Not all football skills are born equal. Slip a nutmeg through the legs of an opponent, and the Vines will be halfway around the world before the poor victim has turned round. Blam one into the top corner and immortality awaits. Fouls, though; fouls only tend to get noticed if they’re profoundly stupid or excessively violent, and that’s a shame. Some fouls are brilliant.
Giorgio Chiellini committed the perfect foul on Cristiano Ronaldo
He was only trying to prevent a goal, but when Juventus’ central defender tripped Cristiano Ronaldo last night, he created something beautiful.
Not all footballers are born equal, either. Take Giorgio Chiellini, who has been at the top of his profession for some time now. But he looks like an extra from a Batman prison scene and plays like -- well, like an extra from a Batman prison scene. We live in world in which central defenders are prized for their elegance and handsomeness and excellent hair as much as they are for kicking bits out of opponents, which is a shame. Sometimes kicking bits out of opponents is brilliant.
Last night, Juventus beat Real Madrid. They did so with a 2-1 score and they did so by harassing them in midfield and terrorising them at the back. Carlos Tevez was at his leashless best and Arturo Vidal did the work of four men, each of those men a seriously good midfielder. But Chiellini? Well, Chiellini stole the show. And he did so with a foul. This foul:
What does the ideal foul need? It needs context: it needs, for example, to be made in a Champions League semi-final with more than 90 minutes gone, in protection of a narrow lead, in the knowledge that conceding one away goal is probably OK but conceding two would be a disaster.
More than context, it needs necessity, for necessity prevents it lapsing into mere cynicism. If the ball had been within reach, or if that hadn’t been Cristiano Ronaldo spinning up to full speed, or if the game had been already lost or handsomely won, this would just be another hack. Instead, everything was in the balance, momentarily, and so somebody needed to be tripped over, immediately.
It needs execution, of course. Nobody is here for clumsiness; equally, nobody really wants to see the application of studs to one of humanity’s most exciting sets of legs. Though there’s probably no completely safe way of tripping over a running man, Chiellini’s timing here is so controlled that Ronaldo has no chance of evading the tackle but is able to tuck, roll and bounce back up for the free-kick in almost one movement. It’s nice, too, that he doesn’t feel the need to spend any time pretending to be injured, though that’s probably more to do with the game time than the tackle. But still.
It needs a booking. And, oh, what a booking. Never was there a yellow so yellow. Some cautions are punishments, some are warnings, some are mistakes. Some, though, are a simple exchange, the wages of defending. Clock in, chop down, take the card and go. Even a player like Chiellini, not usually afraid to make gentle suggestions to a referee, can only make the slightest of gestures towards a complaint.
It needs the tackler to have a giant bandage around his head from an earlier head wound. Obviously.
And if the perpetrator happens to have told the victim — though, really, to be fouled like this is an honour — to stop his yapping 20 minutes earlier, so much the better:
A few hundred years before Jesus was born, Socrates proposed an unknowable world of perfect Forms, each of which could only be reflected corruptly in the sensory world. A couple of thousand years later, Chiellini has neatly proved him wrong. Here is the Platonic form of the Good Foul, of which all others are imperfect reflections. Here is a booking that mother bookings and father bookings will show to their infant bookings, in the hope that one day, they might one day grow up to be even half as magnificent a booking. Here is Rodin’s The Trip.
Thank you, Giorgio. Thank you.
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