Do you enjoy No Dead Time? Do you think this piece is good? If you do maybe wing it to someone else who might like it and see if they want to subscribe. I’d really appreciate it. If you don’t like No Dead Time or this piece then please keep quiet.
It’s funny the moments from international tournaments that end up staying with you. By far the best moment of England’s 2014 World Cup campaign was Raheem Sterling’s stunning ghost goal - a shot so pure it tricked the BBC graphics person into flashing “GOAL” on to the screen and sent the entire country mental for about thirty seconds. It was all downhill from there.
Similarly from the Euro summer just gone my favourite moment wasn’t the Harry Kane penalty rebound which sent England to the final or Luke Shaw’s sweet volley after two minutes against Italy. It was a moment from the round of sixteen victory over Germany.
Midway through the first half the ball was rolled to Kai Havertz on the dugout side touchdown. Havertz, whose overall vibe is that of a sickly heir to a mining fortune, took the ball in his usual languid style, his body language primed with the self- assurance that comes from being a tall, athletic German called Kai every day of your life (it’s very surprising to me that Havertz’s first name isn’t Florian for reasons I can’t quite pin down but that’s by the by.)
Usually Havertz would have popped the ball off or made some kind of telling pass that a teenager with a tactics blog would call a “pre-assist”. But on that day he didn’t. Because seemingly out of nowhere Kalvin Phillips arrived to bop the spidery Havertz into touch with the kind of weary boredom that you extend to a precocious toddler who’s interrupting your Sunday lunch at a gastro pub as she shows you her frankly shit drawings of a caterpillar. It was heaven.
Why was it so enjoyable? Well think of it like this - a friend of mine once said he thought the most satisfying thing you could do to someone you don’t like was to be invisible and then thwack them on the back of the head with a rolled up newspaper whilst they were going about their daily business. The Phillips tackle was the equivalent of that.
I don’t want to psychologically delve too much further as to why I enjoyed it so much. Maybe it’s because Havertz looks like a character from a film who would sneer something like “My father won’t allow this!”. Maybe it’s because Havertz puts me in mind of the kind of person who would try to give your girlfriend ketamine during pre drinks at a Slovenian hostel. Maybe it’s because I use football as a kind of proxy war to partially discharge the deep, repressed anger festering within me, a bewildering spectacle of rage that grows in scope and intensity with every passing year. Who can truly say?
Maybe though it was also the deliverer of the tackle that made it so enjoyable, the avenging angel of West Yorkshire - Kalvin Phillips. Phillips is without question an intensely likeable person. A player of both tactical nuance and blunt force trauma who, through an incredible mixture of hard work and humility under the tutelage of Marcelo Bielsa, has re-made himself from Championship level hacker to a Pirlo acknowledged “regista” in the space of just over two years.
It’s the contradictions of Phillips that make him so interesting and inspiring. He’s a man that talks openly of his love of “smashing” people during games and plays with the kind of chest-out physicality that seems to insinuate that every match he’s involved in is somehow a challenge to his masculinity.
At the same time he’s also a man that talks openly and with earnest tenderness about his beloved Granny Val, who passed away not long before the Euros, and reflects on his grief attached to her passing with a complete absence of machismo.
He’s part of a group of role models for young footballers, and just people in general, that show you can do both in a way that is distinct from previous generations. Paul Scholes loved a tackle as well. I never heard him talk about love or loss or mourning. I’m not sure I’d want to either. So many ex-players and pundits of his generation (with two of his United team mates foremost amongst them) still subscribe to the idea that humiliation, shame and toxic aggression are the animating forces of high level sport. In their theory of the game to show any emotion that can be perceived as “weakness” invites inevitable defeat. Phillips shows a different way forward that incorporates vulnerability as well as strength in it’s schema - and his talent is so undeniable as to make this method incontestable.
I look forward to watching Kalvin Phillips play football for the rest of what I hope is a long and successful career. I’ll enjoy every raking pass and every thoughtful interception. But what I’ll enjoy most of all is knowing that in Munich and Manchester and Milan right now there are waif like academy products (with names like Kayden Thornley-Whittaker) who don’t yet know that, somewhere in their gilded future, as inevitable as the setting of the sun, there is a Kalvin Phillips tackle with their name on it. And that is the sweetest bliss of all.