Labyrinth

Copulation and Mirrors

Written by: Chris Hannan
Photograph by: Lee Brown
03-borges.jpg

There now, that got yer attention, ya dirty minded buggers. I know what you were thinking! Some of you have full length mirrors in the bedroom, and those who don’t are thinking about it.

One of my favourite quotes in all literature is: Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men.

Pretty good, eh? Quote it to the missus when you get home, or your boss when he’s acting the cunt, or your teenage brat when he’s giving it the Billy Big Bollocks.

It’s by Jorge Luis Borges from one of his short stories, look it up if you want to know which.

Borges was Argentinian and is generally considered to be the finest writer never to have won a Nobel Prize. A genius, a one-off. Really. Ask any great writer who they most admire and Borges will be on the list.

He was one of those top-shelf intellectual Latin American writers that wrote so deeply and hauntingly about the human condition. Mirrors, labyrinths, the mutability of memory, the fluidity of time … infinite libraries that contain every book that has ever been written … or ever will be.

Bollocks like that.

Great stuff.

He was also a great Anglophile, there was something about the English character that fascinated him, but he could never really put it into words. About the only thing he couldn’t express.

The critic who best understood him wrote, “His basic contention was that fiction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an author’s ability to generate “poetic faith” in his reader.”

Copy that.

Starting to sound sort of familiar? Argentinian, one-off genius, intellectual, master of the esoteric, sees things other people don’t, Anglophile …

So … to Don Marcelo Bielsa, also Argentinian. If you take that quote above, and replace a couple of words you get this: “His basic contention is that football does not depend on illusion or reality; what matters ultimately is a coach’s ability to generate “poetic faith” in his players.”

Bielsa is to football what Borges was to literature.

All is illusion, true dat, but illusion alone is not enough, that illusion must become real. The trick is how to get that illusion onto a football field. If you can manage that, it becomes a kind of poetry.

I live about 45 minutes from Bilbao. I got to watch Bielsa’s Bilbao quite a lot. They were astounding. You probably know that Bilbao have a policy of only signing players from the local region, a bit like Yorkshire CCC back in the day. A bunch of local lads, all decent enough footballers but nothing special were transformed into a buzzing swarm of flying ants that stung, suffocated and scattered the likes of Barca and Real Madrid, and utterly destroyed the Scum twice, home and away. Nothing like it had been seen before, or since.

They spun an invisible web of smoke and mirrors, laid out intricate labyrinths, took the opposition down paths that led nowhere, doors suddenly appeared and opened where there was no door a few seconds ago.

So when he signed for us I thought I was in some kind of Borgesian dreamworld. Nah! This couldn’t be happening to us. Bielsa at Elland Road? Do me a favour.

But then I thought, well yes, this is exactly what Borges would have written if he had written about football. An endless circular labyrinth of crepuscular crap presided over by crooks, shysters, chancers and fuckwits for what seemed like eternity. An infinite treadmill of shite. One of Borges’ stories is called The Lottery in Babylon. Here’s the thing. You don’t only get tickets with prizes, some of the tickets are Bad News. You might win a million … or you might lose a leg, or your job. That’s the way it crumbles, cookiewise. Adds a bit of spice to the lottery, you must admit.

Every time we got a ticket in the Lottery in Babylon it was a Bad Ticket, we won things like Bates, Hockaday, Cellino, Rachubka … and … suddenly … BANG!

A door opens where before there was not.

Instant Karma. First game, and after a few minutes it became clear that somebody had sprinkled magic dust over the same players that had done a good impression of slack-jawed, mouth-breathing donkeys for most of last season. The same bloody players that couldn’t find their own arses with both hands! They were stealing a wage, the cunts.

We went to watch them, but in our hearts we didn’t really want to. They just weren’t Leeds. Well, maybe Berardi was … sometimes.

Alioski. Johnny fuckin Alioski! Formerly of this parish, best known for writhing around on the floor, rolling his eyes while clutching the wrong leg and waving imaginary cards. That’s just not Leeds.

Samu Saiz. No doubting his class, but his attitude stank the place out. Constantly chelping at the ref, gets himself banned for spitting. SPITTING FFS! That’s not Leeds either.

Pablo Hernandez. Best player on the park every game, when he felt like it, which wasn’t very often tbh. He’s surrounded by clowns. What can he do? Sod it, al carajo! Do the minimum and pick up yer wages, son. Don’t blame you to be honest.

Kalvin Phillips. Archetypal English footballer. Bags of heart and a great attitude, run through a brick wall if needs be. Nowt up top, mind, other than that bloody pineapple.

And so on … a team just about good enough to keep you in the division but nowhere near good enough to get you out.

After fifteen minutes of the Stoke game it was obvious that somebody had swapped last year’s losers for a set of ringers.

Point 1. Instead of shithousing the ref, we are shithousing the opposition. Fuck me! Who thought of that?

Free kick to them? Stand in front of the ball so they can’t take it quickly. Throw in to them? Knock the ball away, just a couple of yards, not too far. Goalkick to us? Take forever and a day. Stuff like that. After our third at Norwich (how good does that sound? Say again: after our third at Norwich) Alioski stood a yard inside their half at the restart, so they couldn’t restart the match. Alioski is looking at somebody in the crowd, and when the ref finally gets his attention, he bows his head, smiles and raises a hand in apology, Sorry ref, my bad.

And NOBODY says a word to the ref!

Total revolution, La Revolucion Bielsiana … without a ball being kicked.

And then there’s the football …

We’d forgotten what football was, really. We were like the poor sods trapped in Plato’s cave, watching two-dimensional shadows flitting across a screen thinking this was real life. Some of us had a vague folk-memory. Names like Bremner, Clarke, Madeley, Batty, Yeboah …

So long ago, a different world, a different life … Shadows, memories, stories in a book that nobody could find …

Bielsa spins some kind of mythical magical web at Thorp Arch? Well, no. He’s been spinning it for years, occasionally finding the right place to attach it. Bilbao, Chile, Newell’s Old Boys. Sometimes it didn’t take, of course, so he packed his bags and went back to his lair.

But it looks like it’s firmly attached here. Could all be a mirage of course, smoke and mirrors, a circular maze with no way out, but it doesn’t look like it.

Kalvin Phillips. Given a very simple, very specific job to do that suits his abilities to the ground. Busquets comes to Beeston. Just sit in front of the back four, be available to take a pass, and move the ball on. After an hour he looks like he’s been doing it all his life. Intelligent, aware, anticipating the next move.

Samu Saiz. When the opposition see his name on the team sheet it takes 10% off their game before a ball is kicked. At least one of their players is out of the game, sometimes two. They’re gonna have to man mark him and hope to get lucky with one. No more chelping, no more spitting, just football.

Alioski. Work rate doubled, totally concentrated on the game, side before self. No more diving and waving imaginary cards around. He gets knocked down, but he gets up again.

Pablo. Reborn. A class above everyone else on the park, and he wants you to know it, every week.

Play the ball out from the back? Up to now it meant pass it around the back four for a bit … and then hoof it upfield.

No! This is what it means and how it works. Shifting triangles, the ball pinging around like a 70s Gottlieb pinball machine with the voltage cranked up. Move the ball forward at pace, not across and back.

And the goals, the goals. Like the sea, always different but always the same. From the left, the right, direct, tap-ins, shots from outside the box, from corners, long elaborate build-ups, lightning raids … But always the same result. The keeper looking helplessly at his defence, arms out, asking wtf just happened. There’s an infinite library, a labyrinth being woven, and one man knows where everything goes. He has the poetry.

Versus Swansea KP was having a bad day. They put somebody on him to man-mark him. Who the fuck does that? Nobody man-marks a defensive midfielder. It took KP by surprise, completely threw him. He was lost and in danger of getting a red card sooner rather than later.

Don Marcelo spots it in 10-15 minutes, nobody else has. He takes another 5-10 to figure out the answer. Takes KP off and tweaks the defensive midfield ever so slightly so they don’t know who to man-mark, because where there was one DMF there are now two, and they’re taking it in turns. Which one do you mark? A forking path! Pure Borges. Their game plan is subverted. They’re in the labyrinth. From that moment on we look the better side.

This is the work of a genius, in real time, right before our eyes.

There will be bad days. Of course there will. There will be bad refs, we’ll have off days, the opposition will get lucky. Bad beats. There will always be a Tony Pulis stinking the place out. That’s the Lottery in Babylon, some days you get The Bad Ticket.

Six games in, and the same players, more or less. Yes, I know we did something similar last year at the beginning of the season. It turned out to be a mirage, smoke and mirrors.

This one’s different, this is not smoke and mirrors, it’s a labyrinth of forking paths, an infinite library, shifting triangles. Bielsa is the one manufacturing the labyrinth on the fly, he’s The Architect, he has the plans that tell you where the exits are, he’s The Librarian, he knows where all the books are.

Por supuesto, Don Marcelo, si usted esta leyendo esto, que conste que yo se lo que usted tiene escondido por debajo del taburete.

Es un Aleph. ◉

(This article was published in TSB 2018/19 issue 03 and is free to read as part of TSB Goes Latin.)

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