The Dream Over

Faced with the predictable orgy of soul-searching after that 1-4 defeat by Germany, it's notable how nobody is using that Lampard non-goal as an excuse. When poor Fabio Capello suggested after the match that the incompetence of the officials was the major factor in England's defeat, he must have expected at least some support from the fans or the media. It just goes to show how much he has to learn; how little he understands English psychology. Nobody here - nobody - is buying that. The only reason we went out, as I've now read a thousand times and been told by scores of people who are all to a man (of course it's all men) experts on the game of football, is that we were crap. Useless. Pathetic. My granny could play better than that. Your granny could play better than that. Bunch of over-paid tossers. Wrong tactics. Useless manager. Rigid 4-4-2. No passion. Or rather, no intelligence. Heskey?? Matthew Upson?? What was Capello thinking? My granny etc. etc. No, we're no good at football; we're no good at anything. Same every four years. Will we never learn? Useless useless useless.

In fact it doesn't seem that exceptional a claim to me: that the decision cost us the match. Certainly we defended badly in that second half, but going in 2-2 at half-time, as we should have done, would have been a not unreasonable scoreline, and then...well, it would have been a different match. Who knows? Nor were the Germans that brilliant. That first goal of theirs, the goalie's long punt upfield, landed just perfectly for Klose, and just wrong for David James: to go for it or not to go for it? "Where were the defenders?" screamed the BBC pundits at half time. "Terry should have been 30 yards back....disgraceful...". Well certainly, if he'd known exactly the type of kick that was coming from the goalie, and where it would have landed, then yes, he was poorly placed. We're all experts in hindsight. And we all see the vagaries of luck and chance, of which there's plenty in football - far more, it seems to me, than most people acknowledge - as the workings of the footballer's art.

Peter Singer wonders why is cheating OK in football?, with special reference to that strike of Lampard's. The German goalie Manuel Neuer clearly knew the ball was over the line (as did everyone else apart from the ref and the linesman):

After the match, Neuer gave this account of his actions: "I tried not to react to the referee and just concentrate on what was happening. I realised it was over the line and I think the way I carried on so quickly fooled the referee into thinking it was not over."

To put it bluntly: Neuer cheated, and then boasted about it.

It's not as though morality is completely absent from football: the unwritten agreement that the ball is returned to the team that kicked it out when a player's down hurt is universally understood and respected, for instance. I tend to think that there's an analogy with the way that religion works: if an external set of morals (for religion) or rules (for a game) apply to certain behaviours, then it can be easy to justify ignoring the natural voice of morality that normally guides our behaviour and appealing only to the external constraints. So people can justify killing in the name of religion, or cheating in the name of football. Yes, I know: the analogy isn't that good. Its an interesting subject.

The Germans, apparently, see the non-goal as revenge for 1966. Indeed rather too many of the UK papers made the same point: as if there's any comparison between a genuinely borderline goal that, to this day, no one can be certain about (from 44 years ago! - I thought we were the ones who were supposed to be obsessed with 1966), and a clear-cut ungiven goal where everybody saw the ball bounce a good yard or so behind the line, and that even Sepp Blatter has felt it necessary to apologise for.

I'm sure if it had been the other way round, the Germans would have been far more ready to blame that fateful decision for their defeat. But that's the only piece of jingoism I can come up with at the moment.

Comments

[Abandon Ship!]

Cheating in football at this level is accepted, and the players don't care whether or not their dives and "sack of potatoes" collapses are shown for what they are on TV around the world. A sorry state.

I do agree about Lampard's goal. We were running riot at that point and Germany were all over the place. Who is to say the Germans would have gone on to score 2 or 3 more goals under those conditions? We just can't say and it could easily have ended differently. Having played centre-half myself I can see that Terry etc were momentarily caught out (half a second) by the length of the goalkick. Unfortunate, but that made all the difference in the first goal. Perhaps they should have spent some of that golf and beer time studying this so that they were ready for it?

The Germans actually got their revenge in Mexico 1970, when an unfortunate bout of food poisoning (bad slice of pumpernickel perhaps?) took out our iconic goalkeeper.

[Brian Micklethwait]

I agree about the role of chance in sport. Constantly underestimated. England would have been 2-0 down in the Ashes of 2005 (which they won 2-1) had a fierce cover drive, near the end of game 2, by Brett Lee, gone five yards wide of deep cover one way or the other, instead of straight at deep cover. Had it been four, as it look like being on the telly because the fielder only showed up in the picture at the very last moment, that would have been it. Game over, to Australia. Moments later, England won, with a dodgy catch behind the wicket, by 2 runs I think it was.

Yet, had all that happened only very slightly differently, and had Australia then gone on to whack a dispirited England by 4-0 or some such crushing margin, it would all have been declared (in retrospect) inevitable, and caused by who the hell knows what profound influences.

See also: how Holland's fluke equaliser against Brazil totally turned that game around.

And agreed about the cheating in football also.

We've been writing about the World Cup a bit at Samizdata, which has lots of American readers, and the cheating in "soccer" really puts them off. Seriously, I think this could be a real barrier to soccer taking off in the USA.