Welcome to the latest instalment of It Is What It Is, the sister column to Adam Hurrey’s Football Cliches podcast, a parallel mission into the heart of the tiny things in football you never thought really mattered… until you were offered a closer look.
Managing your body (or bodying your manager)
Technical areas are the places to be right now.
The problem is that nobody can decide how you’re supposed to behave. Cover every blade of artificial grass within those dashed lines (why are they dashed? Why isn’t it just a normal line?) like Mikel Arteta and the irritation will spread as far as Doha.
🗣️ "It's nothing to do with me, it's him – behaving like that!"@MCATEER4 blames @richardajkeys' comments on Mikel Arteta's touchline conduct for the @Arsenal manager's yellow card 🟨 #beINPL #ARSMUN 🔴👹 pic.twitter.com/bCb1v8rCsV
— beIN SPORTS (@beINSPORTS_EN) January 22, 2023
Assume a more circumspect stance, surveying your Premier League horizon, and you will end up like a puzzled-looking Graham Potter, forced to address semi-apologetic press conference questions about your ability to be angry, like a reverse David Banner: “Don’t ask me about being angry; you wouldn’t like me having to explain what makes me occasionally angry.”
Advertisement
These administrative pitchside zones — from the six-yard-box-sized Stamford Bridge versions to the frankly absurd postcode-worthy affairs at the London Stadium — are now windows to the souls of the Premier League’s gently rotating cast of managers and head coaches, the stages for their various (but ultimately futile) ways of physically embodying their football philosophies.
After some lengthy observation, here is each type of Premier League technical-area body linguist…
The gesticulator
Prime exponent: Unai Emery
Signature move: Pointing
Having had to shout a player’s name at least three times to get their attention, even above the most mid-table of Premier League mid-game hubbubs, there are then two faces a manager must then have as they direct their human chess pieces around with some complex, tactical finger-whirling: 1) an aggressive smile/grimace of “can you just…?” or 2) maniacally intense eye-contact, essentially governed by the rule that, the further away the player, the wider the eyes.
The every-ball-kicker
Prime exponent: Mikel Arteta
Signature move: Getting in the way
Similar to the impulse of a dad encountering a balloon at a kid’s birthday party, only angrier and with more elite muscle memory. If the ball rolls near them — no matter how unhelpful it would be to intervene, no matter what the state of play at that moment — they have to have it, for about 0.2 seconds.
When things got heated between Mikel Arteta & Kevin De Bruyne 👀#PLonPrime pic.twitter.com/6djF6d8YmW
— Amazon Prime Video Sport (@primevideosport) February 16, 2023
It’s not timewasting, it’s not gamesmanship: it’s a perfectly understandable desire to be touching a football, albeit in completely unsuitable shoes. What is really fascinating here is the simultaneous need to be in the way while also trying not to look like they’re getting in the way. Few managers can perfect this, some have simply grown out of it, but Arteta remains in its fast-twitch clutches.
Advertisement
The second-screener
Prime exponent: Eddie Howe
Signature move: Checking something on a tablet
The post-millennial football manager is often, for some reason, banned from showing any positive emotion, as if it might jinx the rest of the game. That has led to managers almost comically trying to bottle up their post-goal satisfaction with a straight face, perhaps also to convey a sense that they’d planned the goal to happen that way, “why are you all so surprised?”
Thankfully, technology has come to their rescue. Not sure how to react? Get Jason Tindall — the most veteran-stag-do-attendee assistant manager in Premier League history — to tilt an iPad towards you so you can watch a TV replay.
The watcher
Prime exponent: Graham Potter
Signature move: Crossing your arms
Just take it all in. It is what it is. You thought they had some good attacking moments in the first half. But that’s football! Look, you take the positives and you move forward.
The figurehead
Prime exponent: Sean Dyche
Signature move: Being tall, not moving
Some managers can make the simple act of getting out of their seat and walking over to the edge of their technical area speak volumes. Matching their opposite number for boundary-pushing, millimetre by millimetre, without saying a word for 13 minutes. Everyone else is securing the crime scene, gathering the forensics, knocking on doors… but DCI Dyche just wants to look at everything for a bit.
The play-actor
Prime exponent: Jurgen Klopp
Signature move: Incredulous facial expressions
Some managers have just had too many pre-kick-off TV cameramen walk slowly round them in a 180-degree arc, focusing directly on the manager’s face as they try not to look directly down the lens when it’s directly in front of them. Klopp still doesn’t care what you think of him on the touchline, but he is very aware that you’re watching. Oddly, the wry Kloppian grins for “Salah, 5-0! Not bad, are we?” and “This has gone completely to shit but 10 per cent of that is the referee’s fault” are identical.
Advertisement
The seether
Prime exponent: Antonio Conte
Signature move: Wincing
An angry Antonio Conte is a force of nature, but it’s easy to get your head around, you know the way out. A disappointed Antonio Conte? You might as well be dead already.
This week on the Football Cliches podcast: Self-appointed visitors, Carlo Ancelotti for England and Match of the Day’s canned laughter
The Athletic’s Adam Hurrey was joined by colleagues Charlie Eccleshare and David Walker for the Adjudication Panel. On the agenda: whether Carlo Ancelotti is the most international team-y manager who’s never managed a national team, the difference between the midfield jobs of “sniffing out danger” and “putting out fires”, some exquisitely-timed Match of the Day crowd noise and at what point a gap at the top of a league turns into a “procession”.
Meanwhile, the panel decided if a team can ever call themselves “the visitors”, and what leads can be “raced into”.
The corridor of uncertainty
Each week, It Is What It Is fields queries from readers on the quirks and anomalies of the language of football (and other niches). Here are this week’s posers…
Dylan — How late in the half is it appropriate for the commentator to say “we’re approaching half-time”?
41:00 onwards. The “cusp” of half-time is 44:00 onwards, as is “the stroke”, although this is somewhat complicated by injury time.
Callum — My mate recently pointed this out to me and I can’t stop thinking about it: why do no Premier League referees have beards? Has this always been the case? I look each week and am yet to be proven wrong. Is this a policy implemented by Mike Riley and his cronies over at PGMOL?
Let’s take a moment to enjoy the fact Callum diligently “looks every week” in this fruitless search for a bearded Premier League referee, scanning the referee appointments on a Friday and wondering if Paul Tierney has taken the plunge.
Advertisement
I can, however, satisfy his thirst for a brief history of referee facial hair in English top-flight football, 1992-present.
We begin with a mere technicality: Mike Dean’s lockdown beard of June 2020, sported for his first fixture after Project Restart kicked in to resume the season behind closed doors. The reaction, as you may recall, was… well, people reacted.
Just when you thought Mike Dean couldn't get any better, he now has a beard! pic.twitter.com/yM5LWtmMgU
— Football Daily (@footballdaily) June 21, 2020
So this makes Mike Dean the last facially-haired Premier League referee. But does this really count? The pandemic made us all do weird things, there were no fans there to enjoy it and (crucially, for this exercise) Dean is not a career-long beardman. This beard, you have to admit, comes with an asterisk.
It is nearly 19 years since a Premier League game was officiated by someone with a discernible and established style of facial hair, as Jeff Winter’s low-key goatee graced the Valley on the final day of the 2003-04 season for Charlton vs Southampton. Indeed, a week later, he became the last bearded referee to preside over an FA Cup final — the final game of his refereeing career, in which he received an appropriate retirement gift of getting to book Dennis Wise.
However, for the goatee sceptics out there — those who understandably do not regard them as “proper beards” — we must go further back through time, to May 5, 2001. At Stamford Bridge that day, Rob Harris was the last non-COVID-era Premier League referee to sport anything close to a full beard, although it could arguably be classified as mere “heavy stubble”.
Almost exactly a year earlier, Alan Wilkie — the last man to referee a Premier League game and simultaneously have a moustache — made a little bit of Premier League history at Old Trafford.
Is our correspondent Callum now at peace? I sense not. Who was the last proper, committed beard-growing Premier League referee?
That man… was Roger. Dilkes.
Simon Charlton, Juninho & Roger Dilkes
[Credit: Mike Hewitt/Allsport/Getty Images] pic.twitter.com/TtCQeVgJGD
— Football Past (@thecentretunnel) April 18, 2021
This week on the Football Cliches podcast: Sunday League pre-seasons and how to ‘bring the ball under your spell’, with Josh Pugh
Adam and Charlie were joined by comedian and writer Josh Pugh for the latest edition of Mesut Haaland Dicks.
Among Josh’s selections were players who go to World Cups because they’re “good to have around”, the phrase “bringing the ball under their spell”, Sunday League pre-season regimes and the complex philosophy of “playing football the right way”.
Meanwhile, the Adjudication Panel enjoyed some more quintessential Glenn Hoddle co-commentary and an ex-player very politely editing their own Wikipedia page.
It Is What It Is is published every Friday — send in your questions and observations on the language of football (or any other curiosities you’ve spotted) by commenting below or tweeting Adam Hurrey here.
(Top photo: Getty Images)
