Also not the words of the Manchester City centre-back Marc Guéhi, despite what you were thinking there. This is instead a condensed quote from the mind of Gary Harkness, existentially curious college running-back and the narrator of Don DeLillo’s great American football novel End Zone. This passage describes a moment where Gary plays a game having been urged by his friends to smoke pot beforehand to discover whether it improves his understanding of time and space, or just makes him want to lie down and untie someone’s laces.
It marks a turning point for Gary. To this point football has been a comforting world. He sees clarity in its militaristic rituals, finds in sport “the illusion that order is possible”, hears hidden truths in the coaches’ shouted instructions.
Run with reckless abandon. Now the illusion has collapsed. Gary walks off the football field and begins instead to fixate on cold war fears and nuclear apocalypse.
Death and political power have entered the chat. Now, I’m not saying Marc Guéhi is Gary Harkness. You might be saying that.
But Guéhi has seemed a bit distracted in the last few weeks. Oddly for an agile and technically sound centre-back, he has seemed brittle and absent, vulnerable to being pressed. There have been a couple of things said about City’s players in this regard.
The first is that their minds might not be wholly on the game, that in the middle of a game against Croatia, for example, concerned only with manoeuvring through tiny pockets of space, Nico O’Reilly is also thinking: “Hmm, but how is it possible even by omission to honestly contravene rules E.3 and E.4 which state clearly that …oh. Oh dear.” Football doesn’t work like this. The physical game is a place of total focus.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
