Last Word: Players play, but only the fans see the whole picture

Football is working class ballet, says the philosopher Simon Critchley, fully conscious of the contradiction in a game played by millionaires and followed by the working class too. My only religious commitment is to Liverpool Football Club.”The quotes above are from his book What We Think About When We Think About Football.It is not, the author tells us, a philosophy of football; perhaps it is about what football can teach philosophers. Belgian writer Jean-Phillipe Toussaint held the view that it is in words that we can reactivate the ‘forgettableness’ of football, writing that can brush up against the experience of football. When interviewers thrust a mike in his face and ask a player what was going through his mind when he scored that goal or made that pass, the honest answer would be “nothing.” No one responds with, “I was thinking of buying a new pair of trousers, then watching a Tarantino movie, and perhaps having a pizza sent to my room for dinner.” That’s why they often answer a stupid question with a politically correct answer like, “I was thinking of my country and my first coach and the hours my parents spent driving me to practice when I was in school.” No. If your mind was filled with all that, you didn’t have the focus to score the goal. “The experience of watching football,” says Critchley, “bestows a strange license and liberty of speech.” Fanaticism and obsession are common conditions in football, but, as Critchley points out, the players play, but only the fans can see the whole picture. A 0-0 draw, an Italian writer once told us, is the ideal game, achieving a sort of aesthetic harmony like in chess. “I have found a strange beauty,” says Critchley, “to watching one team completely nullify another.” Goal-scoring, he says is a media obsession.