I want to enjoy a football match comfortably installed in my living room without the TV commentator ruining my cake by giving me a tactics course. Do not talk to me too much about swings, zone two, zone three, dubbing, second play, passing lanes, transitions and other football neologisms that satisfy more those who pronounce them than those who listen to them.
I prefer to know your opinion about whether Boca won well, if it was a penalty or not (I saw it too, but I like to hear the opinion of whoever is on the broadcast). I am also pleased to see an analysis program where the four or five panelists expose simple and conflicting ideas that enrich me. And give me a general overview of how they have seen the game and the teams. Not everyone yelling on top of me and overwhelming me with fancy words and theories.
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Or the new trend of statistics, more and more profuse, which are interesting, but do not determine everything: analysis is information, but it is also observation. A journalist can take various coaching courses, but if he doesn’t know how to watch the game, he won’t do his job well. And, furthermore, his job is not to be a coach, but a journalist. The four pillars on which the journalistic message is based are to inform, guide, give opinions and entertain. It is the slogan that we must observe in front of the game.
Is it exaggerated in the analysis of football?
Football is overanalyzed. And sometimes journalists and former players saturate the public with explanations that are more typical of the coach’s field. Before a qualifying match, they discuss for days what the team’s game scheme should be, hours and hours are spent differentiating what the approach would be like with four defenders in the back or with three defenders and two full-backs. Why not make it simpler? Example: “To play against Brazil as a visitor, I prefer Tagliafico as a left back because you have to defend a lot and he is very strong on the mark. Perhaps Acuña is better at home because the rival attacks less and he contributes more offensively”.
Journalists and former soccer players come together to try to analyze the game.
The worst cases of over-analysis are the previous ones, for example, when there is a big classic or a final and the coverage starts three hours before. There the tactical breakdowns are unbearable, tedious and long. Above all, because football has a very high percentage of the imponderable. An x-ray is made in advance of what is going to happen and then it happens that, one minute into the game, a defender commits a penalty, he is expelled and his team is down 1-0 and with ten men. All that was forecast for two hours has zero validity. Nothing will be as it was said. And, fortunately, it is so: a huge part of the charm and popularity of football is due to its unpredictability, to the bumps that occur.
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“Football is not that difficult. There is an exaggerated football scientism and pseudo-intellectualism of the game. They do not go with the simple essence of this sport.”
Soccer is not that difficult. There is an exaggerated football scientism and pseudo-intellectualism of the game. They do not go with the simple essence of this sport, which belongs not only to the world of competition, but also to the entertainment industry. We must tell football as a show, not give workshops on technical direction, just as the film critic should not give acting lessons but tell us: “Watch it, it’s a great movie, Al Pacino is, as always, fabulous and the script is captivating, charming”. I don’t want a cinematography treatise, I’m just a consumer.
Tell how the meeting was, attractive, flat, even, if the result is fair, who was the figure, the outstanding incidents. It should not be forgotten that we all know a little about this, the plumber, the dentist, the salesman, the taxi driver, they all have a more than basic notion of the game.
We must narrate from the emotion, because this game is basically that, emotion, and also from the attitude, given that in 95 percent of the cases, the matches are defined in favor of who had more intensity, greater aggressiveness and decision, apart of a better or worse approach. The most beautiful thing about this great passion is its emotional, folkloric and anecdotal sediment, not the surprise rise of the point marker.
Ghiggia recounted that, after his famous goal against Brazil that determined the Maracanazo in 1950, the silence of the 200,000 souls that packed the stadium was so sepulchral that he heard someone coughing in the stands and felt the noise of papers that had swirled in the wind. That matters, that’s what I want you to tell me. Who cares what Uruguay’s tactical drawing was? The system used by Uruguay was defined after five minutes when Mono Gambetta went all out against a Brazilian, won the duel, passed the clean ball to Obdulio Varela and shouted loudly, so that his teammates and rivals could hear him: “Come on, let these They can’t beat us.” (Episode told by goalkeeper Roque Máspoli to this chronicler). That epic was conceived by character, not by the little arrows on the blackboard.
And the role of the technicians who comment?
“The curious thing is that the technicians who comment on football, like Peláez (Juan José), use simple language,” says Gabriel Meluk, Sports editor at EL TIEMPO. Strictly true. Coaches know a thousand times more than journalists and speak a more understandable language. Óscar Tabárez, for sixteen years at the head of the Uruguayan National Team, gave a teaching in his press conferences, always using terms understandable to all. What Gareca, Tite, Alfaro, Gallardo will think when they read or listen to the complex tactical dissertations of journalists and former soccer players themselves!
Maybe we should go back a few squares and relocate: we are journalists, not technical directors.
last tango…
Jorge Barraza
For the time
@JorgeBarrazaOK
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