Football has elevated time-wasting into a sophisticated art form

As a pastime, or indeed lifestyle, time-wasting is undervalued. To do nothing takes real imagination; to produce nothing requires a strong moral core. The idle person does not, among other things, perform unnecessary cosmetic surgery or release an album of swing covers. The most courageous way of experiencing time is through inaction – to remain quite still and feel the minutes crawl across the face. Time-wasting in football, however, is the preserve of knaves and shysters.

The trouble is, while time wasting in everyday life is viewed by the capitalist orthodoxy as weak and suspicious, in football it imparts to its practitioners a level of sophistication. The deliberate act of slowing the game down or breaking the game up, when in the lead, is identified as the opposite of naivety. It has been given a new name, “game management”, elevating low-cunning sabotage into something worthy of a college diploma.

Good game management is now understood to be a quality that a successful side must possess. The dictionary definition of time-wasting – to produce nothing of benefit or expend no energy – does not apply to its application in football. Significant energy is expended in keeping the ball quiet and what could be more important than three points?

Taking the ball to the corner flag is football’s equivalent of the medieval ceremony of leading the Devil away from the village, into the wilderness. For slow-witted insolence, the corner flag time waster occupies a position somewhere between a cow in the road and anyone using the crying-with-laughter emoji on social media by way of refuting an opposing point of view. A diagram, shown by the BBC, of the ball’s position in the last 10 minutes of the Euro 2022 final is a design homage