Football fan Patrick Galea penned this piece as a facebook note. It could very well have been entitled “the Theory of Relativity as Applied to The Game”. He has kindly agreed for it to be reproduced here as a sporty/geeky Zolabyte. Cheers. (and Forza Juve of course)
It is not a secret to football fans that the working of the clock during a game depends entirely on how many times the goal nets have been favourably hit. And if your own team’s net is to be hit at all, just hope that at the very least it is hit favourably, that is, on the right side. The right side, as it turns out in these cases, is always the outside. The reverse applies to the other net, of course, and the inside of that net is where the biscuit is at. That’s football for you: try and score one more than them; and if you are a fan, hope that your team keeps your afternoon in tact and scores one more than the others, those gutless, hate-inspiring evil bastards.
And there’s 90 minutes of that.
Or so they say.
In truth, the time available for favourable net-hitting is like a new-age yoga instructor: exists in another dimension, and has a penchant for flexibility. Like the king of frustrating retorts when all you seek is a straight-forward answer: “it all depends”. It goes to show that whoever coined the term ‘like clockwork’ was not thinking of football time-keeping. Chances are he never watched a competitive football match either, because time during matches goes into Alice-in-Wonderland mode and changes its rhythm and tempo according to the digits on the scoreboard.
There is no news there. That the experience of time is subjective is hardly a Nobel-winning discovery. Indeed, this sentiment is captured easily enough by such common morsels of wisdom as “time flies when you’re having fun” and “clocks go slow at the place of work”. The ruling principle is obvious, time seems to speed up when you’re enjoying yourself, but drags on infinitely when you are not. But as well as this general idea has served the humans in their daily business, it just does not apply to football.
Masochistic tendencies aside, the general assumption underlying this point is that fans, being supporters of a team, should be enjoying themselves when their team is winning, and by obvious logic, should hate it when it is not. You would think then that a winning team’s supporters, being joyful of a favourable score-line, would hardly notice the time going by. But it doesn’t work like that. Time does not fly when your team is winning, especially when that winning margin is one measly frustrating goal and the contest has reached its final segments, around that 80 minute mark. No, time does not fly. It sticks. It lurks. It hangs around idling as if it were a sunny Sunday in a picnic park.
Lest some brave soul dares suggest that the sudden decrease in the pace of time is merely an illusion brought on by a heightened awareness of the clock, I can assure them that it is not. Proof: when a fan’s team is losing by a goal to nothing, or an equally gut-wrenching goal difference, when every bad pass, throw-in, or a millisecond stop is followed by glances at the clock, when fans are basically watching more of the clock than the game, time does nothing that resembles slowing down. It goes faster than you can say “Is that five minutes already”? Hail the absurdity of football time. Unlike other life situations, favourable circumstances in football do not always make time rush, and unpleasant ones do not sedate time into co-operation.
Substituting hyperbole with a dose of realism for a second (or an hour, depending on the score), I guess that the absurdity of football time owes itself to the perennial contest between optimist and pessimist tendencies inside the football fan. Indeed, none of the above applies if your team has a cushion of several goals or if it is losing by some. And most definitely, none of the above applies if your favourite team is Manchester United, who are practically guaranteed to score in the dying minutes whenever they need to (Fuckheads!).
The hazy optimism of the possibility of scoring and the reality of diminishing time to allow it, as well as its counterpart, the persistent pessimism of conceding and the slow and ample time that makes it possible, are only triggered by a vague sense of realism that anything can happen in football. Indeed, the optimist and the pessimist inside the football fan eventually synthesize to become the realist, the fan who knows too well about the possibility, or the probability, that their team concedes in the dying moments of the match, who has surrendered all hope, who knows that the elusive last second goal that would win points for the team will only ever happen if it is immediately followed by a ridiculous raised flag on the side of the pitch. This is the beautiful game. A game which constantly pits pessimism against optimism and the umpteenth triumph of one over the other leaves the loser mysteriously unscathed.
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