a charging elephant, and the entire Switzerland team was scattered and rattled during the entire second half. But that was all secondary—what mattered at the time was that Spain were too good for Switzerland, kept the game pretty steadily at a high hum of thrill-in-prospect, and still went down to a Swiss team that caught a current of inspiration and won the war against its own mistakes.
It wasn’t “good football” from Spain (it was pretty close), but it was some kind of greatness from Switzerland, who had no business doing what they did and did it anyway. Fernandes’s goal was not a thing of beauty; it was a piece of pure chaos that seemed to defy the will of the universe and then, in the next instant, to fulfill it. The exhausted Swiss defenders closing down the ball again and again in the second half, the crazed blundering knockabout counters with Derdiyok, Spain’s patience, the sense that there was always too much time for them not to score, every shot Benaglio barely saved—it was real drama, and whether it means anything or not, whether anyone will even remember it after Argentina and Uruguay and Greece, much less the knockout rounds, it felt like salvation when it happened. If you are one month old, Switzerland is the most awesome team of your lifetime. Let’s hope more of this madness shines through once this World Cup turns on its lights.
Read More: Spain, Switzerland, World Cup
by Brian Phillips · June 17, 2010
No-one seemed to mention throughout the broadcast that the Swiss youth teams are very, very good, and have been for a while. It makes sense to say that the senior team would catch up eventually. Derdiyok is one of the many waiting in the wings for Switzerland. They’re not far from being a perennial power.
@Joe H. A lot of people are going to remember some of these young players’ names thanks to yesterday. Derdiyok’s almost-wondergoal was the thrill-in-prospect of the entire tournament to this point.
Yes. Yes yes yes. It’s one thing to see great attacking undone by–for lack of a better word–”brave” defending, as we saw between Spain and the Swiss. It’s another when teams try to attack and get nowhere not because of great defending but merely they’re just not sharp enough, as we’ve seen innumerable times (most sadly from the African sides, who’ve now combined for a single goal from the run-of-play in eight matches. Sigh). I’m not sure what’s worse–the cynicism of Uruguay leaving a jewel like Forlan stranded up top because they’re too worried about an obviously toothless French side, or the depressing mediocrity of, say, Slovenia and Algeria exchanging wrist-slaps like middle-schoolers on the playground.
I also prefer the last ditch tackle than the hum drum of catenaccio where three defenders snuff out any whisper of a “thrill-in-prospect.”
Brian, I love your comparison of American “thrills in retrospect” vs. the “thrills in prospect” nature of footy. It’s an eloquent way of stating the difference between football and futbol, and I look forward to trying to reiterate it the next time I find myself arguing with someone who is taking the “Jim-Rome-soccer-is-boring-because-there-are-no-goals” argument.
Watching the Swiss victory replayed last night, I repeatedly found myself getting really excited by Spain’s buildup, even though I already knew the result and knew that no goal would be forthcoming. It’s the magic of the game that thrills in prospect can be thrilling, even when the outcome is already known!
Great stuff.
The standardized roles we learn in school (or from our media outlets) carry over into society and the average adult rarely uses their own abilities (if they’ve been developed at all) to question the world around them. Instead, the public is fashioned into newspaper readers, or broadcast news/blog viewers as opposed to citizens.
This role helps to continue the illusion of individuality and supports a larger power structure by allowing people to feel in control. “The working of the “democratic” electoral system is of course as follows. A person is trained up stringently to certain opinions; then he is given a vote, called a “free” and fully enfranchised person; then he votes (subject, of course, to new and stringent orders from the press, where occasionally his mentor commands him to vote contrary to what he has been taught) strictly in accordance with his training. His support for everything that he has been taught to support can be practically guaranteed. Hence, of course, the vote of the free citizen is a farce: education and suggestion, the imposition of the will of the ruler through the press and other publicity channels, canceling it. So “democratic” government is far more effective than subjugation by physical conquest.” (Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Educationalist State’)
@Ryan So…it’s only an illusion that I liked the Switzerland game?
The same things that you felt during Switzerland-Spain I felt during Honduras’ tragic loss against Chile. Chile dominated the game, but the dogged defending that Los Catrachos and her keeper brought to the game allowed a clearly beat team to play like giants despite the loss. The number of desperate tackles and goal-line clearances in that game held more wonder and nail-biting excitement that any other game (minus the US-England game…. also one of last ditch defense) in this tournament.
@Brian Phillips Your opening just reminded me of that quote which I associated with punditry.
Calling Switzerland exciting? For that to be considered (universally) true, the arch-pundit of obscurantism would need to sacrifice some kind of baby at the alter.
That said, I enjoyed the game too. However, for every moment of footballing joy I encountered, it was doubly squashed by the impotence of Spain’s final stroke.
Oh, and El Nino was awful.
@Ryan The shattering thing about inserting that quote here is that you’re suggesting Bob Ley might have control over what we think. And if that’s true…I just…I think I’d rather go on living in denial.
@Brian Phillips Hard as it is to believe, I think he’s putting words in a lot of (glassy-eyes and) open mouths.
If what you like about soccer is ‘thrills in prospect’, you seem like an absolute natural to start watching cricket.
To expand on that: cricket is rubbish as highlights. It’s all the time spent watching things nearly happen which builds up the excitement when something actually does.
@Harry I’m not sure that’s true during the run of play in cricket; even a great bowling performance can only be construed as such after the ball has been bowled, or a great shot after it is played, no matter whether it results in runs or no. Perhaps the closest I can think to the anticipatory thrill in cricket is the sight of a fielder vis-a-vis a struck ball. But then football too is made up of thrills of both parts. Anyway – I agree with your end statement, which is that this author ought to enjoy cricket.
Brian, this is lots of food for thought, and a very good post.
@roswitha I guess it’s that my experience of watching cricket is all about passages of play, and the buildup and dissipation of tension as the balance of power changes over time. Even though it’s a sequence of repeated discrete actions, the key unit of time in cricket seems to me to be an over or a half-hour or even a session. In some ways the best of cricket is when the the bowling is brilliant and the batsmen are struggling to score, and the ball keeps whistling past the edge of the bat and it feels like a wicket will fall at any moment… rather than the actual moment when the wicket falls.
what I meant to say was “…the key unit of time in cricket seems to me to be an over or a half-hour or even a session, rather than a single delivery.’
And with that I will leave the tortuous cricket comparisons and say nice article, Brian.
Favorite post I’ve seen in a long time on here, and that’s saying something.
The constant coverage of the event is an interesting commentary on where we currently stand in society as a whole. Much like politics (or anything else, I guess) are we actually concerned with the issue at hand, or are we more interested in consuming the commentary on that issue or event to the effect of supporting our (correct) position to the end?
For the most part, I stay away from Twitter or an overabundance of punditry. It’s just too much for me. I watch the games. Maybe it’s ignorance (or arrogance) on my part, but I feel I will learn more from spending my valuable time watching the ball the bounce than anything.
As such, Re: US-Slovenia. Thank you, but I don’t need a full-blown analysis of how much the ref bottled this one, or 9 billion tweets cursing him. The Edu goal and the accompanying ultra slow-motion replays are forever indelibly burned into my psyche of what it means to be a US fan. And that’s enough for me.
Brian –
A question: Do you watch with the sound on or off?
Don’t mean to be daft. Far from it. But if your enjoyment of the game — any game — is at risk of being co-opted by incessant chatter, I wonder what voices you permit to sound their call. (I also wonder if you think John Harkes is as mindnumbingly awful as I do.)
Thanks!
-SM!
@Sparkle Motion! The argument here is not that match commentators affect my enjoyment of the game. But yeah, I find John Harkes pretty mind-numbing.
@Brian Phillips Of course. I caught the argument of the piece. I’ve simply been curious about your take on the assault-to-our-minds-and-ears that is John Harkes, and this, in its way, seemed like the best occasion to ask.
Unrelated question: Are you a fan of Carl Phillips? Yusef Komunyakaa? (As poets, of course, not players.)
Okay, one more try.
This post, and this game, catalyzed two things that have been rattling around in my head since the start of the World Cup: what is the quality that soccer and hockey both possess, that other sports don’t? Further, is that quality’s being lost on the general American sports fan why both sports struggle for US sports mindshare?
I’ve heard it said before by a soccer-fan friend of mine, that (American) football is the ultimate game of execution: after all the conditioning, scheme, preparation, film review, gameplan, and motivation, the players that execute the plan the best win. Meanwhile, soccer is the opposite; it’s a game of creation, of improvisation. Coaches can try to maximize their talent, but ultimately the games are won and lost by that talent.
Brian, I like this theory better. The winding and unwinding of tension. The build, the anticipation, the release. The electricity in the stands building to the square of the intensity of the players. The gasp as a centering pass crosses in front of the net; the “OOHHHAWWWW” as the redirect misses . . . it’s all the same.
The action-reaction-analysis cycle of (American) football, repeated a hundred times a game, fits perfectly with the way Americans seem to digest and react to information . . . simply putting your finger on the pulse of the game and synching your heartbeat to it for two hours isn’t the way we’re conditioned to react. But I think hockey, and soccer, can only be experienced that way.
Brilliant, brilliant piece. Thanks again.
Peace
Ty
Re: watching WC games with the sound off. I’ve been living in Vienna and can’t watch all the games at pubs, so when I’m home I’ve been watching on Eurosporttv (can’t pick up ESPN3 or UniVision online broadcasts), where there is no commentary. One simply hears the crowd (and the sounds of the crowd, or the One Sound, but that is for a past post) and the sounds of the struck ball and players groaning, or whatever. It’s quite nice, but was something to get used to: where’s the guy telling me stuff? Then I realized it was odd for me to “miss” that (I did feel strangely lonely at first), but then I felt like I was watching the game from a tunnel; there was the noise of fans, but I could not (usually) see them. Then I felt good.
Should we mute games, watch them, say, to classical music? Jazz? Our own words (verbal Tweet comments)? Or would music distort our experience?
@Casey Wiley I’d say it depends on the game and your own tastes. I often can’t take commentators early in the morning, so I’ll put on music instead. I miss the crowd, though.
Almost unsettling how much difference the audio accompaniment makes, but then that’s true of a live match, too, I guess—not quite the same deal if you’re in front of a guy with a bell.
@Brian Phillips Does the music you, or anyone out there, (sometimes) listen to accompanying games tend to change from game to game, team to team? Or does it mostly depend on what you’re feeling at the time, possibly unrelated to the games? Say, Metallica Black Album vs. V’s The Four Seasons. (Maybe the question is essentially this, and needs not be “answered”: why do we listen to what we listen to, and why does this sometimes happen when we’re watching soccer games on TV?)
I confess I rarely notice–but swear I will now!–but aren’t most highlights set to music? Seems like many of YouTube’s are.
@Brian Phillips I find watching the univision.com feed with 7th-grade Spanish knocking about somewhere in the cobwebbed recesses of my brain provides a nice balance between preserving engagement with the full sensory experience of the game on TV, and dealing with numbing commentary and analysis in English. There’s something about the rhythm of the Spanish-language announcers that follows the ebb and flow of the game much more closely than the ESPN commentators, who often get sidetracked in analysis and minutiae, and have to get pulled back into the action of the game. Plus, getting to hear an announcer call David Beckham “Spice Boy” is priceless.
Great stuff. Even the comments are exceptional. I like reading academic polemics about footy as much as I enjoy watching and/or playing the game itself.
Hi Brian, this is a beautiful blog you’ve got going. I’m not a huge soccer fan, yet, but communities like you’ve fostered here might just put me over the edge.
Thanks.