Do you speak football

In June, we changed the name of our podcast from the Ademola Bookman Podcast to the Dynamo Football Bookclub.

The reason for the change is simply that the previous name seemed to confuse people. We hope that its self-evidence from the new name what exactly the show is about.

We also moved on from focusing totally on biographies and autobiographies, embracing the entire canon of football books. In Episode 40, we reviewed Do You Speak Football by Tom Williams, which looks at football terminology from all around the world.

This is a fun book which underscores the boundless creativity of language generally and the imagination of football cultures in every corner of the globe.

Terms I particularly enjoyed were shoeshine and piano – a term in South Africa for the brash individualistic style of play favoured by teams there, and pihkatappi – a Finnish word which translates as faecal plug, referring to the build-up of poop a bear accumulates over the course of a winter hibernating, and which is employed to describe a defensive midfielder. It is small wonder that the names of Finnish central midfielders don’t immediately spring to mind.

If I have one complaint about the book is that it’s laid out as a glossary so while it’s a lot of fun reading the terms, it is ultimately an undertaken not unlike reading the dictionary. I was interested to see how the terms used in different countries go a long way to explain how football is played in a given place and I thought it might have been more engaging had the author set out the terms of some of the more prominent footballing nations in essay format, rather than as an alphabetized list of terms.

So here goes my attempt to explain how Argentinian football terminology explains how Argentina plays football.

To begin, football in Argentina is played la nuestra (our way), a style to be differentiated from the kick and chase football that was originally introduced to the country by English settlers. The Argentinian game is focused on gambetas (dribbles) and the enganche (No. 10), Messi and Maradona being the two most famous gambetas of them all.

Styles employed by different Argentinian teams are classed on whether they follow the Menottismo or the Billardismo school of play. These are named after the 1978 and 1982 World Cup winning coaches, César Luis Menotti and Carlos Salvador Bilardo, with Menotti insisting on an attacking, entertaining brand of football, especially compared to the turgid pragmatism of Bilardo. Menotti was so put off by the football that brought Argentina to its second World Cup final in a row under Bilardo in 1990 that he said he was ashamed to be Argentinian.

It was notable too that footballing terms draw from wider cultural influences in a particular country. Argentinian football includes several gaucho (cowboy) terms. For example, Juan Roman Riquelme, the mercurial engauche who never really did it for the national team, was viewed as a pecho frio, a gaucho term that means cold chest, referring to a lazy horse for a player who goes missing in a game.

Ultimately, the Argentinian archetypal footballer is el pibe, described by Borocoto, writing in Argentinan newspaper El Grafico, as a boy with “a dirty face, a mane of hair rebelling against the comb, intelligent, roving, trickster eyes and a rag ball at his feet.” The el pibe learns his trade playing on potrero (baked earth pitches) and while he is praised for his viveza (sharpness), he must also develop a skill for picardia (craftiness), an ability to live by his wits, valued more in Argentina perhaps than another other major footballing nation.

El Pibe is such a central character in not only the story of Argentinian football but of Argentina, that a statue was erected of the character near La Bombonera, the Boca Juniors Stadium in Buenos Aires, in 2012 with an inscription of the Borocoto description. The fact that Borocoto wrote those lines in 1926, before Maradona, the most famous pibe of all was even born, gives his description an almost mythical quality and emphasizes the sense that Maradona was preordained by destiny.

Do You Speak Football is a very enjoyable book. Packed to the brim with entertaining and interesting terminology, and a whole pile of fun and quirkly football facts. Would you like to know who invented the bicycle kick or the bicycle horse kick as its known in Iceland? Well, that one is disputed by about five different countries it seems. But its fun to read about each of the individuals who can stake a claim to its ownership.

John Coughlan co-hosts The Dynamo Football Bookclub. With new episodes each week, the podcast is available wherever you get your pods.

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