If France win the World Cup, much credit will be due the incredible midfielder N’Golo Kanté.
Neil W. Blackmon
Light of August, William Faulkner’s masterful meditation on race, otherness and alienation in the postbellum south, seems a strange thing to think of watching a soccer game, but it’s what comes to my mind while watching France’s N’Golo Kanté play against Uruguay in the World Cup quarterfinals last Friday.
There’s one famous line in particular that makes sense- finally.
It comes at the beginning of the sixth chapter, when a young Joe Christmas, the novel’s tragic, subversive, alienated antihero, is about to sneak into an orphanage dietician’s office to steal toothpaste.
“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders,” Faulkner writes.
Faulkner wasn’t, by his own admission, intellectually steeped in psychoanalysis, but he was critically attuned to the idea in contemporary memory studies that memory plays a vital role in structuring individual and communal consciousness. The passage above was Faulkner deploying memory, through a relatively minor incident at an orphanage, to make a grander statement about the relationship between memory and identity formation, and the long shadows memory can cast, influencing the present and at times, altering the future. This happens whether we want or not, or so the line suggests. The hypothetical (belief) comes before certain knowledge, and memory believes things we may not openly acknowledge, even as time marches on.
I’ve been thinking about this passage in Faulkner a bit while watching N’Golo Kanté, the quiet, space-eating, son-of-Malian immigrants and to opponents, son-of-other-things-too automaton of a number six play soccer for France at this magnificent World Cup.
To watch Kanté play midfield is an exercise in memory and belief.
His body buzzes from place-to-place in the midfield or in his final third, almost floating through the ether, his movements seemingly effortless. He’s a whirlwind without the attendant inefficiency, wheeling from here to there and skipping in and out of tackles, rarely fouling. He usually wins the ball, but win he doesn’t, he transforms immediately to a destroyer and mathematician, disrupting an opponent’s rhythm, forcing hesitations, obliterating passing angles, and methodically, quietly, gnawing at an opponent’s confidence, often with a look of wonder and joy on his face.
Against Peru, around the hour mark, I was watching him- with a host of my new favorite Peruvians- when Christian Cueva, the dynamic little La Blanquirroja attacker so wonderful at getting between the lines and losing defenders appeared to have a seam down the French right.
First, Cueva tried to lay off for Andre Carillo, only to be denied by Kanté, who streaked like a pre-Thanos Avenger from a deep central position to deflect the pass with a perfectly timed left foot. Peru won the ball back, and this time, Pedro Aquino tried to play a ball-in behind for Paolo Guerrero, only to have Kanté wheel around in one fluid movement from his left to deny this pass with his right foot. This ball fell back to Cueva, who, having tried the right and the left, attempted to take Kanté on himself. This failed too, with Kanté calmly putting a foot in just as Cueva tried to pass.
When it was over, as the French regained possession and a host of Peruvians along with myself shouted something guttural in the direction of a television, a flummoxed Cueva threw his arms in the air for an instant, a moment of understandable exasperation and dejection. Meanwhile, Kanté was already coming forward, acting as both support for the ensuing French foray forward and prophylactic against any chance of a Peruvian counter.
The whole sequence took no more than twenty seconds, and throughout it, Kanté moved as if from memory, as if his body believed what would happen on the field before his mind knew it would.
Memory believes before knowing remembers.
Kanté celebrates Leicester City’s improbable Premier League title in 2016.
Moments like that have been frequent for Kanté, the Chelsea midfielder who is, by most accounts, the most-decorated French player this World Cup cycle. Even if he isn’t the most-decorated, he’s certainly the most impactful and important. He’s made the second most tackles and interceptions at this World Cup, and if France are to win, he’ll be the largest singular reason why.
That he did so from almost nowhere four years ago, when he was plying his trade in relative anonymity for French Ligue 1 side Caen, makes his position as the brightest star on a team of stars all the more astounding.
Leicester City purchased Kanté from Caen for just under 7 million Euro just prior to the 2015-2016 campaign. The sale made little news. Even locally, the signing was relegated to a paragraph in a Leicester Mercury team preview that focused more on whether journeyman manager Claudio Ranieri could get enough out of flashier players like Riyad Mahrez and Jaime Vardy to avoid relegation. The consensus among prognosticators was Ranieri could not, with a majority of experts predicting the drop for Leicester within days of Kanté’s arrival.
The opening day odds for the Foxes to win the Premier League? 5,000 to 1.
Leicester City won the Premier League anyway, easily the greatest upset in the history of professional sports (the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals of Major League Baseball are second, at 999-1); Kanté was perhaps the largest reason why. Sitting in front of a sturdy but not star-laden back four, Kanté was the consummate fixer, covering up tactical mistakes with his almost peerless range, relentless motor and ability to tackle without fouling, pass in tight spaces, and shut passing windows from seemingly impossible angles. I don’t think, as Blake Thomsen notes below, we can talk enough about that championship, or in turn understate how impactful Kanté was to winning it.
We talk about it a ton, but we still don't talk nearly enough about Leicester's title. They were predicted to be *relegated* by 9 of 11 writers in this @guardian_sport piece. And they won the league by 10 points. https://t.co/RdH3MqZsKx
— Blake Thomsen (@blakecthomsen) July 9, 2018
We often affix the word “metronome” to these types of defensive midfielders, but to Kanté, it seems so cliché and limiting. He’s so much more than that.
The great Claude Makélélé, who redefined the way soccer was scouted in the midfield during more than a decade at Celta Vigo, Real Madrid, Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain, and who, fairly or unfairly, the diminutive Kanté is often compared to, suggested that to see Kanté play is to see joy.
“I don’t want him compared with me,” Makélélé told the French sporting magazine L’Equipe recently. “I want him to be more than me. But I love to watch him play more than anyone in the world because you can see in him joy. Sometimes you see a team with all of the big-name players, but they do not play for each other. With Kanté, you see a star who plays for the team. You see a team that wins because of his spirit.”
Kanté then repeated the accomplishment, though with far-better odds from the outset, at Chelsea the following season, capping the year by winning the coveted PFA Player of the Year Award. The title was his second of the cycle and while Chelsea were unable to repeat this past season, Kanté entered the World Cup with the following three-year results resume:
- 2015/16 Premier League Champion at Leicester City
- 2016 EURO Runner-Up
- 2016/2017 Premier League Champion at Chelsea
- First Place in a World Cup qualifying group with Sweden and the Netherlands
In other words, there’s an excellent chance that in soccer competitions played over the last three or four years, the team with Kanté on it will win.
Because Kanté doesn’t score goals (only four for Leicester City, Chelsea and France combined in the last three years), it can be difficult to explain his influence to the less-trained or critical soccer eye.
The easiest way, I think, is to tell a viewer to spend thirty minutes watching only Kanté as he skip-floats gracefully along the field, buzzing in and out of passing lanes, intercepting passes and torpedoing into tackles.
First, this observational experiment is outstanding learning material, especially for those with children who are playing soccer and eager to learn.
Second, it helps relay a more universal truth about soccer, which is that soccer is, above all, a game about space.
The game is played within a finite amount of space, and the best teams are the ones that bend and exploit the physical dimensions most favorably, whether that means creating more space through flexible movement, such as the great Ajax and Holland teams of Total Football or their intellectual heirs, Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, or effectively limiting space, or both.
If you are an American who has been to New York City’s Central Park, you understand something of what this means. Influenced by Birkenhead in England, Central Park’s creator, Frederick Law Olmsted, handed a finite amount of space by the City, utilized a variety of methods to control and bend the space in his favor, from the clustering of trees to the winding, angled paths to the draining away of swamps to create lush, open meadows. The idea was, according to Olmsted’s diaries, to “control space in such a way so as to create a ground that invites, encourages and facilitates movement by others.”
This- the ability to control space in a way that facilitates movement by others- is, I think, what Kanté does most of all, and he does it, according to his teammate and Belgian star Eden Hazard, who France and Kanté will play in the semifinals, “better than anyone in the central midfield in the world.”
With Kanté patrolling the center of the field and shielding the defense, a great number of the tactical mistakes Didier Deschamps may make in a game, or technical and positioning errors of teammates, are neutralized. It’s why, as the brilliant Clint Smith noted, France can look absolutely aloof at times and yet also appear to have a game by the throat.
FRANCE PLAYED LIKE THEY WERE SMOKING A CIGARETTE AND TAKING A LIGHT AFTERNOON STROLL ALONG THE CHAMPS-ÉLYSEÉS AND STILL WON THAT WAS THE MOST FRENCH VICTORY EVER
— Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) July 6, 2018
I want to close with one other thought, that gets back to the idea of Joe Christmas, Faulkner’s antihero, grappling with his own questions about race and identity and while central to the novel, wholly alienated.
One could argue, I suppose, that Kanté, despite his greatness, is somewhat alienated.
In an important but different way, so are many of his teammates, who like Kanté are dual-passport holders and descendants of French colonial African diaspora, playing for a country that only a year ago held an election that was, in many horrific ways, a referendum on what it meant to be truly “French.”
It’s just that when you watch Kanté at the center of nearly every critical defensive play France make, he seems alienated on the field as well.
Maybe because Kanté doesn’t score much, and isn’t the greatest passer in the final third, there is this idea that there’s more of a physicality to his game or a destroyer-quality than artistry. That idea means that on a team of flashier, goal-creating stars like Kylian Mbappé or Paul Pogba or Antoine Griezmann, to name a few, Kanté is isolated, alienated, alone.
I want to urge a rejection of the idea that Kanté isn’t an artist, or that his game lacks musicality.
I think instead he plays a vital role on a French team the Greeks might find to be Apollinian and Dionysian.
In Mbappé or Paul Pogba, there is the tragic hero, the Apollinian, the perfect blend of technique and human form that plays the delicious final ball or makes the final run and scores and projects the image of beauty.
In the smaller, quieter Kanté, the Dionysian, who glides gallantly and gracefully through the center of the field, a sublime symphony of movement that does not need goals or to play the decisive ball to be beautiful or to stake his emotional claim. He does so through the rush of wonder that accompanies simply seeing him move, musical and alone in the field.
Neil W. Blackmon is Co-Founder of The Yanks Are Coming. Follow him on Twitter @nwblackmon.