In Chad Harbach’s 2011 novel The Art of Fielding, the shortstop Henry Skrimshander is approaching the US college record for the most consecutive errorless baseball games when a throw inexplicably goes awry and hits a teammate in the dugout. At that, his confidence evaporates to the point that he can no longer execute the most basic skills; he gets the yips. What lingers from the novel, for me, is the crushing sense of pressure of having errors recorded like that, appearing even on the scoreboard, as though the sport had become less about the achievement of glory than about the avoidance of mistakes.
Avoiding mistakes is good. Some people should be judged on the avoidance of mistakes. Postal workers, bus drivers, indexers, especially surgeons and air-traffic controllers, should carry on not getting things wrong. But sport? Shouldn’t sport be about actively creating something?
Even if we would like our goalkeepers and defenders to be blemish-free, it still tends to be the goals that are remembered rather than the gaffes – and if mistakes do live on in the general consciousness, it’s almost invariably because of the goals they led to.
This may be a subjective view (of a nostalgic fortysomething made anxious by change), but sport has a problem with perfection. Once participants start getting too good, something is lost.
It’s probably not coincidence that snooker’s heyday, for instance, came before there was a near-guarantee of players clearing up once given a chance with the reds open; the greatest snooker in history, the last frame of the 1985 world championship final, was the unimprovable climax that it was precisely because Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor, nerves shredded, missed makeable pot after makeable pot.
The endless sixes of the modern Indian Premier League, the balance between bat and ball destroyed, feel as though they have cheapened the spectacle. As technology has improved, so the strategic challenge of many of the great golf courses has been destroyed while Formula One has felt increasingly predictable.
Sport should not be about perfection. The idea that enhanced technical ability is necessarily desirable is one of the great myths, not unlike, and not unrelated to, capitalism’s demand for constant growth. The priority should be competition, cut and thrust, parry and riposte, a sense of jeopardy; that’s what gives sport its drama and its narrative.
There are limits, of course: nobody’s suggesting television companies should be showing a hard-fought 1-1 draw from a random parks pitch rather than Manchester City battering Bournemouth at home (again) or Liverpool thrashing Sparta Prague. But there is a danger when the concentration of talent becomes too great, when the gulf between the richest and the rest is so vast that games between them are no longer contests. This has been one of the more intriguing Premier League seasons of recent times in part because there are three sides good enough to challenge for the title, but also because all three are flawed. The outcome of far fewer games this season has felt inevitable.
Liverpool concede the first goal in games far too often, they are beginning to look tired and their rejigged forward line remains a work in progress.
Cody Gakpo is yet really to settle, while Mohamed Salah has been nowhere near his best since suffering a hamstring injury at the Africa Cup of Nations. There is much to admire in the energy of Luis Díaz and Darwin Núñez, but with calmer, more reliable finishers, Liverpool would surely have won at least one of the two league games against Manchester United, or the home games against Manchester City and Arsenal, in all of which notable chances were squandered.
In all four of those games, they missed their most clinical finisher this season, Diogo Jota. He stands fourth (behind Son Heung-min, Jarrod Bowen and Phil Foden) if players are ranked by non-penalty goals minus xG, a rough measure of striking efficiency. Díaz and Núñez are respectively 554th and 559th of 562.
Arsenal’s £60m signing of Kai Havertz in the summer is beginning to look a slow-burn success. Other than a sympathy penalty at Bournemouth, he didn’t score until late November against Brentford, and the sense was that Mikel Arteta was no closer to working out how to use his unusual bundle of attributes than any of his coaches at Chelsea. But he has five goals in his last seven league games and his ability to operate as a sort of deluxe target man/false 9 hybrid has been a key factor in their form this year.
Even if the goals have dried up for Gabriel Martinelli, the fact that Gabriel Jesus is no longer a guaranteed starter and that Leandro Trossard has more goals from the bench than any other Premier League player this season suggests they have strength in depth. But a doubt remains over mentality and the tendency to be shaken out of their rhythm by setbacks – as happened against Bayern on Tuesday.
City, meanwhile, have lost their balance. Real Madrid weren’t the first side to expose the space behind their defensive line, an issue that is largely the result of problems higher up the pitch. Erling Haaland may still be the leading scorer in the league, but he went into the weekend only two places above Núñez in that chart of non-penalty goals minus xG.
He still scores plenty but the problem is that when he isn’t scoring – and his output has dropped significantly by his standards since the end of November – he isn’t doing much at all. He certainly isn’t functioning as an auxiliary midfielder, and the injury that kept John Stones out for months has prevented City from finding that extra man in the back four, while the fact the Norwegian thrives on direct service has created a tension that at times seems as disruptive as it is creative.
None of these are major flaws. They are the kind of problems the vast majority of clubs would love to have. But all three clubs have worked through issues this season. None are entirely reliable. And that has added to the intrigue.
The sense of working things out, correcting, refining, improving, has added to the drama. Perfection is boring: this season has benefited from every side being at least slightly imperfect.
