by The roar starts before the ball even reaches his feet. Lunchtime crowd at the Etihad Stadium, breath visible in the air, cooked breakfast still sitting heavy in the stomach. And this is a crowd that is used to excellence, to the well-known, a crowd that is not so much expected as it is in its post-tribulation glory. Still, as the ball rolls to him, they rise. Football is a cage chasing a bird. And here, that bird is named Jérémy Doku.
Something interesting is happening at Manchester City this season. The melodies and harmonies have remained largely the same, but the backing track is different. Doku’s arrival from Rennes in the summer barely registered at the time, and indeed the rumor is that he was not a Pep Guardiola signing at all but a transfer driven by the director of football, Txiki Begiristain. Like the spa break you’d never buy yourself, Doku might not be the player Guardiola wanted, but Begiristain might see him as the player City needed. Scrawl graffiti on the walls of the palace. The little spark of invention that leaves the machine flesh. The pure joy of the dribble.
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Doku completed 11 dribbles against Liverpool on Saturday, the most in a Premier League game for two years. This season he has a league-high six dribbles per game, almost twice as many as second-placed Eberechi Eze. And of course it would be ridiculous to describe something as natural and elemental and ubiquitous as dribbling as a lost skill. But as a guide and tastemaker, Doku’s emergence as a key player in City’s title defense has a strange significance.
Go through the lists of the most prolific dribblers in the Premier League over the last few seasons – Allan Saint-Maximin, Wilfried Zaha, Adama Traoré, Emi Buendía – and what strikes you is that they used to play for teams that were struggle or in the middle of the table. This is the trend at the highest level: with elite clubs under the control of possession football and structured attack, dribbling has retreated into the field of the underdog, which has more space to run and will always rely more on the counterattack .
It was Guardiola himself, on Spanish television last year, who noted that the art of dribbling was in decline. “The dribble is getting lost in football today,” he said. “Without dribbling players, nothing can be done.” And the development of Doku – along with the signing of a dribbling midfielder in Matheus Nunes – suggests that Guardiola sees this as his next big tactical opportunity. In an increasingly structured and systematic game, the player who can immediately put an opponent out of a game could be a key point of difference.
But dribbling is not a repeatable skill. He fails as often as he succeeds. Not so much a function of technique as pure instinct. In fact, the FA’s coaching website has nothing to say about the mechanics of dribbling itself, instead telling coaches that their role is to “help players feel comfortable dribbling” and “help with them to get a football memory”. And while you can count dribbles and turn them on, you can’t somehow catch them. Because of the infinitely measured, infinitely decipherable modern game, the dribble is probably the ultimate source of true creation, closer to art than sport.
No two dribbles are the same because no two dribblers are ever the same. Like graffiti tags, they are unique to their user. Like music, they are all built from the same basic notes – instep, outstep, sole, heel – but their immanent character is derived from context and rhythm, the shape of the body, the illusion, the interplay between movement and rest. Look closely at Doku and you notice that he barely uses his left leg, even as a distraction. His signature is the only right, in that he will often collect passes by rolling over the ball to maintain momentum.
Kaoru Mitoma is a lace merchant who wrote his university thesis on dribbling. His toes are pointed down like a ballet dancer, his body weight planted into the turf, before he bends the ball with the top of his foot to catch the defender off balance. Dejan Kulusevski moves the ball with a gentle tap of his little toe, like a man dribbling on the narrowest precipice in the world. In contrast, Caroline Graham Hansen dribbles without really dribbling at all: dances, feints, shuffles, then big body swings. John McGinn, meanwhile, is perhaps the world’s greatest arch-survey dribbler. Bobbie John McGinn’s ass. John McGinn’s ass is approaching. John McGinn’s donkey swims. And then in a flash John McGinn’s ass is gone, never to be seen again.
Ah, you say, but what about the final product? That, perhaps, is why dribbling has become such a destructive skill over the years: the broad fixation on ends rather than means, on the demand that the dribbler turn his art into tangible currency. All this ignores the fact that the best dribbling is its own final product: a masterful act, a declaration of purpose, a skill that brings fans to their feet and hurts opponents. Perhaps the simplest expression of the joy of football, the point at which the elite game feels closest to the game we all started playing on the street or in the playground.
And for a coach who is often characterized as a control-obsessed micromanager, Guardiola has always got this. His team has always had great dribblers, from Lionel Messi to Arjen Robben to Leroy Sané. Not everything can be known or rationalized or submitted to structure. Sometimes you just have to surrender to the invention and see where it takes you, to make something out of nothing, the ultimate pure thing in an impure sport.
