The Beautiful Game

Ever wonder why soccer is known as The Beautiful Game?

A few years ago FIFA were looking for a cool moniker for the sport, so they called in fifteen guys from KPMG at $300,000/day. Each. Got them to sit around a table and come up with a name. It started slowly. The first few days resulted in suggestions along the lines of: The OK Game. The Game With A Round Ball Where You Kick It A Lot. The Not Bad Game. The Game. The Funky If You’re Brazilian But Kinda Dour If You’re Scottish Game. A Game On Grass. If Star Wars Was A Game It’d Be Soccer. After several weeks, and several million dollars in consultancy fees, it looked like they were going to have to settle for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rugby, when during the wrap-up, a small fella from Rhode Island said jokingly, “We could call it the Beautiful Game.” There was a certain amount of sniggering around the table, but these were marketing consultants, men for whom truth means nothing, where style is king and substance is immaterial. “I like it!” one of them suddenly. Then Sepp Blatter said, “We must be ballsy. Ballsy! We are in football, and if there’s anything we have a lot of, it is balls.” And then men in suits started saying The Beautiful Game in low voices until it sounded ok, because if you repeat anything often enough it begins to sound plausible. Try it, it works. For example, I bet now when you read about John Reid being a potential Prime Minister, you don’t choke on your cornflakes the way you did the first time you heard it mentioned. The Beautiful Game was born.

As you can see from the above photo, Two of Two is an expert exponent of the Beautiful Game. Every picture tells a story, and here is a boy, limbs moving fluidly, tongue out, poised to pounce on the ball and stroke a sweet shot into the corner of the net.

Saturday 7th Ocotober was a momentous footballing day. I know that already, you’re thinking. Scotland beat France 1-0, and since France had recently beaten Italy, is made us de facto World Champions. At least for four days. Now, certainly that day was momentous for that, but the principal reason it turned out to be a day of moment, was that it saw the first goal of Saturday morning football, after thirteen months of trying, by the aforementioned Two of Two.

One of Two scored two goals the previous week - she was, as her American coach pointed out, on fire - and another that Saturday. We got that warm fuzzy feeling that one gets when watching one’s kid achieve something, or in our case, as we’re not at all demanding, anything at all. ‘Yay! You ate you’re breakfast without spilling any milk! High Five!’ However, each goal was a stab from a couple of yards, in games on a small pitch, four-a-side. And One of Two does not want to be a footballer when she grows up. She wants to be a doctor or a diplomat, she wants to help people and get everyone on the planet to be nice to each other. By God, she has a lot of disillusion in front of her, but you can say that for all kids, and at least she’s going into it with a decent attitude.

Two of Two, on the other hand, wants to play the Beautiful Game. All the time. He wants to play for someone in the World Cup, although he hasn’t yet decided if it’s Scotland or England or France. (The Lindsays came from Normandy, presumably in 1066, so he’s in with a shout.) He keeps taunting me with the England thing, and if he’s not doing that, he says he wants to play for Celtic. He’s young.

So, there he is, going to football every Saturday morning. They practice skills for forty minutes, and then they play a twenty minute game. Quite a large pitch, decent sized goals, and at least twenty-five six year-old boys roving around the park in a tight bunch, like a herd of wildebeest. When the ball goes to one end, it generally takes about ten minutes to get back up to the other. This is end-to-end football in slow motion.

Goals, under these circumstances, are at a premium. When it can take quarter of the game for the ball to work its way out of a midfield scrum of twenty pint-sized Vinnie Joneses, there’s never much goalmouth action. That Saturday’s game was no different. A dour struggle, characterized by the behaviour of the herd, it was heading towards the final seconds with Two of Two’s side on the wrong end of a 1-0 mauling. The ball had finally worked its way up to the other end of the park, and all the opposition needed to do was keep the thing in the midst of the herd for another ten seconds or so.

Suddenly the ball broke loose, and rolled along the ground to Two of Two. He was about twelve yards out, on the outer rim of the scrum - it was a bit like the sun suddenly breaking loose from the centre of the solar system and finding itself next to Pluto. Twelve yards doesn’t sound too much, but these kids are six, and most of them have trouble kicking the ball twelve feet. Two of Two swivelled, smacked the ball right-footed, first time, and sent a magnificent looping shot, through the crowd and over the dwarf-like keeper’s head. The net bulged. The wee lad then took off up the park, hands aeroplane-like out at the side - he’s been watching all the right tv - and was still charging full steam in that classic goalscorer’s pose when the final whistle blew.

He’d saved the day. He’d scored his first competitive goal. It’s now two weeks later, but he’s still running up and down the park celebrating. Saturday 7th October 2006. It might be remembered as the day Scotland beat the nearly world champions 1-0. But not in this house.

Two of Two, goalscorer. It was sweet, perfectly placed and opportunistic. And you know what? It was beautiful.