A plaidoyer for Allegrisaurus football style
To all my critic
By Maximiliamus laeti “Allegrisaurus”, dux crucis apud Liburnum
(
translated from Latin and Tuscan livornese)
Part I
I have no intention of pleading here for the little writing that follows. On the contrary, the ideas that I am going to try to make clear would rather lead to criticism of the kind of psychological study that I undertook in my football philosophy.
I want to deal with the game of football in general.
I am not the only one to whom the same reproach is levelled by the same critics each time a football match is played.
In the middle of laudatory sentences, I regularly find this one, from the same pen:
— The greatest defect of this type of approach is that it is not a football, it is anti-football, strictly speaking.
One could respond with the same argument.
— The greatest fault of the writer who does me the honour of judging me is that he is not a critic.
What are the essential characteristics of the critic?
It is necessary that, without bias, without preconceived opinions, without school ideas, without ties with any particular tactical systems or style, he must understand, distinguish and explain all the most opposite tendencies, the most contrary temperaments, and admit the research of the most diverse form a football game is played.
Now, the critic who
, after Catenaccio, total football, Zona Mista, Tiki-taka or gegenpressing etc., still dare to write: "This one is football, and this isn't", seems to me endowed with a perspicacity which strongly resembles incompetence.
Generally, this critic understands by football game a more or less probable adventure, arranged like a play in three acts, the first of which contains the exposition (defending), the second the action (intricate midfield play) and the third the denouement (scoring goals).
This way of composing is absolutely admissible on the condition that we also accept all the others.
Are there rules for playing a style of football?
If Tikki-taka is a football philosophy, is Total Football another? Is Counterattack one? Can we establish a comparison between Catenaccio and “parking the bus” philosophy?
Which of these systems is a football or antifootball ? What are these famous rules? Where do they come from? Who established them? By virtue of what principle, of what authority and of what reasoning?
It seems, however, that these critics know in a certain, indubitable way, what constitutes a football game
) and what distinguishes it from another, which is not one. This simply means that, without being producers, they are regimented in a school of thought, and that they reject, like the allenatore themselves, all football games conceived and executed outside their aesthetics.
An intelligent critic should, on the contrary, seek out everything that least resembles a football game already played, and encourage young football fan as much as possible to try new paths.
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Part II
All coaches such as Marcello Lippi, or Giovanni Galeone have persistently demanded the absolute right, the indisputable right, to compose, to coach, that is to say to imagine or observe, according to their personal conception of football. Talent comes from originality, which is a special way of thinking, seeing, understanding and judging. However, the critic who claims to define the football game according to the idea he has of it according to the football he likes, and to establish certain invariable rules of composition, will always fight against an artistic temperament bringing a new way. A critic, who absolutely deserves his name, should only be an analyst without tendencies, without preferences, without passions, and, like an expert in paintings, appreciate only the artistic value of the art object that one submits to him. His comprehension, open to everything, must absorb his personality completely enough so that he can discover and praise the very type of football he dislikes as a man and must understand as a judge.
But most of the critics are, after all, only armchair fans, from which it follows that they almost always criticise us falsely or that they complement us without reserve and without measure.
The football fan, who only seeks in a football game to satisfy the natural tendency of his mind, asks the coach to respond to his predominant taste.
In short, the tifosi is made up of numerous groups who shout to us:
- Amuse me.
- Sadden me.
- Make me dream.
- Make me laugh.
- Make me shudder.
- Make me cry.
- Make me think.
Only a few elite minds ask the coach:
"Make me something beautiful, in whatever form suits you best, according to your temperament."
The coach tries, succeeds, or fails.
The critic must judge the result only according to the nature of the effort; and he has no right to concern himself with trends.
It has been written a thousand times already. It will always have to be repeated.
So, after the punditry school of thought which wanted to give us a distorted, superhuman, poetic, touching, charming or superb vision of football, came a realistic or naturalistic school which claimed to show us the beauty, nothing but the beauty and all the beauty of football.
We must admit with equal interest these very different theories of football and, judge the works they produce, solely from the point of view of their artistic value, accepting a priori the general ideas from which they are born.
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Part III
To contest the right of a coach to produce a poetic football game or a realistic football game is to want to force him to modify his temperament, to challenge his originality, not to allow him to use the eye and the intelligence that nature gave him.
To reproach him for seeing things beautiful or ugly, small, or epic, graceful, or sinister, is to reproach him for being conformed in such and such a way and for not having a vision concordant with ours.
Let him be free to understand, to observe, to conceive as he pleases, provided he is a competent coach. Let's become poetically exalted to judge an idealist and prove to him that his dream is mediocre, banal, not crazy, or magnificent enough. But if we judge a naturalist, let us show him how the beauty in football differs from the truth in his football matches.
It is evident that such different football styles must have employed opposite methods of composition.
The coach who transforms the constant, brutal and unpleasant composition of the team, to draw from it an exceptional and seductive adventure, must, without exaggerated concern for verisimilitude, manipulate events as he pleases, prepare, and arrange them to please the football fan with hundreds of passes, to move him or soften it. The plan of his football is only a series of ingenious combinations leading skilfully to the denouement or victory. The incidents are arranged and graduated towards the climax and effect of the end, which is a momentous and decisive event, satisfying all the curiosities aroused at the beginning, setting a barrier to interest, and ending so completely the game played that one no longer wishes to know what will become of the most endearing players the next day.
On the contrary, the coach (like me), who claims to give an exact beauty of football, must carefully avoid any sequence of events which would seem exceptional (such as useless passes or ball possession). Its purpose is not to give us a show, to amuse us or to soften us, but to force us to think, to understand the deep and hidden meaning of events. By dint of having seen and meditated, he looks at the universe, things, facts, and players in a certain way that is specific to him, and which results from all his thoughtful observations. It is this personal vision of football that he seeks to communicate to us by reproducing it in a match. To move us, as he was himself by the spectacle of the game, he must reproduce it before our eyes with a scrupulous resemblance. He will therefore have to compose his work in a way so adroit, so dissimulated, and so apparently simple, that it is impossible to see it and to indicate its plan, to discover its intentions.
Instead of engineering an adventure and unfolding it in such a way as to make it interesting until the end, he will take his player or players at a certain period of the game and lead them, by natural transitions, to the next period. He will show in this way, sometimes how minds change under the influence of surrounding circumstances, sometimes how feelings and passions develop, how we love each other and the team colours, how we hate each other, how we fight for each other in the pitch.
The skill of his plan will therefore not consist in emotion or in charm, in an endearing beginning or in a moving catastrophe, but in the skilful grouping of small constant facts from which the definitive meaning of the work will emerge. He will have to know how to eliminate, among the innumerable minor events, all those that are useless to him, and to highlight, in a special way, all those that would have remained unnoticed by observers who are not very clear-sighted, and which give the match its scope, its overall value.
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Part IV
I understand my way of playing, so different from the old process visible to all eyes, often confuses critics, and that they do not discover all the threads so thin, so secret, almost invisible, used by some charlatan offensive minded modern coaches instead of the single string that had a name: Intrigue.
But by placing oneself at the point of view of these realist coaches, one must discuss and contest their theory which seems to be able to be summed up in these words: "Vincere non è importante, é l'unica cosa che conta"
Since their intention is to extract philosophy from certain constant and current facts, they will often have to correct events in favour of verisimilitude and to the detriment of beauty, because.
The beauty can sometimes be deceitful.
I conclude that talented Realists coaches should rather be called Illusionists.
What childishness, moreover, to believe in football beauty since we each carry ours in our thoughts and in our organs. Our different eyes, ears, sense of smell, taste create as many truths as there are men on earth. And our minds which receive instructions from these organs, variously impressed, understand, analyse and judge as if each of us belonged to another race.
Each of us therefore simply has an illusion of the football, a poetic, sentimental, joyful, melancholy, dirty or gloomy illusion according to his nature. And the coach has no other mission than to faithfully reproduce this illusion with all the artistic processes he has learned and at his disposal.
Illusion of beauty which is a human convention! Illusion of the ugly which is a changeable opinion! Illusion of the never immutable beauty! Illusion of the ignoble which attracts so many beings! Great coaches are those who impose their illusion on football fans.
So, let's not be angry with any theory since each of them is simply the generalised expression of a temperament that can be analysed.
One man by his simple and luminous teachings gave me this strength to always try: Giovanni Galeone
If I speak here of him and of myself, it is because his advice, summarised in a few lines, will perhaps be useful to some young coach less confident in themselves than one usually is when one starts with football coaching.
Galeone, whom I spent time with at Pescara and at Udine, took a liking to me. I dared to submit a few tactical thoughts to him. He read them kindly and replied: "I don't know if you will have any talent." What you have brought me proves a certain intelligence, but do not forget this, young man, that talent -- is only a long patience. Work. »
I worked, and I often returned to his house, realising that he liked me, for he had taken to calling me his disciple.
For eight years I wrote my football thoughts, I wrote tactical systems, I wrote a short coach handbook, I even wrote a pamphlet about the merit of the 3-midfield setup. Nothing remained. The master read everything, then the following Sunday, while having lunch, developed his criticisms and drove into me, little by little, two or three principles which are the summary of his long and patient teachings. “If you have an originality, he said, you must first of all bring it out; if you don't have one, you have to get one. »
— Talent is a long patience. — It is about looking at everything you want to express long enough and with enough attention to discover an aspect of it that has not been seen and said by anyone. There is, in everything, the unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only with the memory of what was thought before us about what we are contemplating. Every little thing contains a bit of the unknown. Let's find it.
This is how you become original.
I developed these ideas on my style of my football elsewhere. They have great connections with the theory of observation that I have just explained.
Maximiliamus laeti “Allegrisaurus”, dux crucis apud Liburnum
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Did I say we should score off 1 odd chance? You didnt read the rest so you cant know.
Look at these Sarri dicksucking phaggots jumping all over each other to throat his cancerous cock first. Cry some more about all the trophies Max won for us in his first stint here, soiboys.
