An ode to the nutmeg

A short while into the second half of Brazil’s Round of 32 match against Japan at the World Cup, with the game poised at 1-1, Vinícius Júnior produced a moment of magic. It was the sort of virtuoso skill that harked back to his country’s finest exponents, a throwback to a bygone era. A pass was fizzed into Vinícius’s feet, as he stood just inside Japan’s half. It was the sort of ball that a player would ordinarily look to control first and then decide what to do with, whether to dribble on, or find a pass.

But Vinícius managed to do two things at once. With his first touch, he redirected the ball at some speed, through the legs of the onrushing right back, Takehiro Tomiyasu, leaving him in his wake. He then jinked his way into Japan’s penalty box, only to have his ultimate shot, hit with a flick from the outside of his right foot, parried onto the post. It could well have been one of the all-time great World Cup goals. Instead, it’s now a moment that the record books will miss. The nutmeg that started the move changed nothing, but it was the sort of unparalleled, glittering genius that can make one stand up and purr with pleasure.

I learned the next day, while listening to a podcast on The Athletic, from the football writer Tom Williams, who is the author of “Do You Speak Football? A Glossary of Football Words and Phrases from Around the World”, that when a person is nutmegged in Brazil, there is a whole host of phrases available to describe it. Indeed, there’s much debate over how the move came to be called nutmeg in the first place (you can read more about that here: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2005/sep/07/theknowledge.sport). But in Brazil, it’s variously likened to giving someone a pen (caneta), a little egg (ovinho), a little window (janelinha), or a little roll (rolinho).

It’s hard to say how Vinícius’s effort might be portrayed by his compatriots. It’s easier to tell what the French might have called Michael Olise’s wizardry against Sweden, just days later. With France leading 1-0, Olise, who’s lit up the World Cup every time he’s taken the pitch, received the ball in the half-space, between Sweden’s backline and midfield. With no dearth of options to choose from, he made the difficult look almost mundane, slipping the ball through the legs of the centre back, Gustaf Lagerbielke, for Bradley Barcola to slam home.

Williams’s book tells us that there are two related terms in France: the petit pont (little bridge) — the classic nutmeg, which is what both Vinícius and Olise performed, the former collecting the ball himself, the latter turning it into a pass — and the grand pont (big bridge), where the ball is knocked past one side of an opponent and gathered on the other, without going through the legs at all. France were winning before Olise performed the trick and would have won without it. But his assist provided something akin to a lyrical flourish to an already exemplary display.

At the highest level, especially in club football, with sophisticated tactical planning, with teams constantly seeking to compress space, individual brilliance has become a rarity. Things can be different at the international level. Indeed, Sweden offered the friendliest of opposition to France. They allowed Olise the freedom of the stadium to work with. With Ousmane Dembélé, all guile and pace, operating from the right and Barcola and the irrepressible Kylian Mbappé swapping between the centre and the left, it seemed at times like Olise was playing in his local Sunday league.

There may yet be occasions when Olise will find space tougher to come by. Even still, his sorcery on the ball was something to behold. Much like Vinícius’s run, it showed us that that within the most collective of games there still might be a place for an act of pure individual assertion. In the final scheme of things it may at best only produce a gasp from the crowd, or from us, watching on our screens, but it is demonstrative of some of the game’s highest virtues, the sort that made us fall in love with the sport.

There is possibly a lesson here for other teams to take. Most notably, the Netherlands. In his foreword to Williams’s book, Clarence Seedorf, the great stylist of the Ajax Amsterdam and Dutch teams of the 1990s, speaks of the words he learnt growing up. “When we were training at Ajax and you managed to stick the ball between an opponent’s legs, it used to be called a poort, which is a Dutch word meaning ‘gate’”, he writes. “The influence of street language meant that it came to be known as a panna, a word also meaning ‘gate’ that comes from Suriname, where I was born. The Italians call it a tunnel, but they don’t give it as much importance. In the Netherlands, if someone got you with a humiliating panna, you’d hear about it for a month!”

Popular history tends to valorise the influence of Dutch Total Football. I’ve written about it elsewhere. But what is sometimes forgotten is the individual flair that was also inherent in their footballing culture, particularly in its Surinamese population, which produced Gullit and Rijkaard, Davids, Kluivert and Seedorf himself. The best Dutch teams seemed to be able to meld the singular with the collective. Today, though, Johan Cruyff’s great ideals have been reduced to a dour, fearful surrender. The team started the tournament well but reverted to a hyper-defensive system in their Round of 32 match against Morocco, an approach that ultimately proved their downfall.

For a footballing scheme to work, the self must necessarily be taught to be subordinate to the system. But the most memorable teams ensure that this doesn’t come at the cost of flair and panache. The World Cup still has some days to run, and its history will be written through its results. Call them what you want—a caneta, a petit pont or a panna—the record books will still tell us only the tally, but our memories will be etched by these moments of genius, the moments that got us on our feet, swept away, albeit fleetingly, by the depth and capacity of human talent.