Ball

Interesting game of basketball yesterday. I was actually playing.

Now I don't usually play basketball. I'm on the same pitch as the rest, but what I do is not really playing. I used to call myself the velvet rope, or the pillar. I just do what people who don't play - just get into the way of the path of the ball, block the obvious next pass. I completely understand why ppl don't pass to me, because I'm bad at receiving, which is why I end up having to get it from the opponents.

But 2 weeks ago I found myself receiving, making passes, nutmegging ppl with the ball, making feints. Like playing.

I guess it was easier because it was 3 on 3. Everybody has more space, more time to think, and I appreciate that. Plus you know there are only 3 people, that means I get the ball sometimes.

I have a slow brain. Good, but slow. In fact I often feel like I'm a cold blooded animal. In the morning, I don't wake up immediately. It's like when you turn on a photocopying machine or a laser printer or anything that uses powder toner, and you got to wait for the thing to heat up before it's capable of doing anything. I'm like that in the morning. I think that when I play with 7 on 7 I usually gabra and don't always know where to place the next pass. But with 3 on 3 that extra half a second I get does wonders, and all of a sudden I'm almost competent.

Like when you hear about how people like Veron and Shevchenko do so well in Italy but not in England, it's probably because of the pace of the game. Maybe they're just used to slower rhythms and when the pace changes they suddenly can't cope.

You listen to a lot of old farts talk about football and they keep on telling us that all the greats were of a bygone era. Therefore Pele and Maradona can never be touched. Then on the next tier you have Platini, Cryuff, Beckenbauer, Gerd Muller. And by the time you get to our era... but I don't see how and why Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, Zidane, Henry are necessarily inferior.

I looked at old footage of football and it just seems that they play football at a slower pace. Yes, Cryuff is very spectacular, and does a lot of neat tricks, but I also noticed that during those times they gave him time to do it. Now defences are becoming so tight that all you have to do is hesitate, and then a lunge will come in, or you will find your pass blocked.

Most of the things that you've experienced when you are young are better, which is another way of saying that young people are more impressionable. I think the game is very different and I think maybe the pace of the modern game would have made all those past masters, like Pele and Cryuff look a little more ordinary.

Anyway somebody also once told me that in order to mark somebody in football you need to stand within an arm's length of that person. I wonder if that's really true, but it's not my style. First, the court is small enough, so that I can keep watch on 2 different people at the same time, so I'll just challenge whoever the pass is played to, not that difficult. Second, I was reading about how people track down and capture terrorists. Ideally, suspected terrorists should not be captured and interrogated immediately, but rather they should be watched to see whether they will lead the investigators to other terrorists. I think that's good. Similarly I don't like to hound people so closely, I will give them the space. Because if I'm too close, the ball will never be played to the guy I'm guarding, and I will never get to steal it.

Of course, there are times when my cavalier approach breaks down... well too bad when it does.