Sorry, Rodri but football’s greatest nights come in all shapes and styles
PEP GUARDIOLA and his Barcelona tiki-taka still have a heck of a lot to answer for. All those years of big galoots being told to stroke it around at the back like the new Franz Beckenbauer when they couldn’t hit the back end of a bus with a beach ball.
All those years of everyone from top-level coaches who should know better to Shuggie McBlooterit at his Monday night five-a-sides talking about ‘playing football the right way’.
God, playing football the right way. How often do you hear that claptrap even now?
In terms of cliches that make you want to die inside, it’s right up there with ‘we don’t want to see that in the game’ — usually uttered, with the kind of earnest tone normally reserved for state funerals, after you’ve watched, let’s say, a Rangers coach headbutt the Celtic manager at the end of a women’s game 477 times on repeat before sending a link to everyone in your WhatsApp contacts book with the words ‘Whoaaaa!!! Check out this madness’ and the wee emoji of the guy with the nuclear explosion coming out of his head beside another one with tears of laughter.
Yeah, we don’t want to see that in the game.
But we’ll keep it stored on the mobile alongside that video of Diego Maradona kung-fu kicking his way round the Bernabeu like Bruce Lee after losing the 1984 Copa del Rey final to Athletic Bilbao — the footage they really should be showing in the Nou Camp museum instead of Sergio Busquets passing the ball to death — anyway.
‘He’s not that kind of player’ is another beauty. It usually gets trotted out by managers when one of their guys has been charging around like an elephant in musth and tried to take someone’s leg off at the ankle.
A bit like our old pal Rodri, who halved Norway’s Martin Odegaard in two in Malaga just three days before turning up at Hampden and telling the world that timewasting in a Euro 2024 qualifying match should come with a five-year custodial sentence and no time off for good behaviour.
Incidentally, his national team coach, Luis de la Fuente was on Bilbao’s books that day Maradona went all Cobra Kai in Real Madrid’s ground, even though he didn’t actually play in the final after being subbed against Real Sociedad the week before.
Looking on as your team-mates scramble across the turf in an attempt to avoid being decapitated by the studs of a wild-eyed Argie with an appetite for destruction — among other things — perhaps explains why he had a slightly different perspective on Andy Robertson taking a bit longer than usual over throw-ins or John McGinn using his bum to nudge someone out of the way.
Look, we’ve all had a good laugh at Rodri’s post-match interview on Sky in the wake of Scotland’s 2-0 win over the Spanish on Tuesday. It was the kirsch-soaked cherry on a Black Forest Gateau of a night.
‘For me, it’s a bit rubbish. It’s always wasting time or they provoke you — they always fall. This is not football.’
Oh, if only Heston Blumenthal could come up with the chemical formula to take the essence of those words and distill them into the sweetest elixir vitae, we’d never need Tennent’s for intoxication again.
Perhaps the funniest thing of all in the midst of all this — and rarely mentioned — is that Rodri is a product of Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid. The Man City midfielder came through the ranks there as a kid and re-signed for them in 2018 from Villarreal.
Simeone’s team have long been regarded as Europe’s undisputed kings of s***housery, to use an indelicate phrase on a Sunday. Timewasting, setting up to frustrate, putting pressure on refs, putting the boot in when need be. Atletico do it all and more. And wear it as a badge of honour.
Rodri knew that when he rejoined them. Was happy to be a part of it all. And no wonder. In his first game back, he won the UEFA Super Cup in a 4-2 extra-time thriller against city rivals Real.
Leaving the club as a teenager, he just missed Simeone leading the Rojiblancos to their first Primera Division title in 18 years, clinching it with a dramatic final-day draw at closest rivals Barcelona.
They won it again, against the odds, under the Argentinian in 2021.
And that’s where this silliness about playing the game the right way comes into sharp focus. Ask any Atletico fan who was at the Nou
Camp that day in 2014 or cheered as their side dumped Real whether it offends them that Simeone raised their team to those heights through tenacity and terror rather than tiki-taka.
Ask them if it would feel better if they had just lifted those trophies with Corinthian spirit and 99-percent possession instead of getting it to Diego Costa or Luis Suarez and letting them do the rest. And understand as they splutter their boquerones in your face.
You see, there is no right way to play the game. No right way to win. Because what makes football such a buzz is about way more than the football itself. It’s about the feels. And the memories. And the adrenalin. And everything that being in a ground on a special, special evening of inexplicable electricity and alchemy brings.
History will be the judge, but, right now, Hampden on Tuesday feels like it was one of those classics that will echo through time. Was it technically brilliant? No.
The first half, in particular, was disjointed, niggly, high-octane, wonderful chaos in front of an atmosphere so old-school that Pedro Porro had to be taken off after being barracked every time he touched the ball and Yes, Sir, I Can Boogie was mercifully replaced with a second-half rendition of that ancient Hampden favourite, Que sera, sera...
Callum McGregor has been granted sainthood for his overall display. Yet, how many times did he actually touch the ball in that opening 45? Scotland lost sight of playing the game ‘the right way’ altogether in going long so often, but it didn’t matter. It worked. It rattled Spain. And rattling Spain, whose players couldn’t hack it, was the key.
The emotion and excitement of the night led me to reflect on the best games I have attended in person. The ones that still raise the goosebumps even now. And what it was about them that lives on.
One was based solely on the play. Ajax at Real Madrid in the 1995-96 Champions League. Two-nil going on 7-0. Overmars, Davids, a 19-year-old Kluivert contributing to a tour de force of performance art, synergy, telepathy and the kind of football that exists only in dreams.
Yet, the others? Arsenal v Parma in the 1994 Cup-Winners’ Cup final in Copenhagen. One-nil to George Graham’s men. Naturally. Alan Smith scores early and Tony Adams delivers the most incredible example of strangling a match to death against a frontline consisting of Tomas Brolin, Gianfranco Zola and Faustino Asprilla.
It’s just Adams I remember. His performance alone. A colossus.
Fiorentina v Rangers in the UEFA Cup semis in 2008 is in there, too. A siege. A night of tension, of people living on their nerves. That fascinating dichotomy of one team set up to defend for their lives and the other charged with breaking them down.
No more, no less. The total opposite of playing football the right way. And, yet, when it was all over and Nacho Novo had scored that last kick of a war of attrition, La Viola’s magnificent man of a coach, Cesare Prandelli, made his team line up to shake the hands of every Rangers player exiting the field at the Artemio Franchi.
Scotland v Spain was just another occasion to remind us that football’s real nights for the ages come in all shapes and forms and styles. There’s no fixed formula. No rules. Nothing that says you can’t use sportsmanship and spoiling and revel in the opposition’s sour grapes.
Even Rodri is well-schooled enough to see that. Now he’s dried his eyes.