The Game

by Ken Dryden

It sounded very familiar; and so too did the prescriptions: improved technique, more imaginative team play, team play based on offense not defense, on ball control and speed, better conditioning and better finishing around the net. And to make it all possible, increased emphasis should be placed on the national team at the expense of “the interminable league program,” as one newspaper put it, to give players more time to play together, as the Hungarians and others insisted on. Change a few of the terms, colloquialize the language slightly, and it might have been written in Canada, about hockey, in 1972 or since. The Canadian and English reactions were similar, perhaps because they came from countries sharing a common culture for many years, and sharing parallel traditions in their respective sports. But that is only part of the story. Everyone, every country, has a watershed moment like this sometime, about something. The point is, what happens next? With all that had been learned, what happened to English soccer in the more than twenty-five years since? I am told by my friend and others that the stereotype English style remains, that even with its greater pace and stamina, the essence of the game has not changed. Indeed, if anything the gap in global styles has widened. But why? For more than twenty-five years, the English have seen the problem and understood it as well as it can be understood, always with the will to bring about the necessary changes. So what stops them?...