‘Hoof’
Football is a sport grounded in simplicity.
An American friend of mine once asked me to summarise the rules, aims and objectives of what I had previously described to him as ‘the beautiful game’ - I did so with ease. By no means do I claim complete omniscience regarding all things football, indeed it is the intrinsic simplicity with which professional football is underpinned that lead me to explain its provisions in a matter of minutes.
Upon receiving my verbal synopsis on what he categorized as ‘British football’, I asked in turn if he could then do me the honour of explaining the process of his favoured American sport, Baseball, within the same timeframe. An hour, three bottles of Budweiser and a couple Jim Beam’s later and my memory retention had taken a severe hit. In that time I was inundated with bases, bullpens, plates, mounds, foul lines, RBIs, curve balls, fast balls, strike outs, ground outs, force outs, tag outs, gloves and mitts, and it just went on, and on, and on. To this very day I remain unsure as to whether it was his intention to confuse me, and perhaps in hindsight my asking lead to an unhealthy comparison (after all, there is cricket).
Fuelled by curiosity, on August 11th 2011 I bought tickets to the matchup between The New York Yankees and the LA Angels at the newly built Yankee Stadium. Sat next to a young college student who insisted on dribbling chewing tobacco into his empty plastic cup, I was overcome with a mixed sense of disgust and puzzlement with what exactly the giant scoreboard was showing. Then at the ‘bottom of the sixth’ up stepped Robinson Canó with the ‘bases loaded’, and with a hefty swing of the bat he delivered a ‘grand slam’ to the upper tier of the stadium’s north-east quadrant. The fans went wild as they furiously scrambled to retrieve the ball that was now meandering its way underneath their seats, only to be hindered by their giant foam fingers and gloved hands. I thought at the time that this reaction mirrored a stoppage time winner, except I had no idea whether this act had signalled the end of the game or if a grand slam was a rare occurrence – it turns out it was, but ‘big woop’.
It was in a drunken stupor in that Bedford Avenue bar that I believe I offered my most pertinent point to this friendly American, one that I put towards my fellow British ‘British football’ fans. The attraction of football does not derive from its innate simplicity, it’s 4-4-2s or its eleven versus eleven, but in the variables that exist beyond its rigid structure. I do not arrive at a football ground awaiting a game that is to be played as if it were summarised to me in a Brooklyn bar, instead I expect storylines, moments of perfection and imperfection, tactical savvy, and most of all goals!
What we have in football is a sport that is simple, but can easily produce complications. The role of officiating, tactical astuteness, or one moment of brilliance on the part of a player are a few of many variables that can decide the outcome of a match. It is the fact that none of the aforementioned are guaranteed prior to kick-off that makes this game ‘beautiful’.
‘Expect the unexpected’.
To be a fan of your team often entails vehement optimism and great expectations, but it also means much more than that. As a result of the sport’s simplicity, football fans have developed footballing standards, that is we expect our favourite teams to impress us with how they build upon football’s very simple framework.
We are bystanders who every Saturday afternoon join one another in the stands to watch as our beloved eleven play football. We have no say in the matter, we cannot influence what occurs on the pitch - sure we can cheer or voice our discontent with what we witness, but that does not make all the difference.
To be an overseas Barcelona fan would be a wonderful thing, with their never ending passing sequences and their squad of World Cup winners, but allegiance to the team you grew up supporting counts for much more than that. We cannot defect, but we will persist on pushing for good football, whatever that might be. For every fan there is a hope that there team will play good, as opposed to the bad and ugly. It is with this desire to make football more than just the sum of its parts that almost all fans look upon the long ball game with disdain.
Oh, ‘The long ball game’. Aimless clearances kicked fifty, sixty yards towards the opposition end, the straining of fan’s necks as yet another one reaches the heights of the main stand, the slight sense sympathy for the defender who must welcome its descent to earth.
From Wimbledon’s Crazy Gang during the 80s and 90s to John Beck’s Cambridge United of 1990-1992, this direct style of football has attracted its critics. Gary Lineker once remarked ; ‘The best way to watch them [Wimbledon] is on Ceefax’. Indeed, it is telling that the two most notable examples existed decades ago, however that is not to say this breed of football is extinct, more archaic.
In the modern day game football fans have adopted the term ‘hoofball’ in an effort to further condemn this unsophisticated and uncultured direct style. Gary Megson made a name for himself during his managerial stint at Bolton Wanderers in 2007 for reintroducing the long ball game to his squad, citing the following as his reason;
"All I did was take it back to the style they'd proven able to play’
As a fan of a team competing with his current club, Sheffield Wednesday, evidence taken from our recent clash appears to indicate a man stuck in his ways, and one that isn’t alone. Tony Pulis at Stoke City, Sam Allardyce at West Ham, and the manager of Norway’s national side, Egil Olsen, all might be considered to be the pariahs of contemporary hoofball.
The question we must ask ourselves as football fans is why the collective dislike of this direct style?
Is it that the adoption of hoofball takes away from the spectacle we paid money to watch?
Is it that this style appears void of creativity and skill?
Is it that it nullifies football’s many variables?
Are we engaging in football snobbery?
Or is it just too simple a style?
I would say ‘yes’ to all of the above, but with particular emphasis on the latter.
The reason the long ball game is despised by so many is that the objective (that is, to outscore the opponent) is already incredibly straightforward. Therefore, why make football even simpler? What we are really saying is that our teams should go about their business in a slick, entertaining and indirect fashion.
Beauty is in the eye of the football fan, and for that reason whenever I watch as my own team engages in a ten minute bout of head tennis, it comes as little surprise that the old boy sitting next to me shouts
‘Pass the f***ing ball!’
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Comments
With hoofball I would say as a manager it's a risky tactic, if it works then you will get the backing of the fans, but any inkling of failure & it quickly becomes a millstone round your neck. I can't imagine any fan saying "the boss needs to be given more time in order to perfect that huge hoofing up the field system that he's trying to get the team to play......"
Decent read.
Would perhaps add that the reason why some people dislike direct football is that it can act to level the playing field and allow perceived lesser clubs (Taylor's Watford / Wimbledon of the 80's) to challenge their own clubs (who they think are larger & better).
They pride themselves on playing a passing game at youth level to the extent that they would rather play the ball out from the back, along the floor and lose than hoof it and win. When someone asked him why, he said that if a player is brought up playing passing football its easy to adapt to playing long ball, but if you're brought up playing long ball you've got no chance of adapting to a passing game.
Obviously some of the players we had last season were brought up in the wrong sort of youth system!
Football (the American kind) is another story, we do have a decent team here in Baltimore, but the game is basically our thugs against their thugs. Our thugs this year have made it to the playoffs, which means that we got nine home games this year instead of eight. (the rest of the year the 70,000 seat stadium stays empty, except for one or two concerts) The game itself usually takes three hours to play 60 minutes, it hardly "flows".
The town gets excited though, and people spend a lot of extra money on t shirts etc. (a good deal of which goes to the thugs)
Wish I could get over for the beautiful game this Saturday, COYR..!!!!
Also, Think it was a bit harsh to say Pulis plays hoofball, admittedly the team used to mplay only hoofball but theyve grown since then, have a couple good wingers and play better football now, but I also have a girlfriend who is a Stoke fan so i may be slightly bias purely coz most of the time it doesn't leave me in the doghouse!!!
Compared to American games, well, I think almost all American sports are pretty shocking tbh, none really flow that much are full of advertisements and most of the attraction isn't really the sport itself, what's up with that?! The best American sport is Basketball, a great sport that involves stamina, speed, agility, skill and quick-thinking. Honestly wish that i'd been given an opportunity to play it as a kid becuase it is such a great sport and SO overlooked!
It has always seemed to me that the easiest way to "gel" a team is the Allardyce/Pullis route. You play the percentages, you cut out the grass, shorten the time it takes to get to the opposition box and provided you practice heading and shooting, and work on being super fit, that should be enough to beat flabby more aesthetic opposition, but......
.....along comes a club who has pretty much gone bust, with fan ownership at its heart, with no money much to invest and a long way off the promised land. They employ a exiled Spaniard who majors on the passing game, the neat triangles, keeping the ball. He believes in coaching these skills to mainly third and fourth tier home based players. Suddenly this team starts to win and he takes them into the second tier. The foundations of this quiet revolution are strong and another two managers later they are playing in the premier league, out passing, out footballing Champions League qualified teams on a regular basis.
As the original post has it, football is a simple game. It is a game that when played as it is meant to be played, by passing and moving, can be so beautiful to watch. Left to percentages, muscle and the shortest route to goal it just becomes an ugly grunt which all but the most partisan find unpalatable.
The lessons for our club are clear. The passing game - with passion and commitment is the way forward. Everything behind the scenes to enable the players to develop the skills to follow this direction needs to be done for the club to thrive. Everything I have seen and heard in the last twelve months makes me believe that we are firmly embarked on this path with Chris Powell at the helm.
Thats why Dowie was appointed, to bring "Attractive" football to the Valley.
My guess would be Big is Best which may attract a Hoof or 2.