Losing in Style, Arsenal: a nation mourns

How Arsenal discovered an ugly truth about the Beautiful Game! They lost the Carling Cup final, despite playing better than Chelsea. They were knocked out of the FA cup, despite playing better than Blackburn Rovers over two matches. They have lost all chances of winning the Barclays Premiership, despite playing better than Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool. They are in danger of failing to qualify for the Champions League next season, despite playing better than all the clubs below them. And now they are out of Europe's premier club competition this season, despite playing better than PSV Eindhoven over two legs and playing better than all eight clubs that remain in the competition.

It's not really fair, is it? But then Arsenal's football was not better in terms of goals and victories and all that; it was better morally. Arsenal play the right way. They play with style and brio, with beautiful passes, with intricate patterns, with wit and charm. They also play with youth, plucked from the ranks and taught to seek and find greatness.

This season Arsenal produced a team of pure and dizzy talent, the distilled essence of football. They embodied every kind of footballing virtue. Question: does defeat in four competitions destroy the moral argument? Does rightness depend on victory? Or is there really a right way and wrong way to play? Is it better to lose the right way than win the wrong way?

After one season in which Arsenal had the upper hand over United, Sir Alex Ferguson, the United manager, said that his team may have lost, but they played the better — ie, the more attractive — football. The comment of Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal manager, has gone into legend: "Everyone thinks he has the prettiest wife at home."

But this season, Arsenal really are the prettiest. None but the most besotted and uxorious of one-eyed fans can deny this. They are better than everyone else, but not good enough to win anything. Where does that leave us?

Well then, what does being the best, the prettiest and most morally perfect football team entail? It is not a question of good behaviour, keeping to the rules, not diving, not kicking opponents. Arsenal have been guilty of all these things, but that does not contradict the belief that they play "the right way".

No, a team that play "good" football are one that please the senses of the observers. They are just nicer to watch. There is unquestionably an aesthetic dimension to football. The famous Danny Blanchflower dictum — that the game is not about winning but about glory and doing things in style — still has a deep resonance.

In 1988, when Liverpool played Wimbledon in the FA Cup Final, people wrote that Liverpool were "playing for the good name of English football". Liverpool were morally good because they played a game based on passing and cute triangles. Wimbledon were morally bad because they lumped the ball up the middle at a beastly centre forward. One team were moral, one team were immoral. The immoral team won 1-0, proving what?

In the early 1980s, football people were outraged by the theory of POMO: the Position Of Maximum Opportunity — ie, whack the ball into the penalty area as many times as possible and it will end up in the net by sheer statistical inevitability. This was rejected by many as heresy, not just because it is less effective than pretty football, but because it is morally wrong.

Cesc Fàbregas, the heart and soul of the young and lovely Arsenal team, rebuked Mark Hughes, the Blackburn manager and a former Barcelona player, because his team — successful against Arsenal in the FA Cup replay — did not play "Barcelona football". As if this failure was a moral outrage.

Blackburn played defensively, sought to stifle and intimidate, imposed themselves as far as the laws and the referee would allow them. Is that immoral? Would they have been more moral if they had, despite lacking the playing resources, attempted to play like Barcelona (or, for that matter, Arsenal) and lost 4-0? You tell me. We all know that football has no marks for artistic impression, but as a neutral I still wanted Arsenal to win. I can argue long and hard and probably correctly that Arsenal's moral stance is utterly bogus, but I am still a sucker for glory and doing things in style.

We all are, except when we have partisanship to deal with. In the rugby union World Cup of 2003, England were criticised for their lack of style. Is that all you've got? Look at the bloody scoreboard, we replied. Style is for wimps, we've got Jonny and Jonno.

Yet, when England choose to kick a penalty rather than run it at Twickenham, there are always boos. The crowd wants victory, but the right way, with lots of running and passing and rolling mauls and line-breaking forwards. A bit of glory. So why aren't the Barbarians everyone's favourite rugby team? They always go for glory. But it doesn't convince us because we know that there is nothing at stake. It's not real, it's just a bit of fun. We want glory in the context of the search for big prizes and persuade ourselves that there is a moral rightness in that course.

There is a tendency to see all those who play extravagantly as morally right because they entertain us. But do we really want every athlete to be like Henri Leconte, a tennis player who cared little whether he won or lost so long as he went the pretty way? Ilie Nastase was adored at Wimbledon for his style and swagger; he was twice a finalist but doomed to lose. Pete Sampras, one of the all-time greats in all sports, was disliked because he was "boring"; this was seen by some as a moral failing.

In the 1960s, cricket became so attritional, so totally based on defeat-avoidance, that they had to invent a new form of the game. One-day cricket came about because the traditional version of the game had turned its back on style and glory. The primacy of one-day cricket in the sub-continent can be traced to the hideous excesses of negativity in Test matches orchestrated by Sunil Gavaskar, the India captain from the late 1970s to the mid1980s.

Logically, we must always support every athlete's right to seek victory in whatever legal fashion he chooses. Logically, we must accept that sport is only incidentally entertaining; that the only duty of the athlete is to struggle for victory with perfect sincerity; that when an athlete seeks to be an entertainer, he loses the sport in himself.

But all the same . . . Sobers, Best, Campese, Warne, Pelé, Maradona, McEnroe, Jayasuriya . . . Pietersen, Muralitharan, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Robinson, Federer . . . yes, even Fàbregas, Henry, Denilson, at least to an extent. Style may not be a moral imperative in sport, but sport is more amusing for its presence. To say that style doesn't matter in sport does not mean that there is no style in sport. It only means that you lack this quality yourself.

I hate money and I'm useless with it.

Only a few things separate us from the apes: 1) there's no direct ape equivalent of The Apprentice; 2) apes are hopeless at changing duvet covers (they pull them over their heads and panic because the sun's disappeared); and 3) apes don't use money. This third fact alone makes them vastly superior to humankind.

Money is the most terrible thing in the universe. It causes more stress, disputes and wars than religion, which ought to be impossible. Everything about it drives me up the pole, which is why I'm useless with it. I pay bills at the last minute, rarely check my bank balance, and get ripped off left, right and centre because I just can't bring myself to care about it. Friends gasp at my ineptitude. A few think me insane.

Immediate convenience. That's important. Not money. It's a wonder I bend down to pick up coins I've dropped. And it's nothing to do with how much money I have at any given moment. It's always been this way. In my early 20s, when I worked for peanuts in the university, I'd regularly take cabs to work because I'd overslept and couldn't wait for the bus. And at the end of the day, I'd often take another cab home because I was tired, thereby blowing my entire daily wage ferrying myself to and from a job I despised. This was, admittedly, astronomically stupid, but so what? I'm still alive, thanks to dumb luck.

As you might imagine, I'm incapable of haggling. I avoid it like beasts avoid fire, because any discussion about money depresses me into a coma. So my current situation is my worst nightmare - my day-to-day comfort is not under direct threat, and the only way out is to plunge headlong into a protracted financial negotiation. I live in a rented flat and the lease is about to run out in two months. The thought of moving genuinely makes me pray for death. Looking round flats, signing contracts, packing things up, lugging them around, sorting out the phones and the bills and the countless petty irritants - just crack me over the head with a paving stone and have done with it. Please. Anything but that.

Am earning some money and trying really hard to save. Folks want me to buy an apartment – quiet insistent on it too. Trouble is, I live in Sydney, where houses are a) satirically expensive and b) people crawl over themselves like rats, scraping each other's eyes out with their selfish, grasping claws at the sight of a halfway desirable property.

And as luck wouldn't have it, my place is slap bang in the middle of the catchment area for about 10,000 flouncey schools full of horrible, bawling little Hitlers called Josh and Jake and Jessica, every single one of whom will doubtless grow up to be as effortlessly brilliant with money as mummy and daddy, while I rot to mulch in the old folks' home equivalent of a pound shop, beaten and abused by underpaid care workers who will film my misery on their cameraphones and upload it to the internet for chuckles because I was too financially apathetic to sort out a pension.

Everyone has their success stories and secret formulas. Save here, invest there, do this, do that – I don’t want to do anything. When I see money in my account I panic – am I not being a good citizen by not spending this disposable income. Shouldn’t I be supporting the economy and making sure that the consumer confidence index is high by buying another pair of shoes.

... Dance the financial tango. Get your money's worth. Play the game.

But I hate the game. Hate it. It's a boring game, of interest only to the soulless. A fool and his money are soon parted. A bastard and his money are best friends. Financial negotiation is the opposite of music, of laughter, of sunshine, of ideas, of absolutely everything that makes life worth living. It's hell.

Do your worst, you awful, boring, terrible world of finance, you. Then leave me alone. For ever.

How I hate Deepak Chopra

Different things spark off migraines in different people. An allergy to the smell of onions. A sharp strike to the temple with a refrigerated dessert-spoon. Kryptonite. That sort of thing.

For me, flickering vision and an abrupt and piercingly painful torsion of the optic nerve are the infallible signs of having received a press release announcing a new book by Mitch Albom, Paolo Coehlo or Deepak Chopra.

I have a conviction, perhaps irrational, but no less deeply felt than the Pope's belief in a benevolent and omnipotent God, that anyone who goes for this kind of tree-hugging hippie crap is a morally and intellectually defective human being.
The new one is from Chopra, the endocrinologist-turned-spiritual guru.

Mr Chopra, something of a jack of all trades, has written about the relationship between quantum physics and healing, has speculated freely about the origins of life on earth, and argued that a key move towards peace in the Middle East would be to open a branch of Disneyland. His ideas, we're told, are helping to change the way the entire world thinks about "emotional wellness". He is, in other words, a complete booby.

Now he seems to have decided that the Kama Sutra would benefit from being anointed by the Chopra brand. It's now Deepak Chopra's Kama Sutra. Sorry, ancient Sanskrit-writin' dudes!

Here's how the puff for the paperback edition puts it:
Deepak Chopra's Kama Sutra brings together India's greatest living writer and ambassador of culture, Deepak Chopra, and India's most cherished and well-known text, the Kama Sutra.

Acclaimed and international bestselling author Deepak Chopra explores the universal themes of spirituality and sexuality and their role in connecting lovers emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Deepak Chopra's loyalty to the original Kama Sutra and ability to find its sacredness makes this unique book a modern classic and a definitive version for generations to come.

The text also includes The Seven Spiritual Laws of Love, Deepak's intensive meditation and affirmation of simple, practical applications that partners can bring to their relationship to enhance and entice their intimacy.

Favourite phrases? "Acclaimed and international… ability to find its sacredness… unique book... enhance and entice…" Find that sacredness, and entice that ole intimacy: "he-e-e-e-re, intimacy, intimacy… that's a good little intimacy… just a bit closer… there's a good intimacy… ye-e-e-e-s."

Personally, I think Deepak does have something to contribute to our love lives. Make sex last longer by waiting until the crucial moment, and… thinking of Deepak Chopra! No good for me, of course. I have a headache

Karuna

It's one of Buddha's words, Pali for compassion, for the immanence of all living things in each other, for the attraction of life for its likeness.

Teak is a relative of mint, tectona grandis, born of the same genus of flowering plant, but of a distaff branch presided over by that most soothing of herbs, verbena. It counts among its close kin many other fragrant and familiar herbs - sage, savour, thyme, lavender, rosemary and most remarkably holy basil, with its many descendants, green and purple, smooth - leaved and coarse, pungent and fragrant, bitter and sweet.

But nothing seems to have any shape for me. It's something you don't see until it's gone - the shapes that things have and the ways in which the people around you mould those shapes. I don't mean the big things - just the little ones. What you do when get up in the morning - the hundreds of thoughts that run through your head while you're brushing your teeth: "I have to tell you about the dream I had" - that sort of thing. Over the last few years I had someone to share these thoughts. Now, when I wake up in the morning those things still come back to me in just that way - I have to do this or that, for someone. Then I remember, No, I don't have to do any of those things; there's no reason to. And in an odd way, what you feel at those moments is not exactly sadness but a kind of disappointment. And that's awful too, for you say to yourself - is this the best I can do? No: this isn't good enough. I should cry - everyone says it's good to cry. But the feeling inside doesn't have an easy name: it's not exactly pain or sorrow - not right then. It feels more like the sensation you have when you sit down very heavily in a chair; the breath rushes out of your body and you find yourself gagging. It's hard to make sense of it - any of it. You want the pain to be simple, straightforward - you don't want it to ambush you in these roundabout ways, each morning, when you're getting up to do something else - brush your teeth or eat your breakfast...

I have known a lot of people in the short span of life. What comes back to haunt me, is the fact that someone told me that I will end up all alone, bitter and lonely. Am I on my way there...the march to existence with no purpose. The men or boys I have known as mates, colleagues, buddies, figure only as abstractions today. A faceless collectivity imprisoned in a permanent childhood - moody, unpredictable, fantastically brave, desperately loyal, prone to extraordinary excesses of emotion. Yet, I know it's all in the past. Watched a movie this afternoon which had a quote, "Salvation lies within." People of completely different background, existence, personality, come together - share experiences, create and destroy things and part ways. I suppose this is what life is supposed to be, a collection of an individuals experiences. Will I ever become a better person, or the dog is just waiting for its opportunity to strike. Shutting my eyes, am running hard and fast towards the unknown. Because, one thing which is known for a fact is that the one thing am not capable of is to return compassion. So many people in my life have been wonderfully kind to me, and in return I have been selfish, cruel, foolish and stupid. Teak - different yet useful, big yet protective, fruitless yet charitable.

I always wanted to be an elusive, unfathomable creature, a whipsmart Yale graduate and polymath who would speak fluent French and Japanese, would be conversant in politicial history and social anthropology, fly planes, direct charities, write music, play guitar and date power babes. Today, I present a defiantly reluctant front. I might be the essence of quiet civility, speaking in precisely meditated sentences about my craft with focused eyes and a furrowed brow. But what am I, and above all why am I? It's not about what who you are, but about what you can do or give to the society. Karuna is what I want to give...something I myself don't have.