Warren S. McCulloch, of the electronic laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in April 1966 (La Razón, Buenos Aires, 26-4-66) that... "a computer cannot change its mind, like man, fourteen times in three tenths of a second". And he added that man can do so because he possesses a trillion computer neurons with a total of two million separate biological components.

Surely Warren S. McCulloch did not think he was "talking football" when he made that statement.
But the man reflected in that scientific conclusion is the same man who plays football and unthinkingly produces all that a football match will register between twenty-two men, one ball and, in addition, a myriad of circumstances beyond the will of those men.

It is this "common man", despite always being the same player, the same gifted, gifted or ungifted, who will always make two matches where the same men play and apparently the same visible circumstances different. But never "the same" among those beyond human control.

It is that "common man" who is to blame for the "almost uselessness" of this book and perhaps all his peers.
It is that common man, not only unequal to all men but constantly unequal to himself, who will make unequal two "equal" football matches thought in the same way; two car journeys in a big city by the same driver and under the same driving treatise.

And even more so, much more so, when it is a question - like football or driving a car - of overcoming opposing factors as changeable and as unforeseen as the fluctuations in the ideas of "our individual" or "our team".

There was a sports commentator back in the 1980s who called football "the passion of crowds" and began all his stories in that way. The name of that commentator, now defunct, was José María Muñoz.

Whatever the common mortals want to say about me, since I am not unaware of how badly even the most stupid speak of Stupidity, I am, however, the one, and precisely the only one who has the power to amuse gods and men. And it is a powerful proof of this, and it is well represented, that no sooner have I appeared before this copious gathering to address you, than all your countenances have suddenly reflected a new and unusual joy, your brows have wrinkled, and you have applauded with joyful and hearty laughter, so that, in truth, all of you present seemed to me drunk with nectar not exempt of nepentine, like the Homeric gods, while before you were sitting with a sad and hurried face, as if you had just come out of Trofoni's den, and you had just come out of Trofoni's den with a sad and hurried face.

In every sporting confrontation there is an opposition to overcome. Even in the most solitary races against the harmless clock. But in individual sports, the direct opposition is passive.

In football it is combative. It is total opposition.

In individual action sport no one deprives anyone of his basic competitive instrument.

If two painters compete at the same time and for the same reason to establish a circumstantial ranking of artistic values, one painter will not deprive the other of his brush.

An athlete fights against the distance, against the tool, against the hurdle, against the rod, against his fatigue... but without an adversary restricting his movement, or taking away his discus, the bullet, the javelin, the pole vault or the hammer.
Football is played with the accepted law of the right to the dispossession of the basic tool of the game.

This is - for football, rugby, basketball and all the collective sports of direct opposition - a condition which makes absurd, impossible, a repeated comparative pretension of many spirits prone to be dazzled by the luminosity of the technological dialectic, which does not discriminate between technique and humanity in that pretension to recast, in a common presupposition of methodisation, the specific activities of a football player with those of an operator, those of an athlete in any individual sporting competition, and even those of a comedy artist. The latter is frequent, and not only in football neophytes; even in those who are supposedly football experts, either for weakness of convictions or for fear of being out of time, of not speaking "at the rhythm" of an era... deceitful. Euphemistic.

We talk about the systematised dedication of each one to his profession (the footballer certainly has it in contemporary society) and we assimilate them all to the same opposing factors, but without ever remembering that while in football we do fundamentally what the opponent allows us to do, and then what we want to do ourselves. ... in all other cases of pretended comparison, human achievement is exclusively what the protagonist is capable of doing, totally freed from the risk of someone taking away the piano on which he plays music, the paintbrush with which he paints, the pole vault with which he jumps or the bicycle with which he runs.

For these cases there may be, and also not permanently, a technique. But for football it is idle to speak of a technique, of a way of playing well, of a rule for playing or "seeing better" a match, since there will be many fluctuating, changing, surprising, unforeseen, spontaneous humanities... which will impose the validity of many techniques. The technique of the unforeseen above all the foreseen. And even more: limiting this technique to the use of the most untamed of man's possessive weapons, the feet, always more untamed than the hands to the ordering of the brain.

Spontaneity cannot be methodised in any order of things. Besides: we have never, in any order of things, seen a virtuous man emerge only because he was "taught" to be virtuous. The surgeon, the musician, the footballer, all have to be born virtuous in order to become virtuous through their different natural paths: some by training, others by manifesting themselves.

Source image: Pixabay.