There are times when we talk about football like it’s a great deal more abstract than it really is. We babble on (okay, I babble on, fuck off already) about space and tempo and touch, about group thought and moments of inspiration, about arrangements of players in space and the ways we can use their arrangement to control things, to make certain courses of action more or less preferable and thereby steer the whole thing to our liking.
But all that mighty thinkifying is really just the skin over the Great Beast Football, and what lies beneath is the common truth we usually leave unrecognized: That soccer can be stripped down to sinew and bone, made a contest more about wanting-to and will than any wil-o-the-wisp fantasy like spacing or movement.