Spain, pt. 386: On tackling

This is from my brother Stephen:

Xabi Alonso on English soccer:

There is a pause as Alonso reaches, again, the crux of the issue. A single English word he returns to that, unpacked, analysed and investigated, explains much. “I don’t think tackling is a quality,” he says. “It is a recurso, something you have to resort to, not a characteristic of your game. At Liverpool I used to read the matchday programme and you’d read an interview with a lad from the youth team. They’d ask: age, heroes, strong points, etc. He’d reply: ‘Shooting and tackling.’ I can’t get into my head that football development would educate tackling as a quality, something to learn, to teach, a characteristic of your play. How can that be a way of seeing the game? I just don’t understand football in those terms. Tackling is a [last] resort, and you will need it, but it isn’t a quality to aspire to, a definition. It’s hard to change because it’s so rooted in the English football culture, but I don’t understand it.”

The tackle is perhaps the greatest expression of an English conception of the game — physical, epic, emotional. By definition, reactive. …

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Come to think of it, what is the Ecuadorian word for tackling? I’m not sure. The behavior lacks referential magnetism.

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So it goes for soccer — and for religion — and for romance more generally. Fleeing solipsism, we embed ourselves into those narratives which seem most universal, only to discover, bitterly, that the tropes which are most sacred to us are widely disregarded or despised: not just by foreign interpreters, but also by our colleagues, and even by our loved ones.

There are some who are shocked or saddened because I’m not fond of Lent or Christmas; and I pity those who can’t sense that a backpass may be performed simply to sustain a pleasing rhythm.