Kenneth Aggerholm, Ejgil Jespersen, Lars Tore Ronglan
The Big Idea
In the 2010 Champions League football final, Diego Milito fooled Daniel van Buyten for his second goal, leading Internationale to defeat Bayern Munich 2-0. A writer for The Guardian described Milito’s second goal this way: “The Argentinian feinted as he twisted Daniel van Buyten this way and that before turning back inside, opening his body and guiding a shot with his right instep past Butt’s left hand.” The writer went on to sum up the meaning of Milito’s two goals: “Vision, timing, flawless technique and sangfroid – these two goals had everything a great striker needs, plus a sense of lyricism in the fluency of his movement.”
Takeaways
- This paper uses the Milito feint to describe the significance of “the feint” in sport in general. A feint is a complex phenomenon not reducible to body awareness or absorbed skillful coping.
- This description moves to a level where the feint is understood as an intentional transcending of the expectations of others.
- The feint’s creative characteristics are appearance, seduction, commitment, and value (in retrospection).
- A much broader view of creative expertise is uncovered given the inherent dynamic and social properties of the Game.
- The perspective of this study is that of the lived experience; the way individual players experience the “other” actually defines sporting contexts. For whatever reason we typically underestimate the impact that such cooperation has one the successful conduct of any game. It is best on the basis of this perspective to always “socialize” ones coaching; that is, remember to create this contextual dynamics in all aspects of teaching, practicing, and playing.
- Think of the need to focus on the delicate ways in which the continuous balancing and unbalancing the action in the sport becomes a major goal of all the players in the sport even if they know not what they are doing. Bring this experience explicitly into one’s philosophy and coaching strategies especially when it is only implicit in a player’s mind. It is likely to simplify a player’s understanding of an otherwise very complicated game.
- Deception is part and parcel of sport. Hence the feint is something to help players develop creativity in a variety of contexts and situations—and for the sake of player development, the younger they learn this the better.
- Learning how to anticipate a feint by learning these situational possibilities will help athletes learn to seduce the attempted seducer.
- Maybe an even better takeaway is to just remember from time to time The Guardian writer’s observation of Milito’s feints in the first paragraph of this summary. In it we see in one sentence the point of this research paper’s text: “Vision, timing, flawless technique and sangfroid –these two goals had everything a great striker needs, plus a sense of lyricism in the fluency of his movement.” Enough said.
The Research
In the paper “Falling for the Feint,” the authors use this second Milito dribble and goal to describe a depth of meaning most accounts of creative performances in sport miss. Reaching back to the work of the philosopher Merleau-Ponty and framing their discussion loosely in an existential and phenomenological tradition, the authors aim to amplify the theme of deception in sport in its social context—a context not accounted for in the more traditional renderings of creative skills.
The Game, as a universal and as understood from its experiential perspective, is essentially social. That is its context. There is the individual player and there are other players. The “other” players are players on his or her team; and there are players on the “other” team. Given that there is always a sense of pell-mell on the pitch of any football contest, isn’t the very idea of the Game in general the social production of interdependences and contingencies, themselves creating a dynamic continuity marked by try-after-try to control the particular game within the allowable rules (enabling constraints)? It is the ever-teetering tension-and-balance, the continuous efforts of both teams who strive to unbalance the other, that makes a game the Game.
And here the feint enters. Milito’s feints were out-and-out deceptions intended to unbalance the opposition. In his case on that day they worked. Feints can be set-ups over a longer time period lulling the opponent into believing you will do the same thing you have done the five previous times you had the ball; the surprise comes when you undo what you have been doing. For that matter, an entire team can feint, usually causing the other team a quasi-faint. The patterns of a game in fact call repeatedly for the feint from beginning to the end of the contest. (The authors exclude crass use of feinting as a form of cheating.)
The authors of this study define a feint: It is to intentionally and within the constitutive rules (the rules of the game) build up and transcend the expectations of the opponent(s) for the sake of winning an advantage. They then use the Milito feint on van Buyten to carry the analysis through four focal characteristics of the feint.
The appearance is the first focal point. Milito narrows the game to the interplay between van Buyten and himself; the gesture of the attack is communicated to van Buyten. Milito must appear as a threat to his opponent, and to become more threatening the closer Milito dribbles in. Milito’s appearance becomes a social performance; Milito has van Buyten’s complete attention the closer the confrontation is to inevitability. Both players express themselves and communicate to one another. This is the social tension of the situation; both players see the other and at the same time know they are being seen by the other. And the social situation is thereby configured.
And what happens now? Milito seduces van Buyten! Given that Milito caught van Buyten’s attention via his appearance, the two players play with the expectations of the other. When Milito confronts van Buyten, he slides to the right pretending to set up for the right-footed shot on goal; Milito even exaggerates the supposed try by lifting his arms a bit. And van Buyten bites; he has to cut off what he perceives as the intended shot. So he moves to his left, is essentially captured by the feint, only to realize too late that Milito is up to something else. Had Milito actually taken the shot after the move to the right, there would have been no real feint or seduction; only the need to deal with normal expectations.
And what does Milito do now? He doesn’t take the shot van Buyten expected him to take. Now that van Buyten is fully committed to the feint, Milito moves back to the left, cleverly and delicately flipping the ball over van Buyten’s right leg and finds the open field to the goal—and strikes. So Milito commits too, and just instantaneously after van Buyten committed. So with any seduction, expectations build up; Milito goes from affect to effect in his commitment after the seduction. The authors describe this moment as the difference between an indecisive player who is caught up still thinking about a move, and a decisive player who makes the move.
Finally, the value of the feint. Such an event in the course of the to-and-fro play of the Game is a unique apprehension of what some philosophers call the experience of “thick time.” Describing the feint as a creative performance means that the player who is pulling off the feint is all-at-once carrying the past forward into the present to create the future: history-to- anticipation-to-creation. This lived experience of thick time is rather like listening to music where we retain the preceding notes at the same time we hear the present notes and anticipate the future notes. How else can we hear a melody instead of simple disconnected notes?
And yet, the feinting is only one episode in the ongoing balancing/unbalancing of the Game. The feint is but a means to something bigger; it points to the goal. The game context of the feint must point to the context of the Game itself. Given the absolutely social context and intersubjectivity of football, the authors argue that the inherent value of the Game is both the individual and social habits of playing the game. The individual habits are acquired; the social habits are transcended. Hence, as they say, the value of the Game is that success in playing it depends on both repetition and variation, both building up expectations and then transcending them. The cultural versions of such interplay of habits and the unique meanings of the Game in differing contexts will determine to a great extent the range of experiential creative performances possible.
