Another TSW debut today, with our hip gunslinger Joshua Denk looking at why Americans could and should come around to the idea of "a gripping nil-nil draw"
Why the very un-American concept of a draw is something to be savoured
Everyone’s seen this cheeky little number.
I’ll admit, it was funny. Jason Sudeikis hit the drawling, testosterone-laden coach nail on the head, and there is great humour to be found in differences. I may have watched and shared it multiple times – and as a former American football fan (long story) and current Swansea City fan, I have been known to appreciate a little bit of mickey-taking about how curious the Premier League must seem to most Americans, and especially watching so many draws.
However, after a deluge of mind-numbing, willful World Cup-related stupidity from Americans I know, Americans I respect, and everyone else Stateside who decided that “soccer is weird”, I’m here to talk about one of football’s great pleasures and something most Americans, including Ted Lasso, don’t get: the fully deserved draw.
I know I don’t need to defend football’s honour for this audience. Frankly, I rarely feel the need to do so at all. I’m not an evangelist, and I’m not here to convince Americans that the sport is great. They need to figure that out on their own, like I did. They need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and start actually watching the game, rather than just looking at it. They can do it. They really can. They don’t. But they think they do, and that’s the problem.
These folks want it to be easy. They want games where you score 100-120 points in 48 minutes. They want big hits and multiple points for scoring. They want a winner and a loser. Me? I don’t need that closure. I absolutely LOVE a good draw. I mean, it’s a good thing, right? Swansea City had nine draws last year - fourth behind only Southampton, Stoke, and the abominable Baggies. In a tough year like last year, you have to learn to like stuff you might otherwise find distasteful. Like beetroot. But there’s something special about the effort that goes into a draw, something tragic and heroic and sometimes tragicomic.
Mostly it’s that, in a draw, the goals - always hard to score, and that’s how it SHOULD be - often become secondary to the individual efforts and performances on and away from the ball that make football such interesting watching. You’re no longer talking about what goal was the game-winner; you’re talking about what could have been but wasn’t and why that’s either a bad sign for future attacking performances or a great sign for the defense. It allows you to go much deeper when you can talk about a draining but incredibly heroic defensive performance. I find draws bring a beautiful catharsis that, while it's qualitatively much less inspiring than a big win, has its own appeal.
Let me highlight two draws that I found fascinating. I started to call them my favorites but I think that far overstates it, especially in the case of the later one:
January 23, 2013: Second Leg, Capital One Cup Semifinal vs. Chelsea, 0-0
Is it cheating that this is only one leg of a two-leg tie? Is it easier for me to reflect on this one knowing that Ivanovic gifted us a 2-0 win at Stamford Bridge? Those might be valid points, but I found this an incredibly compelling listen. It’s hard to find anything resembling a televised Swansea City game over here, so most times I rely on whatever commentary I can find; in this case, it was the commentary provided with one of the multiple soccer-related apps on my phone, and despite the deadpan delivery I knew there was a great deal of open play.
I only later got to see some of that open play for myself through highlights. The first thing I noticed was the amazing interplay right on the edge of the Chelsea box – something I know my American TSW counterpart Warren Smith has also mentioned recently. They made the decision to attack and not to let the 2-0 lead ride in that first half, and they nearly made Chelsea pay a number of times. Routledge looked sharp, with a great chance on the cross via de Guzman which was just barely blocked by Azpilicueta, then he turned provider for Michu who forced a great save from Cech. This team looked capable on the counterattack or around the box. They looked dangerous, and it was that message, I think — the message that they were coming for goal, not sitting back on their heels — that made a draw possible.
When I listened to it at the time I was impressed, and this feeling only increased after watching it with my own eyes. Certainly a goal out of one of those pieces would have been fantastic, but the energy that builds around a draw that won’t get unstuck is a chest-tightening, sweat-inducing fever dream that goes for minutes on end and sometimes hours – because the game keeps flowing, unlike most American sports. That level of tension in the second leg of a semifinal is a feeling everyone should experience.
Demba Ba’s poor right foot was the second thing I noticed. He ended up in the thick of the action for most of the match, but I like to think the Ben Davies half-tackle (one for which he could easily have gotten a foul, though I agree it wasn’t one) near the outset put him off his game. Whatever happened, his shooting was Higuain-esque. Granted, Ba isn’t always known for incisive finishing, but when you have a draw you naturally end up focusing even more on missed opportunities and the body language of key players.
Clearly Ba wasn’t man of the match material, but it’s more than that. He became a solitary, lost figure in this draw, not a goat or a hero but just another ineffectual Chelsea striker, like a mid-level bureaucrat putting in the time and just looking to get through the day (or, in this case, 90 minutes). Juxtapose that image with Ba’s actual frame and intimidating field presence and I found some poetic justice there. Simply by frustrating his efforts, Swansea City claimed the victory. Literally, yes, in winning 2-0 over two legs, but also in the sense that they reduced Ba from potential lightning rod to...just another one of eleven.
So what to make of Eden Hazard and the ball boy? A lack of goals at least allows you to focus on what’s writ large in a situation like that; namely, what are the standards of professionalism we expect of stadium staff? Of players? It was probably the perfect cap to a day of stalemate, to a second half where the Swans held on for dear life. No one really won in that situation, either, least of all the fans. And whether or not it was entertaining to the average fan, I loved how the ball boy/boy wonder standoff summed it all up; we wouldn’t have a winner on the day, just two tough combatants grinding each other to dust.
December 9, 2013: Swansea City 1-1 Hull City
Most people know northern New England is a rough place to visit in December. Now imagine living there. I do find it soothing to take on a good three to six inches of snow from time to time, if only to clear my head and get some much-needed winter exercise. On this day, we had gotten snow on the higher end of that scale, and I was not amused. I did need some “me” time, though, so I got the shovel and headed out the door with my TalkSport app playing the Swansea-Hull game.
I was really envisioning this as one of the games that would help Laudrup turn the season around. All season, it was a constant process of looking down the schedule, finding the winnable games, and hoping/praying for a win. In the end, neither the hopes, prayers nor my vision turned out to be remotely accurate, but the labour of listening to the game and shoveling the snow were so parallel in nature that it was almost like I was there. I love it when stars align like that, even if the result is back and neck pain.
I mean, no one expected Danny Graham to score because he hadn’t for so long...which meant of course he was going to put one in. That’s not your garden-variety irony. That’s the sort of sweet, sweet irony that it takes a good, solitary ninety minutes in a snowstorm to appreciate, and I knew that we would be chasing a draw for at least the better part of the first half while I continued to chase the snowflakes down the driveway.
I feel like the way we pulled off the draw was emblematic of the frustration the whole season brought down on the Jack Army. Again, I was listening, so I didn’t see the play as it happened, but I’m not sure it would have mattered. The TalkSport commentators weren’t any clearer on how the ball went off Chico Flores and found the back of the net than I was, despite my being 5,000 km further away, but you know what? I’ve viewed the highlights multiple times and I still don’t know where the ball hit him. Side-butt? Pelvis? Whatever it was, that was definitely the sort of goal you get in a draw, a goal that speaks of your team’s circumstances. When you can’t use the head or the foot, by all means, use the side-butt.
What else was notable about that game? Michu was either unmotivated or unfit, or a pretty huge combination of the two, and it was clear we were not going to score much more than fluke goals without the late 2012 version of Michu that day. Dwight Tiendalli probably earned his season’s worth of scorn in this game alone, and most of all I felt that the team were out of original ideas. It was during that draw that I realized that Michael Laudrup would probably go before the season was out. Not that I was predicting it or that I “called it” in advance, or even that I started to call FOR his ousting, mind you. It was just a feeling of inevitability.
Sometimes it’s an abject loss that will get a coach the boot, but more often it’s the kind of listless, lifeless performance I witnessed that day, during that snowstorm, when the Swans were held to a draw by a Tigers squad that would eventually take the underdog Europa League place the Swans had claimed just nine months before.
"Yep" I thought at the time; "a draw seems just about right". Whether or not you had the same experiences I had with these draws, you know well the power of the tension and the back-and-forth that can only come with a tightly played, tightly defended draw. Not all draws are great, but when they are, they’re truly things of beauty.
Nothing makes me more weird in the eyes of my fellow Americans’ than a statement like that. Yet I welcome their derision.