I went to the bookshop last week to get a present for my friend for her birthday. While I was browsing the bookshelves and wondering which book to get, this book leapt at me. My friend is a big football fan and so I thought this would be perfect. When I went to the counter to pay for the book and get it wrapped with gift paper, my heart was inside the book and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Ignoring all the warnings from my brain, which screamed ‘Don’t do this!’, I went and got another copy of the book for myself 😁 As this is World Cup Football season, yesterday, I thought I will read it.
The title of Simon Critchley’s book seems to be clearly inspired either by Raymond Carver’s short story, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love‘. Or probably by Haruki Murakami’s book ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running‘. In this book, Simon Critchley explores the game of football from different perspectives – football’s roots in socialism and how it has transformed into a capitalistic game, why it is regarded as a beautiful game and what is the source of its beauty, the team nature of football and how within the team structure it nurtures individual talent, what does it mean to be a football, how players and fans get together and lose themselves in a match and how this creates the music and the magic, what it means to be a passionate football fan especially when one’s favourite team is losing, what does it mean to be a player and a manager, the role of football history, what tribalism and nationalism mean from a football perspective – Critchley explores these and other themes. As he is a philosopher, he sometimes uses philosophical concepts to explore football’s aesthetic beauty and the deeper meaning it might offer to players and fans. During this fascinating journey he also touches upon some of the great players and some of his favourite matches (I will give extra points to Critchley for mentioning one of my favourite players, Philippe Coutinho, whom he calls ‘The Little Master‘) to illuminate some of these themes in more depth.
I loved Simon Critchley’s book. I have never read a book like this on football before. The typical football book is a ghosted biography of a famous player or a manager. During World Cup years, we see books which talk about the history of the World Cup. Sometimes there are books with lots of beautiful, colour photographs. It is very rare to find a book which looks at the overall game and explores its beauty and its meaning. Atleast I haven’t seen one. There are books like this on cricket. The one that comes to mind immediately is ‘Beyond a Boundary‘ by C.L.R.James. The closest football book to that till now is probably Nick Hornby’s ‘Fever Pitch‘. One of the reasons for this might be that football is a truly international game which is played not just in English speaking countries. There might be books on football written in Spanish or French or German or Italian or Portuguese, but these are not translated into English and so they are not accessible to an English-reading audience. In English, the bookshelf is really thin. So, Critchley’s book breaks new ground and takes us through unexplored territory. I am happy to say that it succeeds spectacularly.
‘What We Think About When We Think About Football‘ is probably football’s answer to C.L.R.James‘ masterly work ‘Beyond a Boundary‘ and Haruki Murakami’s charming ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running‘. It is beautiful, engaging, brilliant, sometimes challenging, many times delightful, and filled with love for the game. It has many photographs interleaved between the pages of text, which add to its charm. Simon Critchley’s prose is accessible and engaging, sometimes beautiful, sometimes intellectually challenging when he puts his philosopher hat on, but always insightful and always readable. I hope this book becomes a classic. If you are a football fan, go and read it now, because this is the perfect time to read this beautiful book.
I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.
“Football is a tactical game, obviously. It requires discipline and relentless training to maintain the fitness of the players, but – more importantly – to attain and retain the shape of the team. A team is a grid, a dynamic figuration, a matrix of moving nodes, endlessly shifting, but all the while trying to keep its shape, to retain its form. A team is a mobile shifting form pitted against another form, that of the opposing team. The purpose of the shape of the team – regardless of possession, regardless of whether you play offensively or defensively – is to occupy and control space.”
“Nationhood cannot be simply denied or avoided, for that would be to disavow the fact of where we are from and how that shapes who we are and how we think and speak. Although I am opposed to the simple-minded modern identification of nation with state, I do not think that we can simply choose to ignore or play down the nature of nationhood and its vital importance in providing a sense of place, identity and history. We also need to acknowledge the complexity and exoticism of national sentiment, especially when it is felt for another nation than our own. For example – and I am far from alone in this – my first experience of a passionate attraction to another nation was in 1970, watching Brazil in the World Cup… Football allows me to dream of places that I have never visited and probably never will visit : Cameroon, Kazakhstan, Cambodia…Belgium.”
“Football is not just about winning. It is usually about losing. It has to be. But the really strange thing about football is not defeat as such. As I mentioned earlier, it’s not defeat that kills you. It’s the ever-renewed hope. The hope that every new season offers. The hope that comes in to tickle your feet, and then you realize, as the poet and classicist Anne Carson says, that your soles are on fire. Football can often be an experience of righteous injustice, where defeat is experienced as bad refereeing decisions or a bad pitch or just bad weather. But sometimes your team can simply be outplayed by a superior group of players. That’s a different kind of pain, when you realize that your team just isn’t good enough. But still ticklish hope flickers and burns.”
Have you read ‘What We Think About When We Think About Football‘? What do you think about it?
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