Sky Sports' Spanish football aficionado Graham Hunter visited Balls HQ recently to sit down with our own Gavan Casey and Mick McCarthy for episode 3 of our Friends in Football podcast.
Graham's friend in football was publisher and author Martin Greig, who also produces Hunter's famed The Big Interview podcast.
The full episode is available on iTunes or any Android podcast provider, as well as the link below.
Considering Hunter's background and his two bestselling books, Spain: The Inside Story of La Roja's Historic Treble and Barça: The Making of the Greatest Team in the World, amongst the plethora of topics discussed during a whopper of a pod was footballing aesthetics, and the great debate as to whether the possession-based game resuscitated and remastered by Pep Guardiola at the turn of the decade is revolutionary and extraordinary or simply...well, dull.
The topic was fresh on Hunter's mind; he'd only discussed it with a very special guest on his own podcast a day prior. That guest played in Manchester City's anticlimactic 0-0 draw with Manchester United last night, a game so bereft of quality that it became difficult not to appreciate Marouane Fellaini's 'Sideshow Bob standing on rakes' impression for providing us with at least one talking point.
Watching the game, it once more became very apparent why English clubs have struggled in the Champions League for the past half-decade: They're a bit shit.
And Hunter believes the problem is more intrinsic within the culture of consuming football in England than it is a gulf in class as it may appear on the surface:
I won't name him, but I was sitting with a leading Premier League footballer... [whispers] Michael Carrick... yesterday, and we were talking about this cultural gap where a lot of people - I don't know about Ireland, but certainly in Britain - still think the value in a game is if there's lots of 'incident'.
It's like pantomime compared to opera. So when I've seen this recent school of Spanish football - which has not always been so, this elite stuff that Spain and Barcelona have played - we got into the discussion of, 'Is it boring?' And I got very aggressive and critical of people who describe that brand as boring. They should be taken away from football and have their tv licences removed as well, because they're just idiots.
[Carrick] is an appreciator of football played intelligently. Possession of the ball. I'm telling you something you already know, because you've seen him play. My point is that, it's hard for me to understand how, particularly in the Premier League, we've abandoned a lot of intelligence. There's an overriding tone that everything needs to be fast, that it needs to be hurly-burly, and that this is where the quality lies.
You watch England managers time and time again, or even some managers of top English clubs, saying 'Oh, we didn't pass the ball well. We couldn't pass to each other'. First time I heard that as a correspondent was in '97 or '98 when Glenn Hoddle was the England manager and they'd had a bad result. He said, 'Well, our passing was terrible, we couldn't pass to each other', which for England, at least, is a repetitive theme.
Yet, the people who lament that, whether it be media, fans, players or coaches - who never see England lifting trophies... When they see people passing well they go, 'Ah, pfftt, look at that, man. How boring is that? He's controlled that ball, his body shape was perfect, he's pinged it back five metres and they've done that 17 times. Pffttt, bloody hell.'
Can you see the causal connection between hating football being played intelligently and not being able to win trophies!?! Why is nobody else singing that song?
Maybe some people listening to the podcast will agree. And other people listening, I'm absolutely sure, will be saying, 'Well, I don't care. I want penalties and red cards and lots of people running around and bumping into each other'.
You can listen to the full podcast with Graham Hunter and Martin Greig on iTunes or your other podcast provider. Simply search 'Balls.ie football', subscribe and stick the kettle on.
