Ken Early: Rewatching old matches shows what the present game has lost

Football has always lived in the eternal now. As a mass entertainment propelled by anticipation and hype, it’s all about what’s happening right now, and what might be about to happen. The standard clichés – “We’re only thinking about the next game,” “you’re only as good as your last game,” express the amnesiac, perpetually forward-moving nature of the sport.

“History” is often mentioned, and seldom reflected on. Maybe it has a certain status-currency as a marker of identity and of commitment as a fan. Think of Celtic or Everton fans singing: “If you know your history, it’s enough to make your heart go, Ooooohhhh...”

Really, this is less history than folklore – a mythified and sentimentalised saga of epic deeds, populated by heroes and legends: El Beatle, King Kenny, Captain Marvel, The Guvnor. It’s more about celebration and exaltation than analysis and understanding.

Mostly “history” is just another way of keeping score – a set of tallies that are useful insofar as they can be stitched on to banners, or weaponised to taunt opponents: “20 times 20 times, Man United,” “f**k off Chelsea FC, you ain’t got no history,” or grim chants gloating about mass-casualty events or historic paedophilia.

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Fresh possibilities

Generally, football doesn’t look back. Yes, there is a passionate collector subculture of people who like to rewatch classic games, but for most people there seems little point in watching a match from years ago, when you already know the result, when there’s a new one just about to kick off, full of fresh possibilities. An old football match is not like an old movie or album or novel, it never had a meaning as such, it was never trying to express anything in particular. It was just a bunch of stuff that happened in a moment that’s gone forever.

And yet these half-forgotten games still have the capacity to change how we understand the present. Thanks to the virus, football fans everywhere are now rewatching classic old matches because there’s no other football on TV. The reruns might lack the thrill of live Champions League knockout games, but – at least if you remember them from the first time around – they have an undeniable nostalgic charm. And it turns out there’s nothing that increases your respect for the standards on display in today’s football like being confronted with yesterday’s football in all its ... well, glory doesn’t quite cover it.

The 1999 Champions League final was shown in full on Virgin last week. I remember watching it 21 years ago, and coming away thinking Manchester United had been lucky: Scholl off the post, Jancker off the bar. Watching it again a few days ago, I realised United had in fact been much the better team and fully deserved their win on the balance of play.

What surprises you watching at this remove is the sheer innocence of some of the moments. David Beckham played central midfield that night because Keane and Scholes were suspended. At one point in the second half, Beckham passes out to Teddy Sheringham on the right, then, incredibly, chases his pass over to the wing and actually runs outside Sheringham on the overlap, showing all the tactical responsibility of a Jack Russell that has invaded the pitch. Sheringham loses it and Bayern immediately break down the centre of the pitch, through the gap where Beckham has abandoned his position. Luckily for him, United got away with it and almost everybody promptly forgot this scary thing had ever happened.

Boundless energy

United fans will remember Beckham’s boundless energy tipping the balance in the end, his driving run in the left channel, past exhausted Bayern challenges, helping to force the first of the two corners with which United scored the two goals. And his two beautifully-flighted corners live forever in the mind’s eye.

For most of us memory is a highlights show; it records the goals, the near-misses, the beautiful moments – and discards everything else. This explains why I thought Bayern had been unlucky: I had remembered their two shots off the woodwork and forgotten most of the actual play.

The mind’s eye is selective and deceptive, kinder to some players than others. I was reminded of this when recently rewatching Liverpool 4-3 Newcastle from 1996, which has often been described as the best-ever Premier League match.

One aspect of the play that hasn’t aged well is the decision-making of Jamie Redknapp, who shoots four or five times from extreme long range, including in situations where Newcastle’s defenders are retreating and he has team-mates infiltrating ahead. These are decisions that transform promising attacks into goal-kicks and would probably get you substituted today.

Redknapp, remember, was then regarded as one of the best passers and shooters in the game, and yes, few could match the power and beauty of his ball-striking technique. But fans, pundits, and even players and coaches of the era tended to mistake beautiful passing for effective passing. The mind’s eye is seduced by the sheer stylishness of the way some players can hit the ball, but overlooks all the times they ignore a simple and effective option in favour of an extravagant crossfield pass or a 30-yard shot that skims just over the bar.

Throughout most of football history, a player’s bad decisions could disappear into the dark recesses of forgetting: almost everyone forgot almost everything that happened on the pitch almost immediately, and that was assuming they had noticed it in the first place. In the 90s a Jamie Redknapp could score a couple of screamers a season and his right foot would be revered as the hammer of the gods; he had a license to shoot on sight.

Today every move and action is recorded, logged and analysed; it’s no longer the mind’s eye players have to impress, but the unforgiving, unforgetting glare of machine memory. There is nowhere left to hide. If Redknapp was playing today, a coach would take him aside and say, “Jamie. In our last 10 matches you have taken 50 shots from outside the box for a combined xG of 0.62. We need to talk about your shot selection because, I’m sorry, but it’s absolutely killing the team...”

Rationalised and optimised

Watching these old matches emphasises just how rationalised and optimised today’s game has become. It’s not just that players run harder and faster, in choreographed patterns, and keep it up for 90 minutes instead of putting on a shock-and-awe show of running in the first 15 and spending the next 75 catching their breath. It’s that all sorts of things once common in the game have been identified as inefficiencies and are being phased out – the long-range shots, the death-or-glory sliding tackles, the 70-yard goalkeeper punts, the swirling hopeful crosses.

Clearly, the standard of play has improved massively. Twenty years ago Robert Pires was the only Premier League winger who always tried to get into the half-space and cut back a low, accurate cross, rather than hanging one up towards the back stick. Today the Ireland under-21s can score three Pires-type goals in 45 minutes against Sweden.

Nostalgia being what it is, you also can’t help feeling that this machine-honed efficiency comes at the cost of improvisational freedom, of a certain anything-can-happen unpredictability. A team that can deploy pressing traps involving six or seven players running co-ordinated patterns will always beat a team that can’t, but from a spectator’s point of view, the drama of a game doesn’t depend on the technical standard. There’s an exhilaration in watching those old players make it up as they go along, even if you know that today’s teams would probably beat them 10-0. The loss of innocence is inevitable, and so too is missing it when it’s gone.