Welcome to the latest instalment of It Is What It Is, the sister column to Adam Hurrey’s Football Cliches podcast, a parallel mission into the heart of the tiny things in football you never thought really mattered… until you were offered a closer look.
7,000 km, 16 amateurs and one commentator: the brief story of San Marino 0-0 Seychelles
Everyone remembers where they were on March 14, 2002. The dust was settling on the most perfect perfect hat-trick in Premier League history, Hapoel Tel Aviv threatened an almighty shock by beating AC Milan 1-0 in the first leg of their UEFA Cup quarter-final… and the two tiny republics of San Marino and Seychelles established diplomatic relations.
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Quite why it took 20 years for these two powerhouses to consummate that relationship with a football match is… well, not actually that baffling. But, on a cool Wednesday night in Serravalle, the resistible Sammarinese force (18 years and 123 games without a win, ranked 211th and last in the entire world) took on the moveable Seychellois object (one win in their last 51, ranked 198th, travelled 7,000km to even be there).
The “drama” began before a ball had even been kicked. Nine days before the game, the San Marino Football Federation announced that the game was off due to “unforeseen circumstances” in Seychelles. Four days later, it was back on again. The Seychelles squad landed in Rome less than 24 hours before kick-off, with another 300km of their journey to go. For the first time in history, San Marino were the bookies’ favourites to win a football match.
And, in 2022, if there’s a football match taking place of any note, a TV channel somewhere will be broadcasting it, and a commentator will be talking somebody through it all.
“All of the European qualifiers and friendlies are centrally marketed by UEFA and IMG provide the English world feed commentary,” says Nigel Adderley, who began commentating in rugby league before switching to football in 1994. “I’ve been part of the group who’ve done these games for a few years. I wasn’t available for a few of the Nations League dates so this was ideal.”
And so, Adderley planted himself in front of a live TV feed from the Stadio Olimpico di Serravalle for a 6.45pm BST kick-off. If you’re suspecting at this point that he wasn’t going to bother with the commentator’s traditional biro-and-highlighter frenzy of pre-match notes… you’d be bang wrong.
“The back story of both teams was quite easy to research,” Adderley tells The Athletic. “Matches like this are all about which records could tumble, so you put yourself in a position to react to those. I found Seychelles a more interesting story, as I didn’t follow the Mahinda Rajapaksa Trophy in Sri Lanka last year and who knew that Crawley manager Kevin Betsy scored in the final of the 2011 Indian Ocean Islands Games to force penalties against the Maldives?”
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Adderley resisted the obvious temptation to plough through the records to find all 22 players’ day jobs but — such is football’s romantic laws on such occasions — the information had to spill out eventually.
“It was originally called off as Seychelles couldn’t make the trip but they say FIFA stepped in to pay for it. They travelled via Dubai, got to Rome late Tuesday night then had a six-hour bus journey and arrived in San Marino at dawn on the day of the game. They only had 16 players as many couldn’t get time off work — they’re all amateur — and everyone played apart from back-up goalkeeper Dave Mussard, who is a hotel pastry chef.”
Quite why San Marino decided that the 2011 Indian Ocean Island Games champions would be an ideal warm-up for Monday’s Nations League encounter with Estonia seems neither here nor there. After weeks, days and then hours of administrative uncertainty, two of the lowliest teams in international football — the Titani vs the Pirates — played out a 0-0 draw.
Beneath the fixture’s obvious novelty, the stories of arduous journeys and abandoned pastry kitchens, one truly universal footballing moment — relayed by Paul Watson, the much-travelled writer and former manager of the Federated States of Micronesia national team — made the whole thing rather more real, almost mundane.
As I left the San Marino Stadium I walked alongside a group of kids from a soccer school and was thinking how nice it was that they'd been there to support their nation. Then a small kid turned around and said in squeaky Italian: 'well, that was a fucking disgrace'.
— Paul Watson (@paul_c_watson) September 21, 2022
This week on the Football Cliches podcast: The Adjudication Panel
The Athletic’s Adam Hurrey was joined by Charlie Eccleshare and David Walker for the Adjudication Panel. On the agenda this week: a stock-take of the remaining Erling Haaland superlatives, commentators who greet certain goals with the words “AND HOW!”, the maximum range a goalscorer can “give the goalkeeper the eyes” from and a delightfully subtle corruption of the old classic “hairdryer treatment”.
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Meanwhile, the panel decided the thresholds for “a matter of minutes”, “lighting the blue touchpaper” and “no less than [Team X] deserved”.
Not familiar with the @FootballCliches podcast?
Here's around two minutes of discussing strikers as animals that just about sums it up…@CDEccleshare | @D_C_W
🎙️ 𝗙𝗢𝗢𝗧𝗕𝗔𝗟𝗟 𝗖𝗟𝗜𝗖𝗛𝗘𝗦
Listen here:— The Athletic UK (@TheAthleticUK) September 20, 2022
The theory of Ross Barkley is still seductive
“I’m told he’s more of an eight.”
It is reasonable to say that the latest chapter of Ross Barkley’s career began with a distinct fanfare deficit. Those rather puzzled words belong to his new manager — and soon, very likely, his ex-manager — Lucien Favre, who for now presides over a French Riviera tribute to the art-installation squads of the Turkish Super Lig.
Barkley, whose Chelsea contract was torn up this summer, joined Kasper Schmeichel and Aaron Ramsey at Nice in September, and will have shared some other nods of ex-Premier League recognition with Morgan Schneiderlin, Mads Bech Sorensen, Joe Bryan, Nicolas Pepe and Mario Lemina.
This curious Ligue 1 project, bankrolled by billionaire Jim Ratcliffe and advised by cycling supremo and “director of sport” Dave Brailsford, is not an unexciting one: there is an inherent promise to a club that sees an opportunity to turn the French top flight into more than Paris Saint-Germain’s one-horse race. And that new dawn — false or not — neatly sums up Barkley’s career itself.
On September 4, before Nice’s 1-0 defeat to Monaco at the Allianz Riviera — the third of four defeats in their first eight league games this season — Barkley was introduced to the home crowd in customary style, consisting of the autopilot new-signing routine of 360-degree, above-head clapping interrupted by an occasional aimless wave to nobody in particular.
“Delighted to have joined OGC Nice,” Barkley posted on Instagram. “An ambitious club that I’m excited and grateful to be a part of. Loved the first few days of training and looking forward to the games ahead.”
Welcome to your new home, Mr Barkley 💪🔴⚫️#OGCNice #RossBarkley
— OGC Nice 🇬🇧🇺🇸 (@ogcnice_eng) September 4, 2022
Altogether, these were the words and gestures of a textbook career “kickstart”. Kickstarts are as handy a concept to football writers as they are to footballers themselves, an increasingly fatigued-sounding way of dressing up the latest chapter of a plateauing career. In Barkley’s case, it is a career without a middle: an Everton upbringing, punctuated by 30-yard screamers and broken legs, propelled him to England caps but not a definitive “breakthrough” moment, let alone season.
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When he signed for Chelsea in a remarkably low-key £15million move in January 2018, it didn’t seem like the gear-change it might have been. Rather, it felt like Chelsea had been the latest to be intrigued by the theory of Ross Barkley: a magnificently built, occasionally emphatic midfielder whose first instinct was always to look forward, not sideways. “When I see Ross, I see bits of [Michael] Ballack and bits of Gazza,” said his former Everton manager Roberto Martinez. “I like him very much, because I think he is a complete player,” said his new Chelsea manager Maurizio Sarri.
Perhaps it was this lingering, Gerrardian ideal of the All-English Midfield Hero that kept Barkley’s elite-level career going even that long. Barkley represents the last ember of the wider influence of England’s “golden generation”: that is, a generation and a half of homegrown players semi-programmed to spray 50-yard crossfield passes when a 10-yard one was probably wiser. Incidentally, upon signing for Chelsea, Barkley had played 197 senior games — when Frank Lampard arrived at Stamford Bridge for £11m in 2001, he had played 198.
That bombastic preoccupation has now faded from English football, but Barkley — even with his socks now rolled down, the subtlest of midfield image changes — is still seeking that immediate impact. Six seconds had passed in his Nice career when he received a lay-off, took one touch to steady himself 25 yards out, and rifled a left-foot shot against the post against Ajaccio.
The theory of Ross Barkley is still alive.
This week on the Football Cliches podcast: The ‘What Are YOU Doing Here?’ XI
Adam, Charlie and David select a line-up of players who made some unexpected, barely-computable stops in their careers. From goalkeepers who just couldn’t quit, to graceful midfielders who were thrust into unenviable engine rooms and elite-level strikers who looked very odd in another club’s shirt…these are the transfers that just sound so wrong.
The corridor of uncertainty
Each week, It Is What It Is will field queries from readers on the quirks and anomalies of the language of football (and other niches). This week’s selection is a quickfire but vital set of enquiries…
Benjamin — Is the definitive name for a group of injuries a “spate”?
Correct — but this only applies to clubs, for which a rash of injuries is also available. For individual players, injuries come in catalogues, which is the same collective noun as for errors.
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Elsewhere, substitutions and squad withdrawals — particularly during international breaks — come in rafts and goalscoring opportunities come in hosts (as do players a club has been linked with, or vice versa), particularly if they are repeatedly thwarted by a string of saves from the opposition goalkeeper (consecutive wins or completed passes can also be “strung together”, but we digress.)
In the heat of penalty-area battle, things can get a little amphibious: potential goalscorers may find themselves frustrated by a sea of bodies in front of them, but can still take advantage by firing through a forest of legs. High-pressing teams, meanwhile, can form themselves into swarms of red/blue/yellow/white shirts.
Depending on just how wide the proverbial floodgates have been opened, goals can come in a salvo (either two or four goals but not three or five, that’s the rules) a flurry (see also: yellow cards), a flood (ideally over a number of games, in a neatly dichotomous way to a “goal drought”) or an avalanche (at least six, do not disrespect the scale of the average avalanche, even in metaphor.) Across multiple games, for a player or their team, goals can come in gluts.
Finally, collective nouns even extend to the stands, where empty seats are counted simply in swathes, probably because fans have left in their droves (but not arrived — you cannot turn up in a drove). A small number of hardy souls who have made a particularly gruelling away trip can be quantified as a pocket, especially if they are tucked up somewhere high in the gods.
And speaking of pockets…
Samuel Owens — How many metres/yards do you need around you to be in a “pocket of space”? It’s less than “acres of space”. Is there a smaller denomination?
In this tactically intense modern era of football, pockets of space have become vital, usually for line-breaking No 10s or false nines. But are they the smallest amount of turf a footballer can occupy? No. Let’s try and formalise what can often be a slippery, figurative, exaggerated corner of the football language.
Football spaces: a comprehensive scale
| Type of space | Approximate area |
|---|---|
Half a yard | 4 square yards |
A yard | 9 sq yds |
A pocket | 50-100 sq yds |
All kinds of space/room | 100-300 sq yds |
Oceans of room | 300-400 sq yds |
Acres of space | 400-1500 sq yds |
The freedom of [Stadium X] | 1500-2500 sq yds |
The lower end of the scale is perhaps the most misleading. The half a yard that certain elite strikers are deemed to only need is surely understated: let’s settle on a modest area of two yards by two yards (although some could justifiably argue that the half-yard here should simply be a straight line rather than a two-dimensional area).
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Not surprisingly, a yard of space is a looser, more inclusive concept: I have declared it to be a maximum of nine square yards — or 7.5 per cent of the total area of a six-yard box. (Incidentally, the “could nutmeg you in a phone box” scenario does involve precisely one square yard, according to the official dimensions of the classic UK red telephone box)
That deals with close-combat football, but what about the more expansive areas? Years of watching Match of the Day pundits draw handy on-screen polygons to illustrate a player finding a pocket of space leads us to quantify that as 50-100 square yards.
Anything above that becomes a symptom of defensive inattention, so 100-300 square yards can be classified as all kinds of space/room, an unhelpfully all-encompassing term for a very specifically-sized area: that is, one which a co-commentator can scarcely believe an attacking player has been allowed to receive the ball. In the event of a goalscoring opportunity (or even a goal-creating one), this naturally results in the attacking player having the Louis Armstrong-endorsed “all the time in the world”.
Beyond that, the implied criticism begins to fade and the amount of space involved is deemed to simply be a result of the ebb and flow of the game. Oceans of room (300-400 square yards) are an area, nonsensically, smaller than acres of space (400-1,500 square yards, although perhaps the get-out here is the pluralisation: a player cannot be in a single acre of space.) Towards the upper limit of acres of space, a co-commentator may wish to emphasise this as “in absolute acres”.
That leaves the largest possible area a footballer can physically* occupy: the freedom of [Stadium X]. Crucially, this cannot be their own stadium, it can only take place away from home. Only goalscoring attempts can take place in this space and are traditionally one-on-one situations, such as Fernando Torres’ almost comically solitary goal against Barcelona at the Camp Nou in 2012.
(*Players can, of course, still be in “limbo” or “the international wilderness”, which cannot be quantified but do heavily imply an absolutely massive amount of space.)
It Is What It Is is published every Friday — send in your questions and observations on the language of football (or any other curiosities you’ve spotted) by commenting below or tweeting Adam here.
