How to deal with the dark arts of Sergio Ramos

Welcome back to Tactically Naive, our column looking back at the last seven days of kicking balls into nets. Our sponsors this week are Gareth Bale’s ponytail, and Loris Karius’ ponytail. Visit Ponytail: A Land of Contrasts.

There are, it turns out, many flavours of greatness.

Having won their third Champions League title in a row, Zinedine Zidane’s Real Madrid are secure in their greatness. The last side to win three in a row were Bayern Munich, in 1974, back when it was the European Cup and Franz Beckenbauer was doing his thing. Before that came Ajax, and Johan Cruyff. Company doesn’t get more esteemed than that.

But those sides weren’t just serial winners, they were revolutionaries. They reshaped the game: Cruyff and his lieutenants switching positions; Beckenbauer gliding through the lines from back to front. Today’s onfield revolution, this freewheeling carnival of intensity and pressing and half-spaces, is being prodded along by Pep Guardiola and the coaching hothouse of the Bundesliga. Madrid are slightly removed from all this excitement: merely an excellent side with excellent players and a healthy helping of diabolical luck.

Which isn’t to suggest that they are somehow out of step with their times. Football’s other contemporary revolution is a more nebulous thing, measured in stranger metrics than goals and trophies. The Champions League is the battleground for Europe’s superclubs, as they project themselves (and so their owners, and so their owners’ money and reputations) around the world. Here, at this intersection of celebrity and finance and advertising, Real Madrid are untouchable.

This team’s footballing greatness, then, lies in their almost inhuman ability to navigate the vagaries of this particular cup competition. The Champions League, with its seedings and its group stage, isn’t quite the random mess that the European Cup was; there’s no way Gazprom and the rest would pay all that money for somebody important to get knocked out in September.

But still, there’s must-win and can’t-lose games all through the winter and into spring, and the opposition is by its very nature among the best. In that context, it’s quite something that Madrid simply don’t mess up when it matters. And when they almost do — as against Juventus in the semi-final second leg — they find a way through.

The overall impression is one of monstrous, self-fulfilling entitlement. Some teams have confidence, some have belief. Madrid exist at a level above, in a cocoon of absolute aristocratic assurance They know that the universe will give them what they know that they deserve. It is, in its own way, as intimidating as the quickest attacking line or the most perfectly executed counter-press. It is pure ego: heated, tempered, and weaponised. They are the best team. The grandest of all the equipes. And oh, but they know it.

Speaking of threepeats, congratulations to Lyon for their securing their third Women’s Champions League in a row. And congratulations to both them and their opponents, Wolfsburg, for producing a classic in one of football’s most underappreciated genres: the game where an awful lot happens, but it all happens in extra time.

It’s as though the two teams come together after the whistle and have a quick chat about their responsibilities, then decide, as a gesture of solidarity with the crowd, to cram all the football that was missing from the first hour and a half into the next 30 minutes. It’s almost a reward. You sat through the tension? You hero. Here’s some nonsense.

So it was in Kyiv, where zero goals in 90 minutes — Lyon had one ruled out — was followed by five in 15, with a red card thrown in for good measure. Proof, perhaps, that once football starts happening, it tends to keep happening. Particular props go to Lyon keeper Sarah Bouhaddi, who played extra time with a broken hand and now has an absolutely magnificent bruise.

At the time of writing, a petition calling for UEFA and FIFA to punish Sergio Ramos has amassed more than 300,000 signatures. The petition alleges that Ramos “intentionally kept Mohamed Salah’s arm under his armpit, causing dislocation of his shoulder”, adds that “he kept acting that Liverpool players fouled him falsely”, and concludes that Ramos “represents an awful example to future generations of football players”.

You’ll have your own views on that first contention, of course; the second is undeniable and the third a matter of taste. But we should probably acknowledge that Ramos, over the course of his long trophy-laden and red card-spotted career, has developed into a kind of self-fulfilling avatar of ignominious cynicism. Everything he does looks like a shenanigan because, well, he’s Sergio Ramos.

It’s the same principle as the Jose Mourinho Mind Games Chokehold, which states that everything that Mourinho says has to be a mind game, because if it wasn’t a mind game then Mourinho wouldn’t be saying it. Sure, “Could you please pass the salt?” might sound innocuous. But that’s just what he wants you to think.

So when it comes to the tackle-and-roll and that ended Salah’s game, we’ll probably never know where exactly on the spectrum from “total accident” to “fully-fledged jiu-jitsu slam” it truly sits. But we’ll always suspect it should be at the darker end, because every slow motion replay from every angle reinforces what we already know: that’s Sergio Ramos. Right there. Look, his name’s on the back of his shirt.

So that thing that he’s doing, that must be a Sergio Ramos thing. It’s always a Sergio Ramos thing. Wouldn’t make any sense for it not to be. Should probably give him the trophy and a red card the moment he comes onto the pitch, just to save everybody’s time.

Speaking of extremely on-brand central defenders, what a delight it was to welcome John Terry back to the news cycle. His spell at Aston Villa had, up until last week, been worryingly light on the kind of parping self-regard that defined the great man in his pomp. But once you’ve got it, you never really lose it, and the revelation that he was seeking contractual dispensation from any future games against Chelsea was, in form and in function, entirely perfect.

Consider the implication: that turning out against Chelsea would be impossibly mind-scrambling to JT’s blue-bleeding brain. What awful thing might happen? You know it’s been a good day when the world offers you, quite unprompted, the image of a weeping John Terry hammering own goal after own goal into the Villa net, then tearing off his clothes to reveal a full-body tattoo of Stamford the Lion.

Probably for the best, then, that the universe intervened. Fulham emerged the winners from a really quite entertaining playoff final, keeping Terry and the rest of us safe from the dark blue shadows that haunt his dreams.

This week in Not The World Cup News, it’s time to celebrate the beginning of the ConIFA 2018 World Cup. ConIFA is the international confederation for non-FIFA affiliated federations, from “nations, de-facto nations, regions, minority peoples and sports isolated territories”.

Hosted by Barawa, a team representing the Somali diaspora in England, the tournament is being held in and around London and begins on 31 May. Among the competing teams are Tamil Eelam, Panjab, and Tibet from Asia, Matabeleland from Africa, and Kiribati from Oceania. North America’s only representative is Cascadia, representing the people of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia.

Perhaps the best way to appreciate the singular nature of this competition is to take a look at the qualification process that’s led here. Given the problems inherent in bringing together diasporas, statelets, and other such teams, the process is a charmingly convoluted set of rules that allow teams to work within their circumstances, arrange their own competitions as and when possible, and earn points through any other friendlies that they manage to arrange.

Individually, this throw up wonderful results like “North Schleswig Germans 0–10 Felvidék” or “Barawa 4–3 Tokyngton Harvest FC”. Collectively, it stands as a reminder that football, like a kind of cultural knotweed, will work its way into the strangest and smallest corners of human identity. Wherever eleven or more people decide to make a community of themselves, a football team must surely follow.