The Disgusting Beauty of a Goalmouth Scramble

Now over the past few years, the English football public, armed with their copies of 'Inverting the Pyramid' and YouTube compilation videos of Juan Roman Riquelme, has undergone a sort of intellectualisation. We appreciate the value of 'the Makelele Role', and talk of 'counter-counter attacks' and the values of the ‘regista’ and ‘false nine'. We purr over the rapid counter-attacking thrust of Dortmund and Atletico Madrid, and the merits of Barcelona's tiki-taka.

For shame, I say! Real football is the mud on one’s knees and the sweat on one’s brow. It is about the instinctive surge of the crowd in anticipation of a goal-scoring opportunity; the collective intake of breath as the massed ranks of humanity behind the goal wills the ball towards the net. Football is supposed to transcend the mundane; ninety minutes of suspending rhyme, reason and logic, opening oneself to heightened emotions of operatic proportions. As football enters this grand new age of enlightenment, one is forced to wonder: has this enhanced appreciation of football as an intellectual, aesthetic sport came at the detriment of its vicarious, visceral charms? Centre-forwards no longer bustle. Central-defenders no longer hustle. Isn’t it all a little too sterile?

Yet as a counterpoint to the manicured lawns, the fastidious dieting and fetishisation of OPTA statistics lurks an altogether different side to the game; a side where chaos triumphs over order and toil defeats calculation. This is the side of the game which acknowledges the fallibility, the humanity, of the players. It embraces mistakes. It appreciates the intervention of a herculean gust of wind and an errant divot. Football, this view appreciates, is in a thrall to circumstance. At no time is this glorious chaos more apparent than during a goalmouth scramble.

The goalmouth scramble reduces football to its most primal and instinctive. With all the space of a phone-box to manoeuvre, forwards are compelled to think and forge; to force the ball goal-bound with all their cunning beyond the defensive barricade. Defenders pay scant regard for life and limb. Courageous as the most deranged of lion tamers, they fling their bodies hither and thither, blocking and deflecting as though the protected goal contains life’s elixir itself. Where there was once order, for a fleeting few glorious seconds, anarchy reigns.

To witness such an event unfold is to open oneself to the entire spectrum of human emotions within a matter of seconds. The paralysing fear of being the one whose error costs the defensive team; the hope-beyond-all-reason that the hitherto useless number nine manages to drag his feet from the ground quickly enough to reach the rebound. The sword of Damocles rests suspended over the collective necks of the defensive team, who respond with the satisfactorily requisite terror. As the goal gapes large, the ball becomes square for the attacking team, treated with all the carefree abandon of a virginal teenager confronted with a bra-strap. In short, it is the most beautiful, captivating, hopeless, terrifying feature of football. It ought to be lauded as such.

It is a truth sadly unacknowledged that every football fan worth their salty tears of adolescent loneliness should clutch their favourite goalmouth scramble close to their bosom. Consider this absolute humdinger; a gloriously anachronistic throwback to a time when pitches were marshland, shorts were short and Manchester City were an endearingly risible shambles.

Staring another ignominiously early FA Cup exit to Blackpool, then of the Third Division, right in its implacable maw, hardy souls trudge forward from defence for one final hurrah. From deep on the left, Andy Hinchcliffe swings an exhausted, uncultured left-boot, sending the ball hurtling towards the eighteen-yard area with all the surgical precision of Dr Nick making the first incision into Homer Simpson’s heart. A stout head nudges the ball goal-ward to be met by a stretched leg, jutting towards goal.

To put into words the confusion that doth ensue would be to trivialise its utter majesty. In tribute, I shall focus on three images.

Rare, suffice to say, is the day one witnesses an Egg-and-a-Bun all of a dither, prodding and poking around the scrimmage like the least decisive of rugby players. Additionally, the incomparable celebrations which erupt at the ecstatic conclusion compare favourably to those which met Sergio Aguero’s Premier League title-clincher in the final minute of the 2011/12 season.

Greatest of all, however, is the crestfallen reaction of Blackpool’s hapless defender – don’t ask me who the scorer is – upon bringing the orgy to its conclusion. Has such naked emotion ever been expressed on a football pitch as the guilty party keeling to his knees in unutterable horror at the ghastly atrocity committed? It is a tragicomic moment of farce that Shakespeare himself would have deemed a touch melodramatic. All other skirmishes, one posits, are mere pretenders to its throne.

Let this not be a lament to the demise of an art form, alas. Sure, lush, green turf, physically-primed athletes and training-ground set-piece routines are hardly the ideal ingredients to induce the collective rush of blood to the head required. One must be thankful for the variegated and capricious nature of all human endeavour – the cruel, harsh, glorious beauty of fate – casting forth brouhahas of such purity as to be recounted on one’s deathbed. Internazionale’s feted millionaires’ unsuccessful tussle against the staunchly proletarian Livorno rearguard bears testimony to the goalmouth scramble’s meritocratic nature, whilst this imbroglio featuring Caxias and Internacional proves that even Brazilians – home of football played to the Samba beat – make time for mayhem.

Gilded in furs football may be. Money and prestige on offer strips the game of its former chaotic unpredictability and wrests it from low culture to be discussed of in earnest tones, speaking of tactical shifts and feats of creative genius. But beyond this lurks something more primal; a game which embraces chance and submits itself to the Gods. This is the game of the goalmouth scramble. It is something we should all cherish.