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A review by girlpdf
Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics by Jonathan Wilson
4.0
"Football is born in the brain, not in the body. Michelangelo said he painted with his mind, not with his hands… That was our philosophy… I didn't want solo artists; I wanted an orchestra. The greatest compliment I received was when people said my football was like music."
so my desperate, and some may say futile, mission to understand football, not just to love it, continues. i think i have some kind of idiot disease which makes formations and diagrams and positions about as sensible to me as alien glyphs, but i can say that wilson's no-nonsense charting of the development of footballing tactics DID make me feel like i was at least beginning to understand what the hell is going on in this strange and beautiful game.
he doesn't dive too deeply into politics but i wish he would! the brief gestures towards fascism and invasion shaping and reshaping paranoid, cynical italian football; the allusions to england's imperial decline-and-denial preventing proper tactical development; the explanation of south america's narrow streets and working-class communities developing a game focused on trickery and holding the ball close… all of this was very very fascinating and i did feel the dip of disappointment whenever this finished in an 'ANYWAY! enough about that.' but i suppose that's just another book. this book does boil down to what it says on the front: how the pyramid got inverted.
very glad i read this but it is heavy on the minutiae - football fanatics only, i'd say. if you're more interested in the social / political side of things, you get tantalising glimpses, but the focus stays with the actual mechanics of the game. which i did like! because i love the mechanics of the game. and wilson's prose isn't half-bad, either, though it is helped by heavy quotation from some of the more lyrical managers of the game. (e.g. that quote from above is sacchi….. definitely not wilson)
the slightly melodramatic lament re: the decline of the tradiitonal playmaker towards the end was actually AWESOME though, i love when they get serious and OTT with it in sports writing, like this bit about riquelme: "Perhaps his melancholic demeanour reflects his knowledge that he was born out of time… Our man is a romantic hero, a poet, a misunderstood genius with the destiny of a myth… Riquelme, the last specimen of the breed, shares with Bochini the melancholy and the certainty that he only works under shelter, with a court in his thrall and an environment that protects him from the evils of this world". absolutely hilarious, weirdly moving. it's true that this kind of football is over, but poetry within a system is still poetry. and anyway, messi became such a phenomenon, especially after the publication of this book, that perhaps the loss of riquelme isn't that devastating? or do we just cop the L. i guess we have to wait for the sequel to find out what wilson thinks! get writing jonathan
(villa mentioned twice, second time as an afterthought and first time via a direct insult to our old chairman, doug ellis. so awesome. the socceroos were literally mentioned in a more complimentary fashion than villa…. and THAT is truly embarrassing. AVFC the depression #forever #UTV)
so my desperate, and some may say futile, mission to understand football, not just to love it, continues. i think i have some kind of idiot disease which makes formations and diagrams and positions about as sensible to me as alien glyphs, but i can say that wilson's no-nonsense charting of the development of footballing tactics DID make me feel like i was at least beginning to understand what the hell is going on in this strange and beautiful game.
he doesn't dive too deeply into politics but i wish he would! the brief gestures towards fascism and invasion shaping and reshaping paranoid, cynical italian football; the allusions to england's imperial decline-and-denial preventing proper tactical development; the explanation of south america's narrow streets and working-class communities developing a game focused on trickery and holding the ball close… all of this was very very fascinating and i did feel the dip of disappointment whenever this finished in an 'ANYWAY! enough about that.' but i suppose that's just another book. this book does boil down to what it says on the front: how the pyramid got inverted.
very glad i read this but it is heavy on the minutiae - football fanatics only, i'd say. if you're more interested in the social / political side of things, you get tantalising glimpses, but the focus stays with the actual mechanics of the game. which i did like! because i love the mechanics of the game. and wilson's prose isn't half-bad, either, though it is helped by heavy quotation from some of the more lyrical managers of the game. (e.g. that quote from above is sacchi….. definitely not wilson)
the slightly melodramatic lament re: the decline of the tradiitonal playmaker towards the end was actually AWESOME though, i love when they get serious and OTT with it in sports writing, like this bit about riquelme: "Perhaps his melancholic demeanour reflects his knowledge that he was born out of time… Our man is a romantic hero, a poet, a misunderstood genius with the destiny of a myth… Riquelme, the last specimen of the breed, shares with Bochini the melancholy and the certainty that he only works under shelter, with a court in his thrall and an environment that protects him from the evils of this world". absolutely hilarious, weirdly moving. it's true that this kind of football is over, but poetry within a system is still poetry. and anyway, messi became such a phenomenon, especially after the publication of this book, that perhaps the loss of riquelme isn't that devastating? or do we just cop the L. i guess we have to wait for the sequel to find out what wilson thinks! get writing jonathan
(villa mentioned twice, second time as an afterthought and first time via a direct insult to our old chairman, doug ellis. so awesome. the socceroos were literally mentioned in a more complimentary fashion than villa…. and THAT is truly embarrassing. AVFC the depression #forever #UTV)