Sport

God's own pastime

Football is matchless because it turns sport on its head, writes Rohit Brijnath

Every four years, for a month or so, peculiar things happen. Argentina will lose and it will move a Bangladeshi to weep. Brazilians will educate Greeks on the philosophies of Socrates. A Calcutta lane will become a shrine to Ronaldo, and wives in the Ivory Coast will wonder why "off-side" puts everyone in a fury.

Tunisians and South Koreans will share beers and sagely decipher tactics. Language means nothing here, for everyone speaks football. Teams, after all, are occasionally coached by outsiders who speak in foreign tongues. This is when we ask ourselves: is this game, which collects us all together, where non-participation has never been a barrier to fevered involvement, the greatest? It has a case.

Football is full of artifice yet its attraction is its simplicity. It can be played anywhere, it demands no equipment, no racket or bat or stick. Newspaper rolled up and goals scratched by red brick on a wall will suffice. A rain cloud belches and other games are called off, but this is God's pastime, never held hostage by weather. There is nothing more to this effortless game than putting a ball in a goal.

Football has mostly stood time's test, in recent times only the back pass to the goalkeeper has required major fixing.

But to this uncomplicated art also comes layers of complexity, for football is alive with formations, tactics, ideas, a sport of elegance yet also of intellect, a game that pleases and provokes both sides of the brain.

Eclectic mix

Although globalisation is diluting it, football still presents the most eclectic mix of styles, a collision of rhythms and personalities that dazzle the senses. If football is the language, Brazil speaks it in a fast, flamboyant accent, Germany in precise, measured tones, Cameroon once with a rugged cool, Italians in a defensive tone.

Football is played on grounds neither too small nor too big, testing speed as it examines stamina, fulfilling man's desire for flight and his boyish need to slide. It is a fluid pursuit, most honest among sports in its embrace of the idea of continuous play, 45 minutes before an advertiser can sneak in and annoy us. Suggestions once of four quarters were met with rapid disdain.

Not that cricket is without innovative shots or inventive deliveries, or golf absent of the inspired chip, but football appears relentlessly imaginative, goals will be conjured from nothing like hay spun into gold, man's feet capable of the most outrageous original thought. Goals, too, are the most precious currency in sport.

Football is matchless because it turns sport on its head. Almost every sporting activity in which people compete involves the use of arms, hands or wrist, from cricket to swimming to boxing to gymnastics to archery to weightlifting to golf to hockey to rowing to shooting.

But football (goalkeeper aside) reduces the arms to a mechanism to maintain balance (or occasionally throw a punch), it chooses instead to perform only with the feet (and head), the much harder of two appendages to manipulate.

To catch with the hands in cricket requires a fine dexterity; but to trap a swerving cross with the instep, to run full pelt with ball magnetised to toe, to tease defenders with a blurring feint of the leg, to persuade a ball to rise, swerve and dip during a free kick, is outrageous.

Why does everyone play football, why has it, of all sports, been the only one to invade almost every border, culture, social strata? Maybe it's the simplicity, the affordability, the absence of weather restrictions.

Maybe it's one more thing. Maybe it's also that this moving of feet, this stepping over, dinking, weaving, arching, swivelling, shoulder-dropping, hip-shaking rhythm makes it not just a sport but a dance, a spiritual, seductive triumph of non-verbal communication. And every culture dances. Maybe football is just the one we all have in common.

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