The Way U Talk About Ball - Issue #10
When Will Men's Football Return From The War?
The Week In Ball
Hello my friends. It's been a quiet and extremely boring week without ALL OF THE FOOTBALL, ALL OF THE TIME. It did leave me time to binge all of Only Murders In The Building which I enjoyed very much and would recommend, along with the UFO documentary by JJ Abrams on Sky. It starts off a bit dull but then gets really good and is also worth a watch.
Back with the football, I'm fully aware there was a big weekend of women's football which I do follow via Twitter and very occasionally watch, but which I haven't got into deeply nor feel confident talking about as much as the men's game.
What I will say though is that Vivianne Miedema is the GOAT and the saviour and I would fully mourn her if she ever left Arsenal. (she scored Arsenal's last minute equaliser to draw the North London Derby).
As far as International Football goes, I've been watching the main hitters: France, Spain, Germany, England to see what they've been up to and mostly what they've been up to is scoring lots of goals and looking very comfortable indeed.
England beat Albania 5-0 with a much needed hattrick from Harry Kane, a second England goal for Jordan Henderson and a goal and then a somewhat divisive celebration from Harry Maguire that it's really not worth getting into.
France and Germany really ramped it up winning 8-0 and 9-0 respectively against Kazakhstan and Liechtenstein, leaving Spain to scrape through with two 1-0 victories. To be fair they also had the tougher of the opponents, playing Greece and Sweden and they lack an out and out striker.
And then, last night, England topped it all by winning 0-10 against San Marino. Sure, it was San Marino but it's the biggest winning margin I can remember and while they (SM) were indeed awful, it was good to see England pushing right to the end. The highlight of course was a goal from my beautiful Hale End son Emile, getting on the scoresheet on his first start.
The biggest shock/lol/comeuppance of the games was Italy drawing with Northern Ireland while Switzerland managed to tonk Bulgaria 4-0 and secure qualification for themselves, leaving Italy in the play offs.
Although it's a nice bit of schadenfreude for the Euros, in reality I'd like Italy to qualify. I'd love to see Chiesa and Donnaruma and short king Insigne at a World Cup. Likewise I hope Sweden get there and take 41 year old Zlatan and Norway for Haaland and Martin Odegaard (I think a high scoring draw against Netherlands is the best bet here for them both to qualify, which is preferable to those catfish Turkey getting into another international tournament and embarrassing anyone who backed them again).
Of course, after all that, there are many reasons why this competition shouldn't be going ahead. We know of the deaths of workers building the stadia and facilities, we know of the state's treatment of LGBTQ+ people (something close to my heart as a queer person), we know about the continued sportswashing and more parochially, the disruption it's going to cause to the domestic leagues.
I don't want to stop anyone from watching the sport and supporting the team they love, nor do I want to deny players their chance to take part in a competition they've dreamed of being in all their lives but I do think it's important to be informed, to try and help and advocate for change where you can and ultimately to make a decision based on your own feelings about how much you want to interact with it.
Kick Off
So this week I'm going to talk about a couple of things here that seem in vogue phrases to drop into commentary. I don't know if you've noticed but every year there seems to be one particular thing that commentators, summarisers and pundits hang their hat on, and for me this is the one for the 21/22 season.
Now I didn't grow up learning to play football. It wasn't something girls at my school did, nor did it ever cross my mind it could be an option (apart from anything else I wasn't sporty at all, my interest in football was, as it is now, purely watching it on the TV with the odd live match here and there), so this is probably why these items are a blind spot to me. However, I'm here to admit ignorance and let you know it's OK to learn as you go along so today we're going to talk about the 'channels' and the 'lines'.
As with almost everything else I've covered in this section the fundamentals of the items are extremely basic. In this case it simply refers to space.
Channels, specifically, are "...most commonly referred to as the space between the most outside defender and the side line", so the room you have to play the ball forward down the side of the pitch. It's created by pulling opposing defenders and wing backs in to leave a 'channel' in which the attacking wing back, defender or midfielder (or perhaps even the goalie) can play a ball.
You may also hear the often interchangeable phrase 'lanes' which just means the general space for any forward pass to be made into, again you want to stretch the play to make these as wide as possible:
Lines on the other hand are the spaces horizontally across the pitch between either the line of defenders and midfielders or midfielders and forwards. Creating the space between the lines means disrupting the lines, causing players to run back or forward and leave the space available for your players to run into, to receive the ball and start an attack.
So in order to get as much space as possible it's helpful for a team to be able to exploit the lanes, create space down the channels for players to run and play balls into and have plenty of room between the lines into which forward runs and balls can also be directed.
The {Offside} Thirst Trap
This is what you're getting for the Thirst Trap this week. Donnaruma. Veratti. Italians speaking French. PSG branded silky bomber jackets. The height difference. I'm off for a lie down.
Kit Bag
Two things to mention this week. The first is to reiterate just how much I love the current France home kit. It's such a beauty but every time I see it I'm reminded how much I particularly love the socks. They're such a delicious scarlet and look so vibrant on the pitch.
Secondly, long time readers will know how much I love CD Leganés' mascot, Super Pepino, well now he's available in SOCK FORM!
Extra Time
A few bits and bobs for you this week:
Firstly please listen to the live Wrighty's House podcast with Emma Hayes. She's just absolutely brilliant; insightful, funny, interesting. Also related to this, congratulations to Stadio on their 200th episode!
If you like the Kick Off section of this newsletter, where I try to clumsily but simply explain some of the more nerdy aspects of the game, then I think you're going to enjoy reading John Muller in The Athletic. I wasn't a subscriber to his, by all accounts, excellent spacespacespace newsletter but from this introductory article I really like the way he writes and, for my sins, writing this newsletter has fired up the dork in me who like patterns and logic and solid explanations for things which I think this is hugely going to help with.
Next here's some keeper excellence from Aaron Ramsdale and Ben Foster
Speaking of keepers, it's also 6 months to the day that this happened
Finally, it's Trans Awareness Week and this is brilliant🏳️⚧️
Watch the Nike short here:
For comments, clarifications, questions or corrections drop me a line at thewayutalkaboutball@gmail.com or reply to this email. I love getting feedback and am always happy to have a chat about anything I've written.
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