Until a goofy-looking German working in a Swiss patent office came around, all of us took an Englishman’s word for how the universe functioned. The received wisdom was that time flew linearly at the same pace for everyone and space was a grand stage that stood still. But then the patent clerk showed that not only was time not absolute, but it depended on two things: motion and gravity. We call it relativity. The closer one approaches the speed of light, or the stronger the gravity, the more time slows down. But the genius didn’t know there was another way to slow down time to a point where one wonders if time has passed at all: watching Arsenal in the Champions League final against Paris St-Germain in Budapest.Now as Natasha Romanov kept telling Hawkeye in the MCU, we will all remember Budapest very differently.PSG fans will be thrilled to win back-to-back Champions Leagues, becoming the second team to defend the Big Ears in Europe after Zinedine Zidane’s Real Madrid. Arsenal fans will wonder how things could have gone if Gabriel could have just kept the ball a little lower in the penalty shootout. And neutrals will wonder what karmic crimes we have committed in our previous lives to watch a final so bereft of action that in 120 minutes there were only a total of five shots on target, where PSG had 75% possession and Arsenal made only 69 passes in the first half.Death by BoredomThe eye’s evolution story is particularly interesting: it started as a bit of light-sensitive skin, became a shallow cup, followed by a pinhole, and finally the light lens-bearing ones that we now have on our faces. The process took almost half a million years, but anyone watching this final would have wondered if it was worth the wait.There’s a word on Football Twitter that describes the sort of game we watched last night, one that was so soporific at times that one of my guests actually started snoring while watching: haramball.
For the uninitiated, the term haramball refers to a style of football where the goal is to score one goal and defend to the point that attackers start asking ontological questions about the meaning of life. And this was Haramball Pro Max the moment Kai Havertz scored in the fifth minute.Mikel Arteta learned his art at the feet of Pep Guardiola, who in turn was inspired by the great Johan Cruyff and El Loco Marcelo Bielsa, but anyone who has watched Arteta’s team this year will wonder if he has instead secretly Eklavyed and learnt his craft from a statue of Jose Mourinho.
Arsenal suffocated every PSG attack to the point that one wondered if these were the same 10 outfield players who had thrashed Inter Milan 5-0 last year, only body-swapped.Now sports lovers often say that stats never tell the whole story, and an eye test is a more accurate gauge to sample the vintage and see the full Hegelian picture but, in this case, neither the stats nor the eyes lied: this was a snoozefest.PSG had 75% of the possession and made 806 accurate passes to Arsenal’s 196 across 120-plus minutes. Arsenal managed seven shots and one on target, while PSG managed 21 shots with four on target. This was a football match that managed only five shots on target in 120 minutes, and Arsenal’s only one was Havertz’s goal, meaning Matvey Safonov lifted the Champions League after a final in which he did not have to make a single save.
In the first half, Arsenal managed only 69 passes, the lowest on record by any team in a Champions League final, which would make even Tony Pulis baulk.The match followed a simple arc: Arsenal compact, Arsenal narrow, Arsenal blocking central spaces, Arsenal asking PSG to have all the ball and do something clever with it. PSG tried to move Arsenal around, but they just passed the ball around with the efficiency of a file being shunted across the desks of various bureaucrats.The break came from one Arsenal mistake, when the Gunners’ third-choice right-back, Cristhian Mosquera, fouled Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Dembele equalised from the spot. But that goal didn’t open anything up. Arsenal refused to attack despite losing their lead, and though there was a late furious penalty appeal, the match seemed destined for the shootout. There was something about Eze’s stuttering run-up that almost seemed to suggest he was going to miss, and the moment Gabriel stepped up to take the decisive penalty, one was almost reminded of John Terry stepping up against Edwin van der Sar all those years ago in Moscow.Gabriel has been the heart, soul and rock of this Gunners team, much like John Terry, and yet when he stood over the ball, it almost felt like he was going to miss because fate, like football, always has the cruellest scripts planned.This wasn’t a football match so much as PSG trying to guess a CAPTCHA drawn by Mikel Arteta, but this match also lacked the furious intensity of rearguard actions where one team’s attacking waves are repelled time and again. Like the time Messrs Cambiasso, Zanetti, Samuel, Maicon and Lucio stopped the greatest Barcelona team in the 2010 semi-final. Or when Ji-Sung Park shadowed Andrea Pirlo so much that he called him Ferguson’s “attack dog”.
There was nothing about PSG’s football that suggested they were willing to take the risk needed in normal time to win a match, the kind of risk-taking behaviour that we saw from great attacking sides.Football by consensusPerhaps that’s down to the regimentation that has taken place in football where every blade of grass has to be post-coded and every pass has a risk score. Wingers no longer get dust on their boots because some guy with an Excel sheet said that statistically cutting inside has a higher ROAS. Players, instead of brains, seem to have Excel-sheet prompts in their heads: recycle possession, protect the defence, maintain structure, don’t anger the transition gods.
Every forward is a false nine who needs to track back, every full-back an auxiliary midfielder, and every goalkeeper a sweeper keeper. Tactical philosophies that were once a rarity are now the norm. The 4-4-2 with two dashing wingers getting chalk on their feet, the swashbuckling sign of English football, has been replaced by a low-block 4-4-2, where Gyokeres is more likely to be found defending in his box rather than in the opposition box trying to score a goal.Now there’s nothing wrong with efficiency, but we don’t want efficiency from football. We want that from cars and air conditioners, not from our footballers.This was a match crying out for a Bruno Fernandes. Perhaps that’s why Bruno Fernandes, who broke the Premier League assist record despite playing half the season in Ruben Amorim’s blasphemous 3-4-3, won all individual Premier League gongs, despite United finishing only third.
Football is in dire need of its entertainers. Since the turn of the decade, those individual moments of brilliance have simply ceased to exist, and it’s hard to explain to someone the joy of watching a Maradona, a Zidane, a Ronaldinho or a Cristiano Ronaldo before he became bothered about scoring records. No one remembers any members of the Greece team that won Euro 2004 and yet everyone remembers that it was the year a freakish Scouse lad called Wayne Rooney broke through and nearly dominated the tournament before he broke his foot.After the match, Declan Rice wrote on Instagram that “we will be back”. For the neutral football lover’s sake, one hopes they are not, or at least not the team playing this kind of haramball. Because, as Einstein explained to us all those years ago: time dilation is very real, especially when that kind of football is on display.
