Can we still say there's such thing as a 'Dark Horse' ahead of the World Cup?
Let's beat a dead horse.
This instalment of Played on Paper was originally meant to be about Argentina, but since I want to read some more of ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’ (an excellent book on the history of the Argentina national team by Jonathan Wilson), I thought I would offer you something a little different which still talks in some way about the World Cup.
In the lead-up to an international tournament, there are three unavoidable narratives. ‘Why isn’t X player in with a shout/going to play?’ is often the most common; England fans are currently experiencing it with the likes of Trent Alexander Arnold and James Maddison.
The next is often ‘Why doesn’t the manager try X tactics’ like it isn’t a terrible idea to change up your tactics a few games before going into a knockout competition (if they were going to do it, they would have done it a lot earlier).
And finally, ‘Who is going to be the Dark Horse of the tournament?’
(Just a note, it’s going to get boring if I say the phrase Dark Horse 15 times in this article, so prepared to be wowed by the breadth of my vocabulary)
Everyone loves an underdog story, and I think it drives our obsession to root for an unexpected victor at every tournament; especially if we believe our side will not win it themselves.
But I am here to pose the question, is there truly such a thing as a Jet-Black Pony? Does the fairytale ever have a happy ending and in a digital age is there such thing as an unknown quantity?
So what exactly is a Midnight Colt? Well, the Oxford dictionary definition (and that’s when you know this newsletter is getting classy) says that it is ‘a candidate or competitor about whom little is known but who unexpectedly wins or succeeds.’
So let’s break that down into two key points:
Are there any teams we truly don’t know too much about?
Does the team that gets labelled as such, ever truly end up victorious in the end?
On that second point, I know you’re all probably thinking ‘Greece in the 2004 Euros’ but we’ll get to them in due course (and it was also 18 years ago you need to let Otto Rehhagel go).
We live in a digital age, as I stated before. And that means several things are available to us in the present day that were not available to us in the past when we were talking about Shadowy Mares.
We can stream matches from under-broadcasted leagues in seconds (I see you nerds on the Twitter timeline tuning into mid-table Belgian Pro League matches, you know who you are), look up a player’s key stats but also their underlying ones using sites like FBref and also talk to other fans around the world or read articles about nearly every player on a football team.
Long story short, we live in a society where information is just a mouse click away.
For example, Denmark are the latest team to be labelled a Twilight Gelding (I was going to use the Netherlands as my example since they’ve also been given this tag, but come on, that team is incredibly recognisable).
This was Denmark’s starting XI in their latest match against France:
10/11 players in this image play for a team in the top five leagues in Europe so already I think they’re disqualified for being referred to as an unknown quantity, but let’s focus on the least recognisable name there; Andrea Skov Olsen who plays outside it.
With a quick Google search you can find out Skov Olsen is currently playing for Club Brugge, has made nine appearances in the Jupiler Pro League so far this season and scored four goals (and I didn’t even need to stream it to find that out).
His previous clubs include Nordsjaelland and Bologna and he made his debut for Denmark in a 4-0 win against the Faroe Islands in October 2020. So when someone goes ‘Who’s that guy?’ when Denmark play Tunisia in their World Cup opener, you can tell them.
And you can do the same for any of the lesser-known substitutes who came on during the match; Alexander Bah, Jesper Lindstrom or Rasmus Hojland.
So when all this information is readily available, can we truly refer to a team as an unknown?
I know how you might reply: “Well even though there is more information readily available, not all the information is available, there are still teams we don’t know enough about, like Qatar, Japan, Costa Rica and Saudi Arabia etc. etc.”
But then comes the second part of the definition for Silhouetted Stallion; they need to win in the end.
I mentioned Greece previously because yes, in the 21st Century, they are the only true underdog story. A team that no one truly knew much about who beat all the odds and were victorious.
It’s a great story to tell after the fact; a romantic narrative that keeps alive the grand delusion that ‘Anybody can win it’ (yes it is ‘technically’ true but how often does it happen?), but if you’re insane enough to go back and actually watch how Greece won really that European Championship, you’ll find out that romance is dead.
They were pragmatic and compact, it wasn’t football played on that pitch, it was a war of attrition. Rehhagel set out to complete destroy teams’ spirits as well as their ability to play the sport. But even then you could say that they got lucky that no moment of brilliance completely derailed their chances.
So then you become caught at a crossroads; do you want a truly Eclipsed Mount story or do you want to watch the sort of underdog story that was sold to you in the Rocky movies, where the ‘right way’ conquers all?
Championing the ‘proper way’, there have been examples of teams going further than expected in the World Cup; see Costa Rica topping the Group of Death in 2014 ahead of England (pain), Italy and Uruguay, and Croatia reaching the final in 2018, but no one has caused an upset in the end.
But for every ‘success story’ you also end up with a ‘Turkey are the Umbral Steeds of Euro 2020’; a team that everyone thinks is going to outperform its standings but falls firmly on its face.
Yes, you could say (and in some ways, I’d agree), that if football tournaments were only about who picks up the trophy in the end they would be boring… maybe that’s why Rocky won an Oscar. But I haven’t just written over 1000 words so far to be caught up in semantics.
It’s always the usual suspects that come out on top, your Brazils and Frances who fall into the ‘historically are always quite good’ category or the teams that you’ve seen grow and develop over a long time so you predict very far away from the tournament that they are probably going to do well, ie Belgian’s Golden Generation.
The saying goes that Tournament football can cause upsets, there’s a level of unpredictability there that needs to be accounted for. But it rarely happens where a team upsets the entire tournament, they may beat a big fish and get further than expected but then a bigger fish comes and swallows them up instead (insert Qui-Gon Jinn meme here).
I love the narratives and stories that we have in football, but I just think that now is the time to retire the phrase ‘Dark Horse’ (and all the possible synonyms I have used throughout this article) and embrace the fact that we can talk more knowledgeably about every team that is going to be participating in the World Cup in 2022.
Find the beauty and semantics in what’s in front of us rather than chasing a white whale (different animal, same point).
So let’s confine the phrase to the myth where it truly belongs because when you look really closely at what people keep calling a horse, on a grainy photo from 18 years ago, you’ll see that it’s not a horse at all, but a unicorn that’s been strangely draped in a Greek flag.
Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter. As always I am available for freelance work, so if you like what you’ve read, please feel free to drop me a message. Next week we will finally get around to the next instalment of the World Cup series focused around Argentina.