Tactically Naive: Tottenham fans prove that public shaming works

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column. We’ve been listening to Chromatics all morning. It’s been a good one.

Inconstant times in the Premier League. Earlier in the week, after much kvetching, Liverpool reversed their decision to seek state aid in covering their employee’s wages during the coronavirus crisis. And now Tottenham, a few days later, have taken the same step.

As with Liverpool, supporter sentiment was at the heart of Spurs’ reversal. Their statement on the matter acknowledges “that many supporters were against the decision we made regarding furloughing staff who could not carry out their jobs from home,” that there has been “opposition from fans to fellow Premier League clubs accessing the [furloughing scheme],” and concludes:

In view of supporter sentiment regarding the scheme, it is now not our intention to make use of the current [scheme] that runs until the end of May. We shall consult with stakeholders, including the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust with whom we have been in dialogue over the past week and who share our desire to protect jobs, should circumstances change going forward.

But that’s not all! Tottenham’s stadium has been outfitted to provide drive-through testing for Covid-19, and a full quarter of the stadium has been given over to a local hospital for outpatient services, freeing up space at the hospital proper to respond to the pandemic.

Maybe we should all spend more time shouting at clubs? It really does seem to get things done.

Just an all-round tremendous game of football, between two teams who really didn’t like each other. Famously, this game almost kicked off in the tunnel, as Patrick Vieira said something to Gary Neville, only for Keane to tell him to pick on somebody his own size. That Keane was about six inches shorter than Vieira didn’t seem important at the time. And as if that wasn’t enough, three minutes in Ashley Cole went unpunished for an outrageous dive in the Manchester United box. The tenor of the game was set.

You could write books about this game, and about the symbiosis between Arsenal and Manchester United. But since we don’t have space for a book, let’s talk about John O’Shea. He scored United’s fourth and funniest goal, which when the visitors were down to ten men and effectively sealed the game. You’ve seen it before. It’s this one.

Let’s talk about geology. Let’s talk about erratic boulders.

An erratic boulder is a large rock that doesn’t belong. It is not like the other rocks nearby — it stands out, proud and weird. A fat chunk of granite, friendless, surrounded by uncaring limestone. A fist of gneiss where no gneiss should be. Some are only carried a short way; others end up hundreds of miles from home.

For the most part, erratic boulders are displaced by glaciers, which pick them up, carry them away, and then — when the temperature changes and the ice melts — leave them high and dry. Often literally. Your correspondent’s favourite is the Hitching Stone in south Yorkshire, England, a thousand-tonne lump of gritstone that looks, from some angles, like the skull of some massive, impossibly ancient creature.

Now, comparing O’Shea to a glacially displaced thousand-tonne lump of rock isn’t exactly fair. He wasn’t that slow. But this goal shares a lot with erratic boulders. It is, in the moment, completely baffling. This is why, after it goes in, his first response is to wander around, confused and untethered, like a drunk man at an unfamiliar bus station trying to decode the letters and numbers.

None of these things should be in these places: it’s the 89th minute, United are a man down, they’re defending a one goal lead away from home, and O’Shea, who was introduced three minutes after United’s third goal, is on the field to keep things tight at the other end. Even at the moment he comes onto the ball in the box, his most sensible course of action was arguably to dribble slowly towards the corner flag and tempt an Arsenal player into giving away a silly free-kick. Have a roll around. Try and buy a red.

The proximate causes of the goal were Arsenal pushing forward, Gabriel Heinze being essentially forced down the wing, Paul Scholes having full 360 vision, and O’Shea wandering free. But like the erratics, O’Shea was brought to strange prominence by grander forces. Games like this, capped with goals like that, don’t just happen out of nothing.

The entire multi-year epic of Arsenal vs. Manchester United lies behind this peculiar goal. Years of spite and counter-spite, titles won and lost, trebles and invincibility. Two teams that wanted to defeat each other, sure, but also wanted to humiliate, expose, and obliterate one another. Not for the sake of violence, but for the most sporting reason of them all: they were one another’s only worthy opponents.

And though it didn’t feel that way at the time, this was arguably the end. You can see the cracks starting to appear in Arsenal’s line-up already: that’s Manuel Almunia in goal, where he will remain an option for far too long. Defending their invincible season, Arsenal finished 12 points behind Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea; United a further six back.

The next season, Chelsea won again, and Ferguson had a new prime enemy. Arsenal moved to the Emirates, and haven’t won the title since. And O’Shea was left there, silhouetted against the horizon, a curious object marooned in a curious place. A memorial of a time when the world was very different, before the weather changed.