Once, every Sunday afternoon was a seminar for every schoolboy who loved football. They sat hunched before the television, absorbed in The Big Match, picking apart the performances of the athletes on the screen.
Each boy was taking in the craft of moving a ball swiftly and accurately around a field, absorbing every nuance of the play. Professionals do nothing by accident. Amateurs grow to be professionals by learning and learning and still learning when others see no more to learn.
Yet beauty is born of more than dedicated labour. Without soul there is only correctness. Great professionals open paths to different dimensions. It happens as consciousness intensifies, when thought is no longer part of the work. Sometimes, it can be sustained over a long period. More often, those transcendent moments are sudden glimpses of the sublime that cannot endure, as if we are momentarily privileged to witness the divine but must not be exposed to it for too long for fear we will be consumed.
One Monday morning, two of these schoolboy students of eternal beauty hurried down the corridor to make the most of the twenty-minute break. Both were fresh from the previous day’s tutorial. Football had brought them together after six years apart. They met first at primary school, infants’ school really, and played together until the older one was taken away to another school, up on the hill above the valley.
On the first day of secondary school, the older one was mooching alone on the playing field, tapping and teasing a tennis ball, perfecting the art of kicking with both feet. With no greeting, the younger one was suddenly upon him, flicking the ball from his feet and racing across the grass with it. No words were needed anyway. The older one dashed after his opponent, tackling, losing, winning. Friendship resumed as if it had never been interrupted.
Now, they were heading to the tennis courts, where the chain-link fencing was high enough to deflect a mishit ball before it was lost in a neighbour’s back garden. Goals were formed by the fence posts and the grey tarmac of the courts was the perfect surface for the ball, smooth and with a true bounce.
All football boys understand the unwritten code of games played on school playgrounds, or in parks with jumpers for goalposts. When there are teams, the usual rules of football are followed, although the offside rule may be waived by common consent. When there are only three players, or two players, or there is no room for a team game, a new etiquette is recognised. A goalkeeper may or may not be designated but a Universal Law applies: no attempt on goal may be made if it is too easy. Some element of skill must be involved before a goal can be scored. To bludgeon the ball past the goalkeeper or into an open goal simply because it is possible is unsporting and unethical. The ball must be passed cleverly between the outfield players to set up a chance to strike, or a shot must be made from distance or a difficult angle. Brute force is occasionally acceptable if a goalkeeper is forced into an outstanding save.
As the two friends passed through the glass doors, cracked but held intact by reinforcement, the tennis courts were a stadium, the rumble of traffic and the hubbub of break time the roar of the crowd. Glory awaited them at this time every day. Each of them understood the holiness of the impending endeavour. Over many Sundays they had both taken in the language of magic and their practice was an evocation and an invocation. As weeks passed, the twenty-minute sessions accumulated into hours and days of repeated rehearsal, a continuing quest to scale the heights revealed to them in flashes on Sunday afternoons.
No poet or painter ever strove more intently than these two seekers of perfection. To speak of it was to desecrate the endeavour but its true purpose was never in question. Together, they sought oneness with the giants of the game, to connect with them through the ritual of play.
Who shall doubt the legitimacy of their quest? What professional could stroll onto these crowded courts adorned only in sagging shoes and patched trousers and weave their spells with an ageing tennis ball, while trying to stop it rolling into the corner where sat the smokers, with their Doc Martens and sullen looks of intimidation?
Beauty is true no matter the circumstances in which it manifests itself. These two young lads were intent on a cause as noble as any historic exploration of humanity’s relationship with the eternal. At this moment, the calling that summoned Drake, or Euclid, or Best, was alive within them.
At home, the younger friend’s parents were bickering, sewing seeds of separation and bitterness. The older one was safe and loved and protected but was already sensing a greater adventure within him than his parents had seen as his destiny. Boys on the doorstep of manhood know the truths that will define them but they dare not reach out for them. There is, they feel, still so much more to learn, even though the voice within them tells them that there is nothing. Some know instantly what is true for them. Others seek their truth for the rest of their lives, chipping away at the layers of learned reality that cloud their view.
At this moment, as these two boys entered the tennis courts and dashed between the real footballers to claim their usual pairing of fence posts, football was the most articulate expression they knew of their pain and confusion and hope. For twenty minutes, there would be no world beyond the chain-link framework and the few square feet of tarmac in front of it.
The younger one dropped the ball to the ground and tapped it to his friend. A professional would have stopped the ball and then rolled it carefully between the fence posts. Here, there was no place for clinical precision. This was a hunt for an aesthetic, not for a victory.
The older one used the momentum of the ball to let it roll onto the top of his battered shoe and then flicked it into the air in front of the goal. The younger one craned his head towards it and it glanced off and dropped limply onto the floor. It trickled towards the foot of the fence, wide of the goal.
The older friend recovered it and rolled it away from the goal, down the gentle slope towards the other side of the tennis court. He turned with it and chipped it towards the younger one, who struck it in the air across the face of the goal.
“Sorry,” he said, as his friend stretched in vain to reach it.
This time, the ball rolled into the corner of the court, where it was arrested by the boot of the Alpha Smoker. He looked questioningly at the older friend.
“Sorry,” said the footballer. There was a moment’s tension and then the Alpha Smoker” rolled the ball inexpertly back.
“Thanks,” said the older friend and dribbled the ball away down the court.
Drama informs the aesthetic of football. A scrappy goal scored in the last minute of a big game can be as momentous as a piece of wizadry performed by a virtuoso. Still, there is a hierarchy of beauty in which some facets are more lauded than others, not just because they are more difficult to achieve, but also because they call for a more graceful execution. Of all these, the volley is the most elusive.
When a ball is struck with a foot, it goes exactly where it should go. The ball understands perfectly the relationship between the point and angle of impact and the pressure applied, and the trajectory it must follow. If the striker wants the ball to travel in a particular direction, at a particular speed, it must be struck in precisely the right place, with exactly the right weight. The ball must be given no choice but to do as the striker intends. A professional footballer must execute this mathematically exquisite manoeuvre at high speed in pouring rain on a bog of a surface with someone tugging, kicking and jabbing at him as he does it.
To strike a ball travelling at height towards you and send it to its target with accuracy and timing calls for a swift positioning of the body into the correct shape, informed by an instant recognition of the state of play. It must still be struck with the right weight and in the only place on its surface that will direct it to the desired destination. A lofted ball inevitably travels at speed, which adds to the complexity of the action. When it is a tennis ball, the margin for error is negligible.
Near the bottom of the court, the older friend turned and saw the younger one standing ready, to the right of the goal and some distance back from it. The older one rolled the ball back onto his foot and lobbed it high towards his friend, giving himself time to run into position before the return pass.
The younger one steadied himself and stepped back, allowing the ball to drop onto his foot. He applied no pressure; he simply angled his foot and used the momentum of the dropping ball to give it velocity as it left his foot at a shallower angle. By now, the older one was arriving to the left of the goal, within easy striking distance. Too easy. He too stepped back and struck the ball back across the goal at pace towards his on-rushing friend.
It was a little too high. The younger one sprang up, twisting as he did so, and struck the ball in mid-air, driving it with top of his foot towards the goal. It flew fast and straight and wedged in one of the diamonds of the chain-link, like a permanent monument to the sublime perfection that had just been made manifest.
There was a moment’s stunned silence. The older one turned and looked at the smokers. They sat with their mouths even more agape than usual and then broke into spontaneous applause. They had no regard for football, but beauty transcends even the most determined apathy.
Then, “Yes!” cried the younger one, punching the air and running round with his arm still raised. A goal is a goal.
Manhood arrives too quickly for boys who are still grappling with who they are. They do not realise that they cannot know, until they have truly come of age. For some boys, the transition is too painful and they postpone it until well into adulthood, when the awakening can be destructive and harmful. Sure enough, these two boys found new callings beyond the football field as they matured. They drifted into different worlds. New friendships were formed and fresh paths hewn that were destined never to cross.
Beauty, though, is eternal. They had simply been its instruments, participants in a revelation of perfection. Having once shared that moment, they were bonded together forever. When finally they are summoned to the dimensions beyond, and their inner recording angels are taking stock of their tenure in this ragged earth, both will recall with breathless pride that they were part of That Goal.