Making the game beautiful: Footballers from another planet, starring Sissoko, Hutton and Yakubu

#10 THE WORST FOOTBALL

Ten weeks into Making the game beautiful’s voyage to the centre of football’s dazzling galaxy, it’s clear how simultaneously simple but complex, glorious yet agonising, cultured and wrong headed the sport actually is.

Take this misfiring edition, which comes in the aftermath of last week’s celebration of great goals. One of football’s defining features is that, no matter how much of it you watch, there will always be an unexpected turn of events around the corner, often involving a truly incredulous moment of relative disaster.

READ MORE: Five things learned from midweek Premier League

READ MORE: I’d be in Brazil if the title race was over – Mourinho

The advent of social media and always-on TV coverage means that selecting a first 11 for How Did He Miss That FC and the most compelling examples of dismal football is straightforward. This is particularly true in an attacking sense, where blown chances have a timeless, car crash charm.

Neal Maupay recently submitted his application for immortality in a game against Cardiff but the Brentford striker is in exulted company. As documented in the clip below, Fernando Torres, Neymar and Ronaldo have all been gripped by fear when presented with an open net. In fact, Yakubu’s aberration for Nigeria is so dismal it seems possible the psychological damage may have railroaded much of his career, judging by the hapless soul we re-encounter later.

The defensive side of the game is a little more abstract but there’s something reassuringly heart-warming about a goalkeeper who is, lest we forget, wearing gloves, making a blunder that alters the course of a game.

Again, you don’t have to look very far, towards Sunderland’s Stadium of Light aka the Cathedral of Nightmares, to find not one but two goalies experiencing the onset of early retirement. Of course, tackling is the foundation of football’s defensive side, something Alan Hutton has still not fully grasped, but he did learn his trade in Scotland where even the concept of teams is yet to be fully understood.

But perhaps the greatest celebration of the defensive art took place when Brentford and Scunthorpe met in 2005, and, as if reading from a script, launched into an opera of wild lunges, romantically described as “poetic beauty” by one viewer.

Set pieces are a great opportunity for a footballer to defy the claustrophobic intensity of real-time pressure and become a hero. How hard can it be to dispatch a penalty from 12 yards into the gaping chasm of that massive goal? Quite hard, actually, if the player suddenly realises he left the iron on as the baying mob in the stand behind make all sorts of unfounded allegations about his mother and the goalkeeper does a decent impression of Jar Jar Binks on his line.

Astonishment from both ends of the stadium surely greeted Teo Gutiérrez’s effort for Atlético Junior v Tigres earlier this season but no penalty miss will ever come close to Peter Devine’s for Lancaster City vs Whitley Bay in 1991, where he somehow contrived to scuff his shot so badly that the ball barely moved and he had to be helped form the field, injured. By their very definition, set pieces are pre-meditated and provide the opportunity for some forward planning and imagination in their execution. Or, alternatively, in the case of Cheltenham Town’s 2016 free kick routine, comedy gold.

Turning our attention to unforgettably forgettable individual displays, it might be tempting to end this article here simply by pasting in a compilation of Moussa Sissoko’s “highlights” to date at Tottenham Hotspur. But, somehow, it gets worse even than that. Whether in Sunday League, where basic rules about fitness and skill are sometimes ignored in the pursuit of the new Jimmy Five Bellies, or the Premier League, where Alex Oxlade-Chamberlin is playing The Artful Dodger to Sissoko’s Fagin, some footballers seem to be winging it if not entirely stealing a living.

READ MORE: Football skills that defy science

READ MORE: The greatest golazos non-league football has ever seen

Eyebrows were raised when the England star managed to back Arsenal into the same corner where they got lost with Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez but there’s no hiding place from “Ox Cam”. In fact, there’s basically no hiding at all in 21st century football, which may come as a surprise to the aforementioned Yakuba, who was filmed on the pitch for Coventry last season seemingly unaware he was actually in his kit and supposed to be playing. While it was later claimed the Nigerian striker, whose contract was terminated shortly after, had picked up an injury, others pointed out that his career heatmap had rarely ever gone above baltic.

But we call it “the beautiful game” for every mistake, mistimed tackle and misfiring striker and, in some very special cases, all of this and more can be consumed in one heady cocktail, where complete team performances align to create the worst football the world has ever seen. Again, it doesn’t matter whether you’re an aghast spectator at the highest or lowest levels of the sport. For example, watch this incredible 60 seconds of play filmed during injury time as Padiham looked to come back from 3-1 down against Widnes in their North West Counties Football League earlier this season.

It’s all there: suicidal back pass, missed open goal, leg-breaking tackle, hacked clearances and skyscraping hoofs upfield. For the ultimate experience, however, check out the clip recently voted football’s absolute low by L’Ultimo Uomo. Shot during the first Premier League season in an FA Cup fourth round tie between QPR and Man City at Loftus Road in 1993, the Italian magazine proclaimed it the “ugliest football” of all-time “and yet the most glorious”. Bravissimo!

NEXT WEEK: THE CHANTS