It happens with the regularity of climate cycles. Once a season Sergei finds himself facing the greatest challenge of his life. No, not an away match in Grozny. The sofa, on which His Wife materialises.
She isn't here for the high art of the low block. She's here because the Turkish pashas of her favourite series have taken a week off, and the sofa is the only place in the flat where gravity feels like a hug. For Sergei, though, this is a missionary opportunity. He looks at her as if he were the last keeper of the Library of Alexandria and she the only surviving literate person on Earth.
He is about to explain offside.
Offside
“Right, look,” says Sergei, when play stops and a line appears on the screen. “See the line?”
“I see it. Why is it growing out of that boy's tailbone?”
“It's not his tailbone, it's a projection of his body. He was past the line at the moment of the pass.”
“Which pass?”
“Well, that one. The one that just happened.”
“I blinked.”
“Well, there was a pass,” says Sergei. “That's not the point. The point is he was standing in the wrong place.”
“Why can't you stand where you like? The pitch is big enough.”
“Because then the striker would just stand by the other team's goal and wait for the ball.”
“Well, quite right,” says his wife. “I'd do the same. Why run if you can stand?”
Sergei takes a deep breath. He starts explaining about the last two defenders, about the moment the ball is touched by a teammate, about active involvement in the play. Then he hears himself from the outside and realises that right now he is explaining to his wife the legal system of a small state.
His wife listens with the expression of someone being read their rights in Elvish at two in the morning. Not hostile, just mentally somewhere else already.
At the words “the moment the ball is touched by a teammate” she says “mhm” and picks up her phone.
“Got it?” asks Sergei.
“So why can't you just stand by the goal and wait?”
“Because it's not fair. Those are the rules!”
“But it's effective?”
“Yes.”
“So offside is a rule against clever people?”
Sergei opens his mouth. Closes it. That isn't entirely untrue. If you think about it, it's a fairly accurate interpretation: brutal, but not without logic. Somewhere in Birmingham in 1863 gentlemen in bowler hats decided that standing and waiting wasn't sporting. Sergei is, on the whole, grateful to them. But he can't explain why.
“It's historical,” he says.
“I see,” says his wife, in the tone of someone who has understood something else entirely but has decided not to press the point.
Sergei is silent. At this moment he realises: offside should have been explained before the wedding.
The yellow card
With the yellow card Sergei feels more confident. Here everything is visual: the card physically exists, they show it in close-up, it's yellow. At last football has an object you don't have to imagine.
“See, the referee showed a card.”
“A yellow one.”
“A warning,” he says. “For a rough challenge.”
“He just fell over.”
“He pushed him first.”
“Didn't see it.”
“Well, it was there,” says Sergei. That phrase, “it was there”, is the universal tool of football explanation, applicable to everything: penalties, red cards, a managerial sacking in November.
“If he gets a second one, he's sent off,” he continues. “The team will be a man down.”
His wife looks at him with that special attentiveness which, in her case, means a question is coming.
“Hang on. One person does something bad, and everyone suffers for it?”
“Well... in a sense.”
“That's like our accounts department, when Lyudochka botched the quarterly report and nobody got a bonus.”
“That's a bit different.”
“How?”
Sergei thinks.
“In scale,” he says finally.
His wife looks at him for a second, then nods, not because she agrees, but because Sergei has clearly done everything he could.
The corner
The corner was a mistake, and Sergei realises it around the second sentence. But a football explanation, once begun, has a momentum of its own: like an attack that has gone the wrong way, but everyone's already running and it would be awkward to turn back.
“If the ball goes over the line off a defender, it's a corner,” he says. “Off an attacker, it's a goal kick.”
“Why?”
That “why” hangs in the air the way all the truly important questions hang: quietly, without aggression, simply awaiting an answer that doesn't exist.
Sergei has known football for twenty years. He knows line-ups, formations, club histories, xG and why Mourinho was sacked by Tottenham. But “why a corner and not a goal kick” is a question from the category philosophers call “first causes”, and one Sergei had so far steered clear of.
“It's historical,” he says.
“You've said that already.”
“Because it's true.”
On the screen the delivery comes in. The box is a mob scene. Twenty-two people fighting for position in ways that anywhere else would end with someone calling the police.
“Why are they all shoving? Over there on the left it's completely empty.”
“They're fighting for position.”
“The one who got the card is holding someone's shirt again. Is that historical too?”
“That's tactics.”
“That's a kindergarten,” says his wife, and goes back to her phone.
The ball goes somewhere. The referee blows his whistle.
“And?” asks his wife.
“Cleared.”
“Who?”
“A defender.”
“Which one?”
“There,” Sergei points at the screen, where twenty-two people are moving in different directions.
“In blue?”
“Baltika are all in blue.”
“And what are they in?”
“Red, that's Spartak.”
“And the referee?”
“Yellow.”
“Like the card?”
Sergei closes his eyes for a second.
“Yes. Like the card.”
“Handy,” says his wife. “You can see straight away who the dangerous one is.”
Full time
The final whistle. Baltika won 1:0.
Sergei exhales, long and methodically, like a man who hasn't watched a match but has spent three hours giving a guided tour of a factory where he himself doesn't fully understand how half the machines work.
“So what did you think?” he asks.
“Fine,” says his wife. “I just didn't get one thing: now they've won, are they allowed to stand past the line and wait for the ball?”
“No.”
“Pity. That would have given the game some meaning. Finish your tea.”
Sergei looks at the screen, where players are hugging. Then at the kitchen.
Next matchday is an away game. His wife will most likely be at home again.
Sergei is already thinking about where to start with offside next time.
Maybe with the ball.
Or, he thinks, and his eyes light up slightly, start with VAR.
VAR will explain everything…. But that's not certain =)
