Dick Bruna, creator of the child-friendly minimalist rabbit Miffy, once said that while some artists consider a work complete when they feel there is nothing left to add, he knows a picture is finished only when there is nothing remaining that could be taken away. “What matters to me is reducing everything to its essence so that no line is redundant,” he said. “That is the strength of simplicity: the art of omission.”
On the face of it Bruna’s designs appear worthlessly facile, particularly when compared with more technical works, but to convey complex emotion with only a few strokes of a pen undeniably requires a certain genius. What is more, the art of omission leaves no room for error: a false brushstroke is hard to spot among thousands, besides which when Rembrandt, for example, was not satisfied with one of his paintings he would simply paint a new one over the top of it. In Bruna’s work every line is, and must be, perfect.
It may not have been their primary intention but against Liverpool in February Leicester City created a perfect example of Miffy football. It was a moment of phenomenal quality, rendered more beautiful by its simplicity.
It is tempting now to contrast Jamie Vardy’s finest goal with that of his former team-mate Esteban Cambiasso. The Argentinian midfielder will be forever remembered for a glorious goal he scored against Serbia at the 2006 World Cup, the coda to a footballing symphony, 24 passes long. Vardy’s finest hour was created by a single pass upfield, more sledgehammer than silk. Lengthy passing moves are exulted over when they bear fruit; they and perhaps those assisted by a rabona cross are the only goals whose method of creation earns its own headlines: “Sterling scores for Liverpool after stunning 51-pass move”; “The 48-pass Spurs goal that rocked Redknapp”. These may have a rarity value – in the Premier League about one goal in 10 is preceded by eight passes or more – but perfection should be celebrated in all its forms. Perhaps scarred by some of the less controlled route-one football that spoiled the English game in the 1980s, people do not often celebrate the simple. The beauty of this particular goal, however, was undeniable.
Riyad Mahrez won the ball deep inside his own half and speared it forwards; Vardy sprinted towards it as a hopelessly outpaced Mamadou Sakho disappeared in his slipstream and Dejan Lovren attempted to cover his path goalwards. The striker watched it bounce, checked his run, swung his boot and thumped it over Simon Mignolet and into the goal from 30 yards. The moment that Leicester took possession of the ball, deep inside their own half, and the moment it dropped into the Liverpool net were separated by six seconds, for most of which the ball was in the air. But its quality was such that for the seconds that followed most watching football fans were airborne. This was high-speed, high-risk football; the slightest fault in either touch would have ended the attack in an instant. It stands in total contrast to Cambiasso’s goal for Argentina but it is in no way inferior. This was football at its fastest, bravest, sharpest and best.
“It was an unbelievable pass from Mahrez and unbelievable what Vardy did,” Claudio Ranieri said. “He watched the ball arriving, watched the opponent and watched the keeper. He looked at the keeper out of the goal and hit it. It was unbelievable, amazing, fantastic.”
Vardy revealed after the game that his shot had been premeditated, adding further lustre to the goal’s already glaring sheen. “I was looking all game, he was quite far off his line,” he said of Mignolet. “As soon as Riyad’s played it through and it’s bounced quite high and I’ve got no support, I just took my chance and luckily it’s gone over the top of him.”
However, it was the wider context that elevated the goal to genuine greatness. After something of a festive wobble, in which they won one league game in five, Leicester beat Stoke 3-0 before approaching consecutive matches against Liverpool, Manchester City and Arsenal. “The next three games are very crucial,” Ranieri said. “This has been a crazy league, very strange, but the players know that we can now do something good. This is the right moment to push a lot, to fight.”
It would be wrong to say that this was the moment when Leicester had been expected to buckle – there had been many of those already – but it was to be the last. By the end of the run they were favourites for the title and scarcely a sceptic remained. In terms of their title challenge, when it was sink or swim, they donned jet skis.
The odds against the Foxes becoming champions were still 12-1 before the first game of the series. Liverpool were beaten 2-0 and Manchester City dismissed 3-1, two games in which Leicester blasted away any lingering doubts about their abilities with the sheer quality of their attacking play, particularly the goals from Vardy in the first match and Mahrez in the second. Before this goal was scored, in the 60th minute and with the score still tied at 0-0, many people still expected the Foxes to falter; at some point during these six seconds hope crystallised into belief. By the time they headed to the Emirates Stadium their title odds were down to 9-4 and although a 2-1 defeat followed, Arsenal were losing until Danny Simpson was harshly dismissed in the second half and still needed a last‑minute Danny Welbeck winner. After that 12 games remained; Leicester drew four and won the rest.
If 2016 will be remembered for popular uprisings of people who had had enough of being ignored by the powers that be and set about thumbing their noses at the so-called experts, Leicester’s fairytale title was the most (only) joyful example. And this goal was a distillation of their season: totally unexpected, utterly astonishing, technically impeccable and, as is rapidly becoming apparent, impossible to repeat.
