Tactically Naive: Wayne Rooney for prime minister

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column. We may be socially distant, but we still love you.

In times of strife, a nation needs heroes. And when a flailing government staffed by overpromoted clowns decides to take some heat off itself by pointing the finger of blame at professional footballers, then professional footballers need: Wayne Rooney.

How the past few days have played out is a disgrace. First the health secretary, Matt Hancock, in his daily update on coronavirus, said that Premier League players should take a pay cut. He was supposed to be giving the nation the latest on the biggest crisis we’ve faced in our lifetimes. Why was the pay of footballers even in his head? Was he desperate to divert attention from his government’s handling of this pandemic?

[reloads shotgun]

The Premier League then announced it was looking for its players to give up or defer wages by 30 per cent. This despite owners and the Premier League board knowing players were already deep in discussion about what their contribution should be. It seemed strange to me because every other decision in this process has been kept behind closed doors, but this had to be announced publicly. Why? It feels as if it’s to shame the players — to force them into a corner where they have to pick up the bill for lost revenue.

Rooney goes on to point out that “footballers,” as a category, encompasses a few very rich people and a lot of people in extremely precarious circumstances, and that the rich ones all pay considerable amounts of tax anyway, which should in theory be going towards public services.

Given that his column emerged around the same time that Liverpool, to loud booing, announced they would be availing themselves of the government’s scheme for furloughing workers, it’s probably fair to say the players are winning the PR battle, such as it is. At least within football.

Outside football, it’s harder to tell. Footballers are, of course, the preferred millionaires of anybody looking for somebody to blame. They are public figures, and some of them spend their money in quite extravagant ways. Whole sections of the English media are devoted to recording the indulgences of these feckless, usually working-class youths in horrified tones, offering them up to a nation powered by class snobbery and spite.

“Give nurses footballers’ wages” used to be a meme. Now, apparently, it’s government policy.

Obviously some footballers can, on occasion, be a bit silly. The award for Footballer Most Likely to Appear in a Future Satire of Events Currently Unfolding goes to Kyle Walker, who this weekend apologised for hosting a “sex party” on the same day he issued a statement urging the public not to host sex parties to follow government guidelines on social distancing.

Otherwise known as the game that launched a thousand “Is 2014 the best World Cup ever?” thinkpieces, an energy which lasted all the way through to the knockout stages. Then — with the obvious and glorious exception of Brazil’s self-immolation against Germany — things got a little flat.

This game endures for two reasons. The first is that it was very, very, very, very funny, in a chaotic and emergent way that sport does so well. Such defeats are often called “humbling” in coverage: the BBC report of this game, for example, notes that “Spain, looking to win a fourth consecutive major international trophy, were humbled and humiliated.”

But humbled comes with connotations of pridefulness, even arrogance — something to be corrected. Whereas Spain, here, didn’t look particularly arrogant or complacent. They just got done. For an entire cycle of international football they’d been essentially invincible, and now they were getting vincibled all over the shop. I would suggest that they were not humbled, but rather humanised. Or possibly re-humanised, given how hilariously human Spain at major tournaments had been before the triumphs of tiki-taka.

Here is G. K. Chesterton talking about the importance of “a mood of democracy” in the work of Charles Dickens:

There are two rooted spiritual realities out of which grow all kinds of democratic conception or sentiment of human equality. There are two things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal. [...] But this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this, again, is an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. No special and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having to die. And no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of having two legs. Every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run after it.

The great thing about sport is you can have both tragedy and comedy at the same time without anybody actually having to lay down their lives. Here the great, all-conquering Spain died; and here, also, Spain had their hats knocked off their heads over and over again by Louis van Gaal’s giggling pranksters. In the process, they were returned to the rest of us, to the broad sweep of flawed humanity. And all it took was the very public crucifixion of San Iker.

The other reason it sticks in the memory is that after the game, Robin van Persie said this:

This is inexplicable. We trained all those weeks for this. The match has gone exactly as the coaching staff predicted.

I wrote about this at the time, and these words have stuck with me ever since. This is, on the face of it, an entirely peculiar thing to say: if something has gone entirely as predicted, how can it be inexplicable? And yet those apparent contradictions are reconciled by remembering that football is a horrible game where plans are made to fail and fail again.

What a miserable sport! You can turn up with an amazing plan, and implement it really well, and still get rolled over by some lousy finishing, or a couple of decent saves, or David Silva taking a relatively simple chance for 2-0. This game, then, stands as an apology from the universe to every football fan that watched their team get things absolutely right, only to lose anyway because goals are really hard. We were all van Persie, flying through the air, borne by the inexplicable knowledge that everything was going as it should, for once.

Featuring, among other things, a perfect impression of Fabien Barthez.