Liverpool opinions
Those base football players - How football taught us to clock in on time
By John Williams
"...For at my back I always hear time's winged chariot hurrying near..." Andrew Marvell
Wonderful thing soccer, on the one hand it's probably done more to introduce disparate cultures to a shared rule system, (offside, penalties etc), than any religion that ever existed. Ironically, at the same time, it divides nation from nation, town from town, and, in instances such as Liverpool versus Everton, Celtic versus Rangers and AC Milan versus Inter Milan, pits parish against parish in bitter rivalry. Rather like religion I suppose. However, when you consider the time that it took Christianity, Islam and Buddhism to reach their zenith in terms of geographical dominance, then the rapid growth of football from its origins in medieval England to its near global exposure is nothing short of miraculous.
How did this come about? As far as I am concerned, soccer is simply a device to drag mankind out of agricultural time into industrial time. Soccer was used as a kind of model to induce farmers, shepherds, weavers and fishermen of the world to perceive time not as a cyclical event that rolls the seasons around in a regular and predictable sequence, but as something that is valuable, finite, and, most importantly, controllable.
In the early nineteenth century Josiah Wedgewood faced a problem shared by all of his contemporaries, namely, that the surly peasants just would not play the game. Here was Josiah kindly investing his money time and money to the provide the wretches with full time employment and they kept sloping off to do inconsequential things like finish weaving a bolt of cloth, harvest their vegetables, go fishing or even poaching.
Didn't those ingrates understand that every minute of down time in Wedgewood's factory cost him pots of money in interest charges? Eventually Josiah generously installed one of the first clocking in devices the world had ever seen so as to help them over their aversion to time slavery. However, the problem remained, how to persuade the ungrateful swine to appreciate the profit potential in every second, every minute, every hour? Josiah's cavalry were just galloping over the horizon, with a ball at their feet.
The pastime of kicking a round object has existed since time immemorial, in all cultures, and has served many purposes. In Elizabethan England, when peasants were being pushed off the common lands, the word 'goal' appeared for the first time, (O'Nions). It meant a boundary. Now, boundaries were being erected everywhere at that time, to keep the riffraff off their own land, and, coincidentally, gangs of men began playing something that was a combination of Roller Ball and Gladiators. The legacy of those games can still be seen when, on Shrove Tuesday, whole villages compete over an area of several miles trying to get the ball into the opposing village. During the course of the 'game' a great amount of damage is caused to boundary hedges, gates and fences. In Shakespeare's 'King Lear' there is a scathing reference to those 'base football players', who were no doubt involved in similar destruction of the hated enforced boundaries, or goals.
Many of these games had a magical connection, whereby youth was seen as the future, and the means to redress the wrongs of the present. Even today we have mascots, typically young male children, and the word comes from the Italian Masca, the masculine of witch. So football was not only frowned on because it offered dangerous scope for free association of men in times when political gatherings were seen as threats to the state, but because it also, via mascots, kept the hope of a fairer future alive.
How did football help our old benefactors, like Josiah? Adam Smith had the idea that it was cheaper to produce pins by having the component parts, head, shaft and point made by three individuals performing the same repetitive task rather than have one man make the whole bit and so taking three times the time. In other words, each man had a time and task specific role to play in the pursuit of wealth, Josiah's wealth that is.
Out on the fields of the industrial cities the emerging Proletariat was playing a game of football called soccer, which was soon to be codified by the public schools, thereby imparting a universal system of rules. The main rule was that each game lasted no longer than ninety minutes. Let's face it, reasoned the legislators, if men have been working for twelve hours a day in the mills, mines or factories then an hour and a half is long enough. Wasn't it kind of them to think of the proles welfare? Directly reflecting the industrial hierachies, each team had to have a captain, (foreman), and a vice captain, (chargehand). Their task was to ensure that their men got on with the job of achieving goals which had to be accomplished in their ordained time. At the same time they had to subordinate their own sense of fair play, and their ability to regulate themselves, to a higher authority, the referee, (proxies for the judiciary and the establishment).
Think of the game in 1966. England had the world at their feet and sportswriters employed expressions such as 'Mid-field dynamos' and 'work rate', which amply conveyed the industrial values of our culture. At the same time, the wage difference between strikers and defenders was justified by the defender's description as a 'Sweeper', a term which conjures up images of menial work. What exactly was the difference between a man heading the ball into the net and one heading it out of the net? About a thousand pounds a week, until the nineties when defenders began to earn high salaries, (now there's a word if you like!).
If you think all this is fanciful then explain to me why the geographical spread of soccer mirrors the growth of the industrial culture. In the late nineteenth century soccer was exported to Germany, Italy and Russia, where it was gratefully received by the masses as a game, and by their masters as a tool to teach the values of linear/industrial time. The growth of football is still happening. The desert dwellers of the Arabian peninsula are enthusiastically subscribing to the pleasures of a game which is inexorably introducing Western values into their ancient and hitherto timeless culture. I mean, can you imagine what it must have been like persuading the first nomads to stop playing after 90 minutes? Think back to those childhood games which lasted hours on end, until the players decided that whichever team scored the next goal would be the winner. This was fore-runner of the modern Golden Goal, which arose from the pressures on teams who were playing too many games and so were pressed for time. Similarly, the Asian Tiger economies are football daft. In Japan, the ancient art form of Noh is becoming a no-no while soccer is seen as a fervent yes. The Brazilians, who never quite took to the idea of assembly lines, elegantly kicked into touch the industrial dictum that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and so developed the banana shot, the sweetest route to goal.
Finally, I want to refer to those rare moments when men can break out of the awful tyranny of their timebound existence. This happens when they see one of their their heroes score a goal. The period between a goal being scored and the restart of the game is outside of normal time and so 'escapes' the iron grasp of industrial time. This brief liberation from the tyranny of recorded time annihilates industrial time and allows spectators an ecstatic, albeit unconscious, glimpse of that 'golden age' when our lives were measured not by the hours, minutes and seconds of a remorseless workplace clock, but by the gentler cyclic progression of Winter, Autumn, Spring and Summer.
This brings me to the fact that even today most women hate soccer and sport in general. Why? Unlike men, whose activities, prior to the industrial age, were determined by cyclical time, women have always been subject to the tyranny of linear time. For women, Saturday was no different to the other days of the week. Twenty-four hour shifts were the order of the day, every day, as they cooked and washed and cleaned at home. Their need to break out would come, but it would come not via the sports field, rather in the arena of literature and philosophy. Simone de Bouvoir, Germaine Greer, Jane Austen and the rest of the feminist eleven have played a blinder, even if they are still a goal or two short of their aim. Incidentally, I adore the beautiful game, especially when Liverpool F.C. play.
Guardian Newspaper 31st august 2001 Twelve of Europe's top coaches - including Arsène Wenger, Gérard Houllier and David O'Leary - have called for the controversial golden-goal rule to be scrapped. Uefa's third Elite Coaches' Forum meeting in Geneva yesterday took the unanimous view that the rule does not add to the spectacle of the game and serves only to increase the pressure on the players and referees, with the last two European Championship finals having been decided by golden goals as well as last season's Uefa Cup final when Houllier's Liverpool beat the Spanish side Alaves 5-4.
"People have been educated to the fact there should be a result within a certain amount of time," said Wenger, the Arsenal manager. "We believe it's part of the excitement of the game to see how a team reacts if they are 1-0 down in extra-time.
July 26th 2007 - John Terry, Chelsea's central defender, today became the highest paid player in Britain. The world's turned upside down.