l now I am able to fill in that gap in our understanding: to provide a new and vital theoretical tool to enable us to understand the enigma that is football.
We need to add a third dimension, alongside the two I’ve already outlined. A third sporting archetype, if you will, alongside athletics and chess. This third dimension is – and herein, I believe, lies the genius – scissors, paper, stone.
Let that sink in for a moment. The implication is that there can never be a perfect or optimum team, because, for every style of play there is always another which can beat it. A team can beat you even though they have been beaten by a team which in turn were beaten by you.
Right, we now have the theoretical tools: let’s apply them to Euro 2004. We can identify three styles of play. Firstly – scissors – there’s the open fluent attacking game exemplified here by Portugal. Individual players are out to shine, and impress with their skills. A second style of play – stone – exemplified here by Greece but usually associated with Italy, concentrates on highly organised defence, putting nearly everyone behind the ball and hoping for a single winning goal from a break or set-piece. Stone blunts scissors: Greece beats Portugal.
A third style is exemplified by England – paper – the long-ball game, punting the ball upfield in the, usually vain, hope of finding an England forward. Scissors cut paper. Portugal’s open style defeats England’s long-ball game. But – and I think by now you may be able to see where this is going – paper wraps stone. England would have beaten Greece because the long-ball game, though useless against Portugal, would have been effective against the closed highly organised Greek defence.
So there you have it: a small but I believe seminal addition to football theory. Only a start of course: I expect others to develop my insight so that we can eventually arrive at a fully formed and sophisticated explanatory tool.
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