Very few bands willingly identify with the term. Partly that’s because of the above; post-rock still struggles to communicate and identify itself with conviction and clarity. But if we’re to take the term at face value for a moment, it’s
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“I have this instinct for knowing when a defence is going to relax, or when a defender will make a mistake,’ he once said. ‘Something inside me says, Gerd, go this way; Gerd, go that. I don’t know what it is.’ A killer who claimed to hear voices. Serial goalscorer.”
― Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football
― Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football
“Gerard van der Lem, Van Gaal’s right-hand man at Ajax and Barcelona, explains: ‘The main principle was possession of the ball. We trained on this endlessly. In some European Cup and Dutch League games we had seventy per cent ball possession. Seventy per cent! You need a lot of technical skills to do that. We almost always had the ball and we were always trying to find solutions. People think our system was rigid, but it was not. It could not be rigid. We could play with three strikers, or with three in midfield, with or without a shadow spits [striker]; whatever you like. The thing was to understand what consequences these formations have for the team. The players must be tactically very skilful and they have to be thinking spatially in advance. When we won the European Cup, everything fitted. Everything fell like a puzzle. Every player knew the qualities of his fellow players. Each player knew how to play a ball to his fellow players. In defence, they knew exactly how to press. They all knew the distances… Yeah, it was like solving a puzzle.”
― Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football
― Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football
“Johan Cruyff was the first player who understood that he was an artist, and the first who was able and willing to collectivise the art of sports.”
― Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football
― Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football
“In more than one hundred years of football history, in a country where scandals have been the norm, not the exception, the number of cases involving referees could be counted on the fingers of one hand. This had not helped their reputation. Venduto! – crook – was still the most common insult hurled at the men and women in black every Sunday afternoon.”
― Calcio: A History of Italian Football
― Calcio: A History of Italian Football
Ishan’s 2025 Year in Books
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