BfB

Some friends and I went to the football to watch Bradford City chew on the gristle that was Ian Holloway’s Swindon Town.

Thirteen was confused. He really liked what he saw from Swindon and at the end of the game he was really impressed with how hard they worked. “They ran harder, and they made things hard, and that is going to get them more wins than not this season.” Twenty-Four pointed out they were third bottom.

Oh-Three was not really taking part in the conversation. He was just looking wide-eyed at the game with the kind of thousand yard stare that of a man who had seen something he did not especially want to. After a time he started to speak and when he did speak he mumbled that that was probably the highest quality football match he had ever seen, before dismissing the idea as fanciful and going quiet.

Angela

Physicist Angela Collier, when talking about Crackpots, likens receiving their emails to being a hardworking chef who is confronted by someone who storms into the kitchen, claims that they should be head Chef, and would be if not for the Establishment stopping them, before slamming a pizza box down with what they are saying is the greatest, most important meal ever in it.

Open the box, and it is not even food, it is Play-doh. Play-doh shaped like food, superficially perhaps resembling food, and you laugh, because it is laughable. It is all laughable, until Eileen Fahey.

How much onus is there people who study Physics to explain Physics to people who have not studied Physics? Is that even possible?

Disagree

My friends and I went to watch the Bradford City vs Barrow game on a Tuesday night too. Thirteen found the game lacked intensity, while Oh-Two felt it was almost entirely pointless. Ninety-One marvelled, in a way at the way that the players lined up, drifting around the pitch seemingly untethered.

When Bobby Pointon crossed to Andy Cook to head home City’s equaliser late in the game we all stood and cheered long and loud – we all have that much in common – and Thirteen was pretty forceful in saying how he felt that City should have done more of that and less of the passing play which had marked out some of the exchanges. “Get the ball, in the box.”

Twenty-Four turned to him askance, annoyed at the comma, but annoyed at more too. “One time, in the whole game, did we get the guy who crossed the ball in the place to cross the ball when the guy who heads the ball was in the place to head the ball.”

Hunting

Will turns around reveling that he’s lit the PROOF ON FIRE. Will drops it on the floor. Lambeau drops to his knees and puts it out. He looks up at Will.

LAMBEAU:
You’re right, Will. I can’t do that proof and you can. And when it comes to this there are only twenty people in the world that can tell the difference between you and me. But I’m one of them.

WILL
Well, I’m sorry.

LAMBEAU:
So am I.

Control

There is an oft repeated but rarely explained word in football, and that word is control, as in “We controlled the game”, “We controlled the midfield”. It is obfuscated largely because as a term it has a cluster of meanings rather than a single one but aggregating that cluster one is given to understand this.

Control in football is about having both or either the ball and the players on the field where you want them to be when you want them. On a base level, control could be about having more position – that is what Tiki Taka is about – but it could also be about attacking more down one side than another, or forcing one player to give up possession quicker than others.

In more detail, control is about moving through the phases of play at the opportune moments. The best time to move from Situation A to Situation B is when Situation B is ready to be moved to. The best time to pass a ball is when the player you want to receive it is in the position you want them to be, and the action which you want to follow that has the most chance of success.

End

The best chance to get the ball to Bobby Pointon is when he is in the far left side of the penalty area and Andy Cook is around the penalty spot – as City showed against Barrow – and control is the term used to describe how one achieves that.

That sort of control is rarely, if ever, gained by lashing the ball down the field, or playing it quickly forward, or having wide midfielders hitting the ball mirthlessly into the area every time they get past a full back.

It is achieved by retaining position and moving the opposition around until a time when Situation A can become Situation B, and C, and so on. The defence play it until the gap appears in the opposition press, when a ball to Smallwood allows Smallwood to move it on to a player who has become freed by the pressing.

Fyneman

Richard Feynman and Fred Hoyle used to drink in a pub in West Yorkshire. The man who coined the term Big Bang and the first man to watch a Nuclear Explosion with his own eyes hung around this part of the world.

There is a culture around Dick Feynman which has elevated him to a mythic status because he famously played the Bongos, and picked up women, safe cracker, and was an extrovert of sorts. Even watching the Nuclear Blast at Los Alamos might be a bit of Feynman-spin – everyone else was covering their eyes, after all – and the idea of Feynman has outgrown the reality.

But Richard Feynman made amazing Physics discoveries. Physics that far outstrips the tatty legend around him. It has given rise to the idea that you don’t need to know Physics to be Richard Feynman, you just need to feel like you are Richard Feynman.

Friends

Ninety-One pulled back and considered matters. There was so much to know, and it all felt new, but Oh-Two was less convinced. The problem with Oh-Two, the thing he finds hardest to shake, is the disparity between the good times and the bad.

In a way City’s rise to success in the late 1990s has set in the mind a way which success can be achieved which is not in the minds of supporters who have seen success in multi-facetted ways. When it was good it was one way, and every other way has been bad, so the answer is always obvious to Oh-Two, and it is always to do the things which Oh-Two likes.

Thirteen finds it hard to not agree and is right when he talks about what everyone says they want is captured in what he wants. “Why can that not be the way, the way that we always play?”

Contrast

Swindon Town were tough meat chewed down by a City team which played an entirely more advanced version of football. Holloway’s Swindon were regimented to having fixed three lines of players. Defenders gonna defend, midfielders are there to midfield. They worked hard, but they played with one arm tied behind their backs.

City, by contrast, had four or five rows of players. The back three, the wing backs passing or not the two deep sitting pivots, two dropping from the front with Cook up front being joined by those two. If someone told you that Swindon Town’s players worked twice as hard as City’s then they are probably not wrong, but in almost every instance City players outnumbered Swindon when it mattered.

If ever a football match illustrated why control mattered in games, why you try to have it, and what happens when you do not, it was Bradford City vs Swindon Town in December 2024.