Until a goofy-looking German working in a Swiss patent office came along, we all took an Englishman’s word for how the universe worked. The received wisdom was that time flew at the same speed for everyone and space was a great stage that stood still. But then the patent clerk showed that not only is time not absolute, it depends on two things: motion and gravity. We call it relativity. The closer to the speed of light, or the stronger the gravity, the shorter the time. But the genius didn’t know there was another way to slow time down to the point where one wonders if time has passed at all: to Arsenal. Champions League Final against Paris Saint-Germain in Budapest.Now, as Natasha Romanoff continues to tell Hawkeye in the MCU, we’ll all remember Budapest very differently.PSG fans will be excited to win back-to-back Champions Leagues, becoming only the second team in Europe to defend the Big Years after Zinedine Zidane’s Real Madrid. Arsenal fans will wonder how things could have turned out if Gabriel could have kept the ball a little lower in the penalty shootout. And neutrals will wonder what ceramic offense we have committed in our past lives to see a final so unexecuted that there were just five shots on target in 120 minutes, where PSG had 75% possession and Arsenal made just 69 passes in the first half.Death by boredomThe story of the evolution of the eye is particularly interesting: it began as a light-sensitive skin, became a shallow cup, then a pinhole, and finally the light lenses that are now on our faces. The process took nearly half a million years, but anyone watching this finale may have wondered if it was worth the wait.Soccer is a word on Twitter that describes the kind of game we watched last night, one that was so entertaining at times that one of my guests actually snored while watching: forbidden ball.
For the uninitiated, the term Hermball refers to a style of soccer where the goal is to score a goal and defend to the point that the attackers begin to ask ontological questions about the meaning of life. And it was Hormball Pro Max when Kai Huertz scored in the fifth minute.Mikel Arteta learned his craft at the feet of Pep Guardiola, who in turn was inspired by the great Johan Cruyff and El Loco Marcelo Bielsa, but anyone who’s watched Arteta’s team this year will wonder if he’s secretly Eclave instead and learned his craft from the likes of Jose Mourinho.
Arsenal smothered every PSG attack to the point that it was the same 10 outfield players that beat Inter Milan 5-0 last year, only the body was changed.Now sports fans often say that statistics never tell the whole story, and the eye test is a more accurate gauge for sampling the vintage and seeing the full Hegelian picture. But, in this case, neither the statistics nor the eyes lied: it was a snoozefest.PSG had 75% possession and made 806 accurate passes to Arsenal’s 196 over 120 minutes. Arsenal managed seven shots and one on target while PSG managed 21 shots with four on target. It was a football match that saw just five shots on target in 120 minutes, and Arsenal had just one goal from Huertz, meaning Matvey Safonov won the Champions League after a final in which he didn’t have to make a single save.
In the first half, Arsenal managed just 69 passes, the fewest on record by any team in a Champions League final, which would make even Tony Pulis laugh.The match followed a simple arc: Arsenal compact, Arsenal tight, Arsenal blocking central spaces, Arsenal asking PSG to keep all the ball and do some clever things with it. PSG tried to move Arsenal around, but they only moved the ball with the efficiency of a single file locked on the desks of various bureaucrats.The break came from an Arsenal mistake, when the Gunners’ third-choice right-back, Cristian Mosquera, fouled Khoecha Kvartskhelia and Dembele equalized from the spot. But this goal did not open anything. Arsenal refused to attack despite losing their lead, and although there were furious late penalty appeals, the match looked destined for a shootout. There was something about Aze’s tumultuous run-up that he seemed to miss, and the moment Gabriel stepped up to take the decisive penalty almost recalled John Terry stepping up against Edwin van der Sar in Moscow.Gabriel has been the heart, soul and rock of this Gunners team, much like John Terry, and yet when he stood on top of the ball, it almost felt like he was going to miss out because, like football, fate always has a cruel script planned.It wasn’t as much of a football match as PSG tried to guess the CAPTCHA produced by Mikel Arteta, but the match also lacked the intensity of rearguard actions where one team’s attacking waves are repulsed time and time again. Like time Messrs. Cambiasso, Zanetti, Samuel, Maicon and Lucio stopped Barcelona’s greatest team in the 2010 semi-finals. Or when Ji-sung Park threw so much shade at Andrea Pirlo that he called him Ferguson’s “attack dog.”
There was nothing about PSG’s football that suggested they were willing to take the risks required in normal time to win matches, the kind of risk-taking attitude we’ve seen from great attacking sides.Football by consensusPerhaps this is due to the regimentation in football where every blade of grass has to be postcoded and every pass has a risk score. Wingers don’t dust off their boots anymore because some guy with an Excel sheet said that cutting inside has a higher ROAS according to the data. The players seem to have excel sheet prompts rather than brains: recycle possession, protect defence, maintain structure, don’t offend the transfer gods.
Every forward is a false nine that needs to be tracked back, every fullback a supporting midfielder, and every goalkeeper a sweeper keeper. Strategic philosophies that were once rare are now the norm. The 4-4-2 with two dishing wingers chalking at their feet, a hallmark of English football, has been replaced by a less blocky 4-4-2, where Guevara is more likely to be found defending in his own box than trying to score.Now there is nothing wrong with performance, but we don’t want performance from football. We want it from cars and air conditioners, not from our footballers.It was a match that was crying out for Bruno Fernandes. Perhaps that’s why Bruno Fernandes, who broke the Premier League assists record despite playing half a season in Ruben Amorim’s outrageous 3-4-3, won all the individual Premier League gongs, despite United only finishing third.
Football desperately needs its entertainers. Since the turn of the decade, those individual moments of brilliance have all but ceased to exist, and it’s hard to explain the joy of watching Maradona, Zidane, Ronaldo or Cristiano Ronaldo start to worry about setting records. No one remembers any member of the Greek team that won Euro 2004 and yet everyone remembers that it was the year that was called a strange boy. Wayne Rooney Before he broke his foot and nearly dominated the tournament.“We’ll be back,” Declan Rice wrote on Instagram after the match. For the sake of neutral football fans, one hopes they aren’t, or at least the team isn’t playing this kind of forbidden football. Because, as Einstein explained to us all those years ago: time dilation is very real, especially when this kind of football is on display.
