Bukayo Saka deserves our love and adoration

Hobbes do you feel like talking about red cards? Do you want to hash out Arsenal’s frustrations over the fact that they’ve had a player sent off in three of their eight games so far this season? Over the fact that those are the only three games they haven’t won? Do you want to nitpick whether each sending off was warranted, was consistent with how each ref officiated the rest of the game or else has officiated all other games in their career, as a way of allowing that Arsenal might feel hard done?

No, me neither.

Let’s talk about Bukayo Saka instead.

It has come to my attention that I haven’t really talked about specific soccer players all that much. Names have been mentioned in passing, but mostly I’ve done a lot of talking about teams, about leagues, and even about coaches, who in most cases were once players themselves. But I’ve pretty much kept the players out of it so far.

Which isn’t really fair to you, but it’s partly a defense mechanism for myself.

A defense mechanism because players feel impermanent. They get injured, they switch teams. It’s a defense mechanism because somewhere, deep in the irrational part of my fandom, I fear that by talking about a favorite player I might jinx them into some alternate version of events where I look back and feel sad to have once spoken so optimistically.

But that isn’t fair to you because I know for a fact that my first true love in the game of soccer was not teams and was certainly not managers, it was in watching individuals, in rewatching their solo exploits and marveling at how the crowds sang and chanted their names and then going to the park with friends to imitate how they dribbled and mimic their famous celebrations. 

So I’m going to tell you about Bukayo Saka.

And now that we’re here, sitting down to talk about him, I don’t really know where to start.

I guess there’s how he carries himself.

Bukayo Saka is 23 years old and he feels like a veteran. He plays as the right winger for Arsenal and for the England national team, deploying a beautiful left foot to cut in off of the right wing and create magic.

And maybe part of why he feels like a veteran is because he broke into Arsenal’s senior team at age 17 and has been a consistent fixture ever since. He first made his presence known as a left wingback, a defensive position, then over the next season or two he slotted into a handful of other positions before eventually landing where he wanted to be, on the right wing.

But even as a left wingback Saka worked hard because it was the position where his contribution was most needed. And now, as a right winger, he works hard because it is the position where his contribution is most needed.

Maybe part of the reason I wanted to avoid talking about players is that they are really difficult to describe. A special athlete is something you need to see, to experience. My words about Bukayo Saka are never going to replicate what it’s like to see him play.

The way he moves with the ball is like water flowing.

It’s in how he carries the ball. Which is maybe one of those glossary terms that I should have previously clarified, that when someone carries the ball in soccer they are dribbling with their feet. Bukayo Saka has an ability to carry the ball up the right wing at a full sprint, with defenders clipping at his heels, and it’s honestly as fluid and gravitational as water pouring down a groove. 

Let’s see. 

For the last three years Saka has stepped up to take the majority of Arsenal’s penalty kicks. I think one day I’d like to talk to you in depth about penalty kicks, about that moment when an entire stadium is expecting for the ball to go in the goal while a penalty taker and the opposing goalie stand 12 yards apart and try to read one another before the whistle blows and the shot is taken.

Here’s a story:

Bukayo Saka was 19 years old when he burst into the starting lineup of the England national team, helping in their run to the championship match of Euro 2020, a tournament which was played in 2021 but then the marketing team couldn’t be bothered to rename the tournament so it was and still is called Euro 2020. And when that championship match went to penalty kicks it was a 19 year old Bukayo Saka who stepped up to take the fifth and final penalty for his country, so that when his shot was saved it sealed the title for Italy.

That championship match was being contested at Wembley Stadium, in London. It was by chance that England got to play in their home stadium for the final, and a home crowd can be a wonderful advantage except when it’s not. A home crowd amplifies emotions, so that when Bukayo Saka walked from the midfield line up to the penalty spot with his team down by one shot and needing to score to keep their hopes alive, it was tension which amplified and there truly was an entire stadium and nation of expectation pressing down with its full attention on the moment where his shot would either prolong the contest or else end in Italian celebrations.

Who it was that decided a 19 year old should be in that position is beyond me.

Although maybe it was the 19 year old himself. I imagine there were conversations throughout the tournament and then again in the waning stages of that championship match, and I have to assume that Bukayo Saka felt confident that he was the right person to step up and take that fifth penalty for his country.

There’s this saying British folk use every time a major international tournament comes around, they say It’s coming home, referring to the fact that soccer was invented in England but then the nation hasn’t won a major trophy since 1966. Although in 2022 England’s women’s national team did shed that bogey by winning the Euro themselves, but as of 2021, when Saka was walking up to the penalty spot, it hadn’t come home for over half a century, and something that I’ve been so exceptionally pleased to watch in the three years since that final is that Bukayo Saka—who walked from the midfield line to the penalty spot with most of the UK feeling strongly about whether he made the shot or not, only to see it saved—in the months and now years that have followed, Bukayo Saka has had the resolve to continue taking penalties both for England and for Arsenal. Because now, like when he was 19, he seems to understand that he is the best person to convert a shot from 12 yards away and with a goalie standing in his way, and just because that one penalty was saved doesn’t actually mean he was wrong in that instance.

And Hobbes this note, I promise, is not the right venue to launch into the reality of racism in sports. You are too young and I do not fully understand it. But for the sake of not skirting around one of the worst aspects of the sport I love, you need to know that a big part of the story with the Euro 2020 final was how highly charged the reactions were from some number of British fans who felt let down by a boy who had the self-confidence to try and help his team win a tournament.

Maybe Bukayo Saka feels like a veteran because he has carried himself through periods of disappointment and abuse with a level of maturity that some people never arrive at.

In every game he plays in Bukayo Saka gets his ankles hacked at by opposing defenders. Star players have always taken more physical abuse than most of their peers because opponents don’t know how else to slow them down, and there is something wonderful about the way Saka has started to stand up for himself. Because it’s one thing to be a level-headed and generally joyful person, but it’s another thing when the other team tries to take advantage of that demeanor, so Bukayo Saka is learning to not take excessive abuse, to instead trade physicality when the occasion requires. 

Here’s something, getting back to the things he does during the course of a game, and just as an attempt to round out some image of the actual soccer that he plays. Bukayo Saka has developed this way of getting open and I swear I’ve never seen another soccer player do this, I think he and his teammate Martin Ødegaard and maybe their coaches invented it. 

I don’t know how new tactics and moves are still being invented in soccer and maybe they’re not, but this is new to me.

Defensive setups often end up with a back line of defenders, allowing that if an attacking player is beyond them when a pass is played then they are offsides. So then attacking players have always tried to run directly at that back line, have relied on a teammate’s pass being released at the exact moment when they are not yet offsides but have momentum going in the right direction. It works sometimes and is very much a thing that defenders know how to counteract. The back line steps up at the same moment as the pass, and because an offensive player’s momentum is too set they end up offsides.

It’s called an offsides trap, maybe also worthy of a glossary entry but I doubt it.

But then Bukayo Saka has in the last couple years been utilizing a variant where he is starting out on the right wing, and instead of running towards the back line of defenders he takes a darting little run exactly parallel to it. Ødegaard, one of the best passers currently playing, clips the ball into space and Saka is able to peel his momentum towards the goal.

No I cannot find video evidence of this, yes I have tried.

But the offsides trap doesn’t really work here because Saka’s momentum is going along the line of defenders and even if they step up he is better able to adjust with them than he could if his momentum were fully towards the goal.

It’s so simple that it looks strange.

Because how have we not seen this before?

On a soccer field the same flourishes often get passed down, with certain moves and techniques being iterated and improved upon with each next generation of players. When Bukayo Saka cuts in and across the top of the box to unleash a left-footed shot towards the goal’s far post, that is an exceptional thing in part because it’s familiar, because left-footed players have been doing that for a while now and defenses are still somehow unable to nullify the threat. There is comfort in recognition. But when Saka makes that janking little run parallel to an offside trap it’s something almost bizarre, because it feels like he has found a new angle of approach in a game that has had millions of cumulative hours dedicated to searching for every possible angle and every possible approach.

Now that I’m reading it back I see how imperfect that whole attempted explanation is. There are too many things in motion for a series of static words to really capture the fluidity of an attacking passage. 

Even his ability to lash a shot out of such minimal backswing, his steadily improving blunt-hammer right footed shots, how he uses his strength to shield the ball from a defender, uses his quickness and to feint and unbalance, it all involves so many overlapping variables.

The good news is that Bukayo Saka is only 23 years old. He feels like a veteran and in a lot of ways he is one, but also he’s so early in his career.

The good news is that in a few years you’ll be able to sit with me and watch an Arsenal game. So we’ll sit together and watch Arsenal, watch Bukayo Saka. It will make more sense in motion, I promise.