As a Toronto FC season ticket holder, I have seen my fair share of junk chucked onto the field. I will even claim responsibility for contributing to it at least once, when Danny Dichio scored that goal and I thought I'd rather be a part of history than some guy with a novelty seat warmer.
But I've never chucked a streamer at a corner-taker, nor have I thrown my half-empty ten dollar beer cup at an opposing forward running along the touch-line to celebrate a goal with no one in particular. And I was one of many fans eager to see who ever chucked a flair onto the plastic pitch awhile back get cuffed and charged.
That said, there is something about the messiness of pitch-level garbage I appreciate. When you flip on the TV or an illegal internet feed (heaven forfend) to watch a Premier League game, the first shot you get is of a pristine green pitch, mowed in mesmerizing patterns with white lines as crisp as cake icing. When the action begins, it's almost surreally perfect, players in clear formation, fans standing and sitting and waving their flags just like their autonomic video game doppelgangers.
In FIFA 09 however, all decisions are perfect, every offside call just right, ever foul and penalty decision clear as day, and you will never, ever see a boy's novelty beach ball wind up unobstructed in the middle of the six yard box. Not so in MLS; if a video game featured pitches faint grid-iron hash marks, or players celebrating while dodging beer cans, or streamers tossed ad hoc on opposing corner takers, you'd be much closer to the North American game. Messy, unclear, imperfect. Just like real life. Something European football has striven to remove erase.
Perhaps it's because I follow MLS that I don't see the beach ball incident as one of those ignoble refereeing whoppers to be forever immortalized on YouTube. I see it as the detritus of real life encroaching on the illusion of a hyperreal Premier League, as an homage to football's messy roots years removed from today's sanitized world of mathematical formations and electronic hoarding signs. It's the football of Hans van der Meer (recently profiled in brilliant fashion by football iconoclast Fredorrarci), open to the expanses of the world and all the little errors that make incarnated life so messy, so imperfect, so fleshy.
Like football on a godawful, frozen pitch in the early eighties, key internationals played in fog, or the White Horse final, it's history now, and perhaps, depending on how the Premier League narrative plays out, it will be among the only things anyone remembers from "just another season in the PL." This is not to say I advocate throwing things onto the field, and certainly referees should strive to make the correct call about objects obstructing play. But Saturday was a reminder that beach balls will still end up where they don't belong and referees will fail to disallow goals and bad penalties will be given and balls will cross the white line with no goal given, or not cross them and be given. In other words, God laughs at men's plans.
It's also worth remembering that in the end the beach ball didn't defeat Liverpool—Sunderland did. There were eighty minutes for Liverpool to equalize and they couldn't break the defense for all their hard work. Good football clubs win because they overcome all systems and they correct for "shit happens." Rafa has often undermined himself with pinpoint player rotations and overly cautious formations, only to be undone by the wildness of the willful world crashing down around him. Like a beach ball swatted into the Liverpool goal mouth by some kid.
And sitting there in the box, an instrument of brand marketing and club merchandise sales, one tiny link in the circuit of financial exchange in the "New" Premier League; it went rogue, an affront to the game of suited tacticians and made-for-television fixtures. Because try as you might, you will never completely erase the inherent dirtiness of the world from the Modern Game. Like the streamered corner kick taker at BMO Field who sends in a perfect, headed in cross to win the game, football itself is all that can transcend it.
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