20 Kinetic Melodies (2)
Football, in Egypt (where I learnt to play it at the age of five), as in South America, is a game of touch and skill. The reasons are obvious: the ground is hard and dry, the ball is always light, and such conditions favour the quick and nimble rather than the bulky and powerful, the good dribbler prepared to take people on rather than the heavy tackler intent only on blocking the progress of the opposition. Those were the days of 2–3–5 formations, 2 backs, 3 halves, 2 wings, 2 inside-forwards and a centre-forward. No one had heard of total football, neat triangles, Christmas trees or diamonds: the idea was to get the ball to the forwards as quickly as possible and let them get on with it. Watching us, present-day managers would have had a fit: when the opposition was attacking we forwards hung around the half-way line, waiting and hoping. Once we had the ball it was up to us to make for the goal as quickly as possible and score. They were high-scoring games, I remember, with twenty-two small boys on a full-sized pitch and a diminutive goalkeeper defending a full-sized goal. And they were never boring.
There were magical days when I could do no wrong, scoring three or four of the six or seven goals which earned us a narrow victory and setting up at least two of the others. On days like that it seemed so easy to swerve round the half-backs, cut inside the backs and send the ball high into the corner of the net. There must have been bad days, of course, when nothing would go right, when I never got the ball or could do nothing with it when I did get it. But my memory has blotted these out as effectively as mothers are said to blot out the pains of childbirth.
What does having ‘a good touch’ mean on the football field? It means having an instinctive sense of the ball as it comes to you, its speed and trajectory; it means knowing instinctively how to position yourself to receive a pass most effectively, when to linger and when to accelerate; it means feeling the ball as a part of yourself not just when it's at your feet but when it's at the other end of the field; it means internalising the pitch, sensing the game as good chess players are said to do the board before them, as a series not of static positions but of lines of force.
No one knows how they are going to perform when they step on to a football field or a tennis court. That is part of the beauty of sport, why it is life in microcosm, life compressed and heightened by rules and by the limits of space and time. Once you are out there you are on your own, the coaching, the training, the team-talks, the personal advice no longer relevant; only in the course of the game do you discover how good or bad you are (on that particular day).
This is even truer of tennis than it is of football, for in tennis you can't complain that you didn't get the right passes or lost because someone else was not on form or made a crucial blunder. In tennis there is no one but yourself to blame, though it does happen that one comes up against an opponent who, for the duration of the match, seems himself to be caught up in a dream of perfection and can do no wrong.
We talk of touch players in tennis much more than in football and all those who follow the game have a list of such players. Mine would include Okker, Goolagong, Nastase and McEnroe. But all the great players have touch. They all internalise the court instinctively, so that the game is not so much played out there where the spectators see it as, somehow, ‘in there’, in their bodies. Watching Hoad or Laver at their rampant best was like being invited into a dream. They seemed always to pick the right shot to play and it seemed that they not so much ran for the ball as that the ball was inevitably drawn into the centre of their racket.
The beauty and pain of both playing and watching tennis, though, has a great deal to do with the scoring system, which makes it very difficult for anyone to keep this up for a whole match. Hoad managed it when he demolished Ashley Cooper in the 1957 Wimbledon final (the first game of tennis I ever saw on television), and Connors managed it when he thrashed Rosewall in the 1973 final. But most of the time no one can take complete control, as one would in a race or a football match. There is too much time between points and between games. However hard you try you cannot keep yourself from thinking, from wondering if your touch is going to desert you or your opponent is finally going to find his. So many dreams turn into nightmares, tests not so much of skill and stamina, as in other sports, but of your whole balance and co-ordination. You start to become conscious of your touch and that is probably the moment when it begins to desert you. Whether you have begun to grow aware of it because it has already started to go or whether it starts to go precisely because you become aware of it no one can tell. But it is a curious and well-known fact about tennis that to win the first set 6–0 may not be the best way of ensuring an eventual victory. I suspect more matches are won from 0–6 down than from 3 or 4–6.
Tennis is a game where real time plays a key role. In football one may rue a missed opportunity but there is little time to think about it. In tennis the half-chance not taken, the break-point muffed, goes on haunting one and can easily lead to that dread tightening of the arm, that sense of unease which no amount of will or exertion can dissipate. That was Borg's great strength, apart from his extraordinary balance and speed of foot: a point played seemed to be over and forgotten as soon as it was done, leaving him totally free to concentrate absolutely on the next one.
A game which had looked comfortably won one moment can seem irretrievable only ten minutes later, and one wonders miserably, between points, what on earth one can do to get back the touch which was so effortlessly there just minutes before. So Adam must have wondered about the eating of the apple as he sweated away miserably, trying to scratch a living from the soil, and so Marcel must have felt on waking up to recall how, the evening before, he had managed to inveigle his mother into spending much of the night reading to him from his favourite book.
A few years ago I took up Aikido. I had twisted my knee playing six-aside football long after I should have given up the game, and it wouldn't stop hurting. Every time I tried to play tennis the injury flared up again. The doctors prodded and X-rayed but couldn't find anything wrong. Finally a specialist suggested that the only solution would be to go in to hospital for an exploratory probe. The idea did not appeal to me, and when I mentioned it to a former pupil who had spent a year in Japan and, I knew, practised some sort of Japanese martial art, he said Aikido would be just the thing for the knee. A lot of it was actually done on the knees, he said, and I would thus gradually build up the muscles in that region. I had never much liked the idea of bowing to portraits of the Master and throwing opponents over my shoulder (or, for that matter, being thrown over someone else's shoulder), but he merely smiled when I said all this and suggested I come along to the Dojo one day and have a look. So as not to appear churlish I went, and was pleasantly surprised. Although classed as a martial art, Aikido is non-aggressive. You work with a partner, not an opponent, and, though there was quite a lot of bowing, there seemed to be much less throwing over the shoulders than I had imagined. I decided to give it a try.