The Art of Sport

Gilbert Adair, author of The Holy Innocents once remarked in reference to the Cinematheque Francaise that "fights would break out the hall" he continued "people really felt as strongly about cinema then as today people only feel strongly about sports" a brief, rueful pause "...about football". I've no idea if Adair likes football, or even if he meant it pejoratively at all; what it implied to me though was that art and sport exist on separate plains. This is something that I should like to dispel, not to the detriment of art but solely to the veneration of sport and, specifically, football.

I suppose the least contentious definition of art (bearing in mind that a whole library has been published on the subject from Tolstoy to Woolf via Kant, Hume and any other hairy-arsed layabout who fancied a crack) is that it is linked to 'higher' thought. That the creation of art evinces a propensity within the creator to take stock of his surroundings and, at no small expense of effort on his/her part, comment upon them. Now, whilst art can indeed 'comment', what we may more readily assert is that this function exists alongside another which is the creation (or recreation) of beauty. Now, art performs these two main functions to varying extents and in varying proportions. Now, what is sport? Sport, broken down to its essentials is, I suppose, recreation. It is fun, relaxation and as ephemeral and as substantial as a puff-pastry. However, the 'essentials' in sport aren't especially essential, what is really essential are the inessentials. When people wish to belittle sport they break it down to essentials: "twelve men kicking a bit of leather about...twelve men standing about...eight women running in a circle". This is of course true but, in the same breath Wagner is just fat Germans wailing and Beethoven is forty people blowing into tubes, banging bits of wood and metal and scraping bits of string. So what is it that creates beauty in sport?

Let's start with formal beauty, of which there is an abundance. There is a video doing the rounds on the internet of Olympique Lyonnais' Brazilian midfielder Juninho Pernambucano and, if you can stomach My Chemical Romance playing in the background then you will see a collection of set-piece goals that are as staggering as they are beautiful. I remember being annoyed when Simon Jones, the chief sports writer for The Times, described Johnny Wilkinson's drop-goal against Australia as a "gorgeous, arcing parabola"- because it wasn't- yet, it is just such fruity phraseology that is required here. Let us examine one in particular scored against Bayern Munich in last season's Champion's League group stages. From fully forty yards away and some distance to the left, Pernambucano launches the ball with such spin, and such perfect weighting that it drops against the far post some three inches beneath the cross-bar and safely beyond a hopeless dive from Bayern's Oliver Kahn. We'll take this free-kick onward on as our example as, being entirely self-contained, it is suited for closer analysis.

The free-kick happened, it is an event that occurred in Munich in 2004. Those watching in the crowd would have acknowledged the quality of the strike, but would its full beauty have been seen without the benefit of the slow-motion replay wherein you can see an unconcerned Michael Ballack picking his nose in the wall as the ball, revolving exquisitely, glides inevitably towards the goal. Possibly not. The problem with lumping sport in with art is that the conditions required for it to happen are at variance. For someone who is solely an armchair fan of football, I require someone to film it for me to be able to absorb it? Is the beauty then attributable to the cameraman, to the director? This diffusion of authorship question is one that also plagues art you'll note and, unlike most critics, whose careers depend upon teasing out every kink in an argument we can simply say that we don't give a fuck and that it doesn't matter. The event happened, and it provoked this reaction within me- everything else is just so much gammon. The credit for the formal beauty lies solely with Pernambuco.

What sport does is to manifest what in art is purely theoretical, which is to clearly delineate between what is good, true or beautiful (a goal) and what is bad, false and ugly (hitting the post). Now as a critic, I can look at Tracy Emin's bed and opine that it is nothing, it isn't beautiful, it isn't interesting to look at, it isn't an insightful comment upon the human condition- but I can never prove it. If it were a moment in football it would be David Beckham sending a penalty into row Z and falling on his arse in the process. He can look around all he wants, but no semantic acrobatics can flatter to deceive here- he was shit, and everyone knows it. So this is a simpler process, but none the worse for that. What you get is an absolute assertion of superiority, not necessarily of the team (Lyon may have gone on to lose in Munich) but of the individual.

Sport is watched because it the prerogative of the few to perform prodigies for the many. We love it, we ache for it. The Premiership's opening weekend was awful. Dull matches, negative play and only three goals with any kind of grace or skill (courtesy of Danny Murphy, Nigel Reo-Coker and Hernan Crespo). It was frustrating to watch Liverpool pound ceaselessly against Middlesborough's defence. Steven Gerrard is a genius; I don't mean that his passing isn't sometimes appalling (which it is), that his defensive capacity is strictly limited in most games (which it is) I simply mean that he scores wonderful, wonderful goals once in a while and that his struggle to achieve a moment of goodness, truth or beauty was mine too because we both knew that he could.

So far I have dealt exclusively with paintings and music in comparison to sport but let us take a look at the novel. 'Anna Karenina', for example. The moments of formal beauty come from images and from what they mean. Vronsky exiting the train to meet Anna in the snow; Karenina stuttering; Levin scything crops with his workers. What elevates football up to this level is the soap opera aspect of the thing- I don't mean all those nightclub confessions, dogging and transfer misdealings, I just mean the simple, wanton human emotion that we can see in a game of football. Picture Hernan Crespo as Tolstoy's Kitty. He moved to Chelsea for big money in 2003 from Inter Milan (entertaining Levin's preliminary advances) but found the terrain unfamiliar and outwardly hostile, meanwhile Chelsea/Levin reacted badly to the first signs of dissatisfaction and yielded to an AC Milan/Vronsky loan deal. Return home to Levin was reluctant, but, when he scored that wonderful goal against Wigan, Crespo was finally reciprocating Chelsea's embrace. Now I realise that that is ungovernably pretentious, but it is crucial for the outsider to see that there is human emotion in football that transcends the pieces of formal beauty. I'm not saying that Crespo will end his career at the Bridge, or that he will even be there next season but at the very least he may not start wearing woolen gloves in September.

Football, at any given moment, is a tangled mass of these stories. Charlton purchase Darren Bent from Ipswich on the cheap and he scores 4 goals in the first 3 games of the season. A player fulfils potential of which he was only dimly aware and becomes an England prospect. Meanwhile, he keeps Francis Jeffers out of the side, Jeffers who was bought by Arsenal with the highest expectations that were never met. Thierry Henry has to grow into Arsenal's captaincy; he has to fight for the club that he loves because otherwise he may bow to his Champion's League ambitions and move to Barcelona before it is too late. Graeme Souness's job is safe if his players remain fit, but gone if not. Tales of betrayal, angst, death, glory, worship and love, and each one of them as compelling in a footballing context as Tolstoy.

So there are moments which are simply exquisite (Pernambucano), and moments whose beauty are superseded by what they represent (Beckham equalising against Turkey to guarantee qualification for Euro 2004, Gerrard scoring Liverpool's third against Olympiakos). These are moments that cause violent reactions in people. I missed the Champion's League final and was kept updated by text messages; so when I sat down to watch it, I knew roughly what had happened. Yet I still felt sick when the Milan goals went in and shouted and screamed when Gerrard, Smicer and Alonso scored. The commentary, the images and the emotions are all linked in one explosive reaction that I relive whenever I watch it again, it is as effective an artificial high as I can possibly imagine. So perhaps sport has assumed a mantle of popular inflammation that once rested with art but we are certainly no worse for this transition.

By J.L. Cranfield

Copyright September 2005