In praise of the goalless draw

Nobody puts 0–0 on a poster. The scoreline is shorthand for a wasted afternoon, and if you tell someone you enjoyed one they assume you are being difficult on purpose.

But consider what a goal actually does to a match. It ends an argument. Everything that was finely balanced a second earlier — the shape, the risk, the question of who blinks first — collapses into a new and much simpler problem. One team has to chase, the other has to hold. The game gets louder and less interesting almost immediately.

A goalless match never resolves. The argument runs the full ninety minutes. You can watch a defender spend an hour learning a striker's habits, adjusting half a yard at a time, and by the end you understand something about both of them that no highlight package could convey.

The scoreline records what did not happen. It has nothing to say about how hard it was to prevent.

I am not romanticising bad football. There is a difference between a match where nothing happens and one where a great deal is happening and none of it works. The first is genuinely dull. The second is the most absorbing thing in the sport, and the scoreboard is incapable of telling them apart.

This is my whole objection to reading results in a table. The table is accurate and it is not informative. Two points there look identical and were earned in completely different ways, and only one of them was worth being cold for.