Stop Telling Mesut Ai??zil To Improve His Body Language

Mesut Ai??zil needs to work on his body language, according to Joachim LAi??w. Here’s a slightly different perspective on the playmaker’s attitude “problem”.

Attitude is everything. “We are what we pretend to be,” to quote Kurt Vonnegut, “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Or, in the words of Arsene Wenger: “If you do not believe you can do it then you have no chance at all.”

A positive attitude always trumps a negative one. Sour faces contribute nothing to team morale. Kick pessimism out of football. Right?

Hold that thought.

On the football field, a player’s demeanor can be as important as his skill. Say, for instance, a player is knocked over by a tackle and takes a moment to clutch his foot/ankle/leg, checking for possible injury and catching his breath. Was it a foul? Was it a dive? The answer depends as much on the player as on the play. If Miroslav Klose falls over, the first thought popping into your head would probably be: “Is he all right?” If Luis Suarez falls over, said thought would probably be revised to: “Is that a dive?” Never mind that Suarez could have been legitimately wronged. A volatile attitude and history of play-acting signal to the referee, fellow players, and fans watching that Luis Suarez falling down equates to dive.

Players build up public personae through these individual actions that, strung together in the eyes of the beholder, become a narrative. So do clubs and teams. Stories and histories — of struggle, of triumph, of pride. These are the bread and butter of sport, as much as the game itself. Football on its own doesn’t have a plot (no matter how much some of us like to curse the capricious football gods). So the stories that we tell, that we choose to believe from all the possible readings of a set of actions and stats and fleeting moments from the chaos of a game and the general madness that is the business side of things — these stories say more about us, the fans, than about football.

What we choose to demand from players and teams tells us about how we see the game. On Monday, Germany coach Joachim LAi??w had this to say about Mesut Ai??zil:

“Mesut needs to work on his body language. He has heard it from me, and, I believe, also from Arsene Wenger. He is an inspired footballer. But when he fails or is not able to solve a deciding situation, he also needs to show that he can swallow that and send out signals like: In spite of that, I am still here and I can still affect the game.”

From a coaching perspective, LAi??w is depending on Ai??zil to become a player who can inspire teammates with both his skill and his attitude. Given that the current German national side is young enough to make HAi??wedes look like a benevolent team uncle — fair enough.

On the other hand, the question of body language isn’t only a concern for LAi??w or Wenger, apparently, but also for the fans. Because Mesut Ai??zil needs to stop looking like a three-week old birthday balloon (i.e. deflated) every time he misses a set piece. Mesut Ai??zil needs to stop looking like a Japanese tourist in Boston (i.e. lost) when the match gets too physical. Mesut Ai??zil needs to grow a pair of prolate spheroids and get on with it. Because attitude is everything. Right?

Keep holding that thought.

“Being second is to be the first of the ones who lose,” goes the famous Ayrton Senna quote. It can be read a few different ways. One, as a declaration that winning is everything and nothing else is worth aspiring to. Two, as a brutally honest confession of how much competitors hate to lose. Hating failure is not the same thing as having a positive can-do attitude. The latter is a motivational strategy; the former is a human condition.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting success. But there’s also value in understanding loss.

Football is what we make of it: a study, a hobby, an escape and a blank canvas for hopes. Football can offer a vicarious taste of success. Football can deliver a religious sense of belonging. Football can also deal crushing defeat — and that, too, is a condition of not just the game, but of life. So when fans ask Ai??zil to get a better attitude, the underlying demand is for a change in character — a change in the narrative of my side versus the enemy, of man versus physics, of protagonist versus all the obstacles in a story that, surely, must ultimately end in success.

That success starts to look a little uncertain when a player like Ai??zil slumps his shoulders and signals with his body language, “This is hard, maybe too hard, and I don’t know what to do.“

It’s almost like seeing Harry Potter get to the final showdown with Voldemort and suddenly realize, “I can’t do magic.“

There’s still a difference between sport and fiction, however: one is real, in the sense that it’s played out in the real world, in real time, no scripts, no editing, no mastermind author controlling the plot. You can analyze and plan and try to nail everything down; once the whistle blows, it’s all up in the air again. The experience of the game is free-flowing at best and senseless at worst. But it’s still the experience of being a fan. You can’t watch football just to see a win. There’s a reason why fair-weather bandwagoners are frowned upon.

In a results-oriented modern game, this experiential aesthetic is getting lost somewhere between marketing strategies and headline-screaming transfers and drastic inequality between the haves and have-nots. Success becomes everything when falling short could literally mean the end — of player contracts, sponsorship deals, and any viable future as contenders with the top of the food chain. Nobody has time for beautiful, tragic second-fiddles or idealists aiming for moral victory. All of football’s possibility gets narrowed to one point: be a winner, or be gone.

Enter Mesut Ai??zil with disappointment and frustration written all over his face.

It seems somehow incongruent, even antithetical, to all the hefty hopes (and price tag) he carries. As a professional, surely, he should radiate confidence like the second coming of Harvey Specter. As a player who cost Arsenal a whopping A?42.5 million, surely, he should be a more certain thing than tax.

As a real person playing a real game, surely, he is allowed to feel and show what emotions every fan goes through come matchday and the scoreline’s not quite adding up.

In an uneasily-plastic world of widening distance between fans and club management, of players being advised to kiss the badge after scoring their first goal because that’s just good personal branding — in the midst of all that, little moments of visible frustration and unabashed humanity are not things to be ashamed of, but things to hold on to.

Certainly, football can be a dream theater, a wishful projection and idealistic vision apart from the flatlining monotony of daily life. Certainly, vicarious joy is as valid as any other kind. Everyone deserves a lucky break, a dose of good fortune, and nobody wants to go through the trials and tribulations of supporting a club through hard times, because heaven knows there’s already enough of that in our personal lives.

But even more toxic than suffering, perhaps, is the hope that it will never come.

Life might knock you down more often than not. So might the Stoke back line. Hoping it won’t happen isn’t going to do much good, other than give some self-appointed realists the chance to say I told you so. Relentless optimism at some point turns into willful disconnect. Sometimes, a positive attitude means a little less cheer and a little more grace.

Mesut Ai??zil isn’t perfect. But his frustrations are real, their expression is honest, and for that alone, he’s a player definitely worth watching.

Stop Telling Mesut Ai??zil To Improve His Body Language

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