This will start in one place and end in a totally different one, and the two things won't be connected apart from by my train of thought. Sorry. This is just an attempt to replicate a reverie from a few evenings ago which I thought was interesting in a self-indulgent way - nothing else.
I recently read the novel 'The Netanyahus', by Joshua Cohen. which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize. I enjoyed it very much. It's a fictionalised account of a real incident in which Benzion Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu's father, went to a US university to be "interviewed" for a job, taking his family with him.
It's a short, clever, funny, book - reminding reviewers of the likes of Roth's 'The Ghost Writer' and Nabokov's 'Pale Fire'. It's a lot easier to follow than 'Pale Fire', though. That's the aspect I want to write about, or rather lead on from.
I whistled through it. I have not been whistling through books at all, lately, I've found reading something of a struggle. Now - strong caveat - my eyesight has deteriorated in the last couple of years and it's only recently that I'm fully committing to the new reality of reading glasses - I think 'The Netanyahus' was one of the first books that I read entirely with glasses, so that will certainly have helped my sense of clarity.
But also, as I read it, I felt that it was very precisely "my thing". Long sentences, long words, academia, history, ideas, assumed erudition, allusion, absurd humour, sarcasm. It was clever but not complex, nor deep within the human psyche - it was brisk, smart and clear. Far from trivial, full of big ideas, but something you could react quickly to and run with.
And what it reminded me of, funnily enough, was the realisation pretty late in the days that I played competitive cricket, as a fully grown young man, that, as a batter, I was best against fast bowling. As fast as you'd get in amateur league cricket. 75/80mph ish. It was clear what was coming, I didn't have to think about it, I didn't have to hit it hard to make the ball go a long way. I could use my wrists to guide the ball at will through the infield of the off side. The comparison to the book is that what might have been to some people the intimidating, tricky stuff was, in my experience (though it took me a long time to realise it), the simple, enjoyable stuff.
... so anyway, I'm not going to talk about books anymore, I'm going to talk about sport, sorry ... and, even worse, I'll talk at length about myself playing sport, although, I will, I think, happen to end up with a fairly interesting universal insight into football which I hadn't pinned down before, so hold on to the end if you can.
So, anyway, I was thinking about my last season of playing competitive cricket regularly, how I found I was really good against quick bowling, and I played several good, enjoyable innings, both on the counter-attack and to save games. Remembering this, I asked myself, why, then, did I give up playing the sport I'd loved more than anything else as a child, just when I'd really found my grown-up batting groove?
I'd grown up able to both bat and bowl fairly well, but been pushed more to be a bowler. I remember some youthful disgruntlement at not batting as high up some orders as I thought I deserved, but, also, as I moved my way through my teens, was very happy to bat 7 or 8, as that seemed a place where there was not too much pressure but you could still have a massive impact, and you might well be better than people thought you were going to be. And if I failed, or didn't get a bat, bowling was more of a guarantee.
I remember speaking to (Rev) Robert Stanier when we were both young adults playing league cricket, and he'd just been opening the batting and out cheaply, and him saying "you know, if you're just a batsman, it's a bit miserable. You've got a job, you work all week, you give up your whole Saturday to play cricket, and if you're out second ball, that's it, that's your day". Whereas as a bowler, I'd get minimum 3 or 4 overs (if I bowled terribly) but usually 10+ overs. It was worth the subs, worth the day.
I loved bowling, and I was good at it. Some days I'd bowl 20+ overs. I was reliable, and tireless. A quarter of the day's play belonged to me.
And I loved fielding, particularly boundary fielding. I loved chasing the ball, throwing myself around. Above all, I loved throwing the ball. I could throw a cricket ball like a demon.
My brother was even better. Years later, I saw someone we used to both play with, who asked after my brother, and said, "Jesus, your brother had an arm on him". So did I. But I lost my arm.
My own fault. In winter nets, in a cold sports hall, 23, I think, still had not suffered any serious injuries. Practising bowling spin in winter nets was a bit boring and pointless because it was very hard to extract spin from the mats, and I didn't have any new tricks to teach myself or a groove to get into so long before the actual season started, I was just there to serve the batters. So I'd roll up and bowl medium pace. I remember Tom, the captain, saying, "you should still be practising spin" but it just felt a bit thankless in February. Anyway, I turned up, didn't warm up, bowled seam, tore my bicep. Didn't know that's what it was, it just hurt a lot In fact, I still don't know that's what it was, because, like the fkn idiot I was, I did nothing about it, just assumed it would sort itself out in a couple of weeks. But it never did.
Within a couple of months, I could, kind of, bowl again. Kind of. It was better on warm days. It was painful, and I couldn't do it consistently for 10, let alone, 20 overs anymore, or confidently apply the subtle variations that are the essence of an orthodox spinner's craft. And I could never throw a cricket ball again. Still can't. If ever I've played since, I've either sent the ball in with a bowling action, a pitiful underarm, or an even more pitiful wobbly overarm born of fear and weakness which i could hardly get more than 15 metres.
Silly as it sounds, hurling a cricket ball was part of my identity. Possessing that knack for explosively whipping/ripping the ball into the ether with some unidentified combination of muscles.
I remember Tom, the season after I'd injured myself and I sent a wobbly underarm in, muttering sadly to the opposition batsman "it's such a shame, he used to have the best arm in the club" ... and thinking, dammit, i did. What's become of me ... 24 and finished...
So that's why I stopped playing cricket, I remembered, because I knew the hit-or-miss experience of being a specialist batter would not be enough. I wasn't going to be able to bowl 20 good overs a day anymore, and now I hated fielding. My ground fielding had deteriorated, and I couldn't throw anymore. If everything else went badly in a day's cricket, there had always been throwing the ball! Now I shuddered when the ball came to me.
There had been the pleasure of it in and of itself, and then there was the showing off part. My experience is that there are few more guaranteed ways to impress a group of fellow males than throwing a ball a long way. Playing cricket, or rounders, or podex, just hurling it, and hearing the gasps. It sounds ridiculous, but it did happen. Finchy from The Office was on to something.
The ability to surprise people.
Right, I'm switching tack again. I did say it was a meandering train of thought. I realised that surprising people was the part of playing sport that I enjoyed the most. And that's not always the best thing.
Most sports are a combination of consistently doing what's expected over and over again and, at just the right moment, doing the unexpectedly. That's the key to success, whether that's Shane Warne, Roger Federer, Pep Guardiola, Keely Hodgkinson. Playing to your strengths, wearing the opposition down, then, at just the right point, taking them by surprise (even if that surprise is not, from a distance, a surprise).
The problem with me when I played football was that the surprise became everything. I always wanted to do the unexpected. Practically speaking, that meant looking for an unlikely, high-percentage pass, rather than a safe pass, and it meant dribbling. Dribbling was my strength and my weakness. The genius of the great dribblers, like Messi, is that although he's done the same thing 10,000 times and a defender, theoretically, knows what he's going to do, in that millisecond that he does it, his bodily movements surprise yours. He makes the defender put their body and their balance in a place where he can move away from it. I was no Messi, but I understood, instinctively, that dribbling was about balance and timing, and some unexpected combination of the two. And, much to the frustration of all team mates on all the pitches through all the years, that was the feeling that I played football for. To wait, wait, wait, slow, slow, slow, feint one direction, dart the other. Feel the surprise. Slow down play, jog, make a defender come to me in order to get away from him. Great when it worked.
But that is how you dribble, at least. In as much as that was the aspect of football i was good at, i had the right fundamentals. The problem is, I applied the same principles to the other parts of the game.
And that's the part that is, I think, interesting to me now, that I've only just truly pinpointed as "why I was not good at football when i should have been".
I understood that effective attacking play was about the element of surprise, but, overwhelmingly, the element of surprise for goal scoring is the opposite of what it is for dribbling. To beat a man, you wait until the last moment, you lure them as close as you can, you slow time down. Not always, but mainly.
The best way, the most reliable way, to score goals, on the other hamd is to shoot before the goalkeeper has his feet set. Shearer, Kane, Owen, Lewandowski - the pure strikers, it's see ball, get ball, hit ball. If the keeper's not set, the shot doesn't have to be perfectly placed, it just has to be hard and true. Sure, you might occasionally get a beautiful finish where a striker outwaits a keeper, til they've committed and gone off their feet, then sends it the other way or over them, but that's not the percentage way to score goals. But that's what I tried to do pretty much every time. Send the keeper the wrong way. But I wasn't good enough to do that reliably, and so the result might be a miss, or a tackle, or a save, or outthinking myself. A couple of times, a school coach would say to me, "you need to shoot earller", and I would, and for a few weeks it would work, and then I'd forget, and be lured back to waiting that extra second, and wouldn't score again for months ...
It strikes me there are very few footballers that are true dribblers and true finishers. Henry, Messi, Salah, potentially Saka. Brazilian Ronaldo. Even Cristiano Ronaldo, I think, put aside his dribbling instincts, the older and more ruthless he got, and had more of a finishers' mindset.
The instinct to know when to wait or when to strike early. Something I, and most people that try to play football, never get close to mastering.
Now, back to Pulitzer Prize-winning novels ....
