The most mysterious creature in a football game is the ball itself. While everyone else involved remains the same for 90 minutes, the ball constantly changes sides, even character: one moment it is a friend, the next it becomes an enemy. One moment it is a weapon in the possession of team A, then the signs change, and now team B is threatening poor team A with it.
Football is therefore a highly nervous interplay of possession and loss of the ball. There is actually no third state – apart from the recovery phases that sometimes occur after a foul, the subsequent huddle or the long minutes before the VAR announces its decision.
It is said that a team recovers from the stress of the game when it has the ball. But is that true? Football psychologists claim, on the contrary, that teams are gripped by fear when they have the ball – namely, the fear of being abandoned by their favorite thing, the ball. This is what the English team did recently in their match against Denmark.
This may explain why certain deep-lying teams like Atlético Madrid or the Catenaccio Italy of earlier times appear so fearless and daring: they rarely have the ball, do not even want it and therefore do not know the fear of losing the ball – only the desire to win the ball and the satisfaction of stealing it.
They have a fundamental disdain for the ball. They only want it so they can get rid of it as quickly as possible and, at the first opportunity, they smash it into the opponent’s goal as if it were a giant wastepaper basket.
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And despite their few shots, they tend to be “efficient,” meaning they score so often that the opposing, more ball-loving teams despair. They often shoot at the goal, but somehow half-heartedly, because they don’t want to let go of the ball.
A few days ago, the Spanish team fired 20 shots in a match against Italy but didn’t score a goal. They eventually won thanks to an Italian own goal.
The ball, it sometimes seems, does what it wants. The ball is stubborn. One sign of this is that there have already been five own goals at this European Championship.
The own goal is a paradox of this sport: a goal that the player who scored it is not at all happy about, and the player who provided the assist is only half happy about. A goal that embarrasses both parties: the scorer very much, but also the person who provided the assist, who benefits from the opponent’s clumsiness.
The trend towards own goals was already apparent during the league. It was clear that it can be more effective for a team to aim at the opposing defenders, or more precisely at their arms and hands, than at the goal. The opposing goal is extremely well secured, with numerous field players’ legs and a goalkeeper who usually jumps up quickly to prevent the ball from hitting the net – the chances of getting through are slim. A hand or an arm, on the other hand, are relatively easy to hit, as a simple calculation shows: the opponent only has one goal, but a total of 20 arms and 20 hands that you can aim at: the chance of hitting the net – if everything happens in the penalty area and the referee whistles for a penalty – is therefore much higher.
In some league games, one had the impression that certain players had specifically trained to shoot at worthwhile opponents’ limbs.
Could it be that the attackers have now internalized this logic? That it can be more profitable to chase the ball into the crowd of defenders than towards the goal? Or does the ever-increasing sophistication, the insane subtlety of the passing game mean that the simple shot on goal is actually seen as primitive, as vulgarity by the super-technicians (including those in the German team), which means that they would rather pass again than shoot? In which case an opponent’s leg could be in the way of directing the ball into the goal?
All of this is just speculation, of course. The author of this column is still intoxicated by the Netherlands vs. France match that he saw yesterday in beautiful Leipzig. A great game that unfortunately ended 0-0. There is no doubt that an own goal would have done the game some good.
The most mysterious creature in a football game is the ball itself. While everyone else involved remains the same for 90 minutes, the ball constantly changes sides, even character: one moment it is a friend, the next it becomes an enemy. One moment it is a weapon in the possession of team A, then the signs change, and now team B is threatening poor team A with it.
Football is therefore a highly nervous interplay of possession and loss of the ball. There is actually no third state – apart from the recovery phases that sometimes occur after a foul, the subsequent huddle or the long minutes before the VAR announces its decision.
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