Tottenham and Manchester United show us that in one moment everything can change

Fifteen years ago my colleague Steve Palmer gave me a book his father had given him. It was The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And it was brilliant.

Tolle said we are only ever alive in one moment, which is now, but we can miss it because we are thinking about something else, either the past or the future.

Later I discovered that this idea is not new. It has been around for thousands of years. It is at the heart of Buddhism. Leo Tolstoy believed it was part of Jesus’s teaching.

What, you may ask, has this got to do with football? Well, here is my answer. It came to me last Wednesday when Tottenham beat Manchester City on away goals to reach the Champions League semi-finals.

Most football fans and football bettors do notice the present moment. But they are not conscious of it in the way that Tolle meant.

Tottenham fans were delirious, and why not? Celebrate good things when they happen. There are few enough of them for many of us.

Inevitably, though, other football fans do not like any ordinary or bad things that are happening to their team now. And they do not accept them calmly. There is none of the serenity that Tolle said we should experience in the present moment. Why?

One piece of the explanation – admittedly, only one piece – is that we still lack something. We have not noticed that in this present moment nothing around us stands still. It keeps moving. Change is the only constant, to paraphrase the Buddha.

When Tottenham reached the Champions League semi-finals we were told they had proved the doubters wrong. I suspect some of those who said Tottenham had proved the doubters wrong had been among the doubters.

In January Tottenham were called serial failures after they had been knocked out of the FA Cup by Crystal Palace. At the end of March they were still regarded by many as flops – they were without a win in five Premier League games.

“That’s life,” Frank Sinatra used to sing. “You’re riding high in April, shot down in May. But I know I’m gonna change that tune when I’m back on top in June.”

He was not the only singer to have understood that fortune lurches one way then another. Some painters have too.

Rembrandt painted a picture called The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. On a pitching boat one of the men clutched a rope and clasped his hat on his head. The face was Rembrandt’s. He put himself in many of his pictures.

Years later, after many ups and downs, Rembrandt recalled The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and wrote: “I was so young when I painted this. I really had no idea how true it was going to be. Life is a storm. One minute the sea is flat calm and then the next minute it’s not and the doubters shout “Abandon ship”.

We will never make proper sense of football, let alone have any hope of making a regular profit from betting on football, I feel, until we get this idea of impermanence.

“What is absolute truth?” asked a Buddhist monk called Walpola Sri Rahula. His answer was: “The absolute truth is that there is nothing absolute in the world, that everything is relative, conditioned and impermanent.”

After Ole Gunnar Solskjaer became their caretaker manager Manchester United won 14 games out of 17, drawing two and losing only one. The culmination of that sequence was a 3-1 win away to PSG in the Champions League. The last goal came from a penalty in added time and earned qualification to the quarter-finals.

Solskjaer seemed to be regarded as the best coach in the world, who had transformed United’s players into the best team in the world. Since then they have lost seven games out of nine and perceptions have shifted. During that time Solskjaer became United’s permanent manager. On Wednesday United lost at home to Manchester City, a result that may enable their nearest rivals to win the Premier League.

One of Tolle’s simple but deep observations was that once something has happened it has happened. “It is as it is,” he wrote. For the benefit of us football followers he could have added that now something else may also happen.

Why Liverpool are seen best as a team in transition

Rembrandt died in 1669. If he were alive today and he painted the Liverpool football team I think he would capture them in a split-second when they gain possession, with Salah, Mane and Firmino bent to sprint forward.

Rembrandt understood that the key moments in a story are the turning points. In a football match we now call these transitions. No team make better use of them than Liverpool.

One of Rembrandt’s paintings is called Belshazzar’s Feast. It is based on an Old Testament story.

Belshazzar was king of Babylon. His father had raided Jerusalem and looted the temple. When Belshazzar threw a banquet his guests were served wine in gold cups that had been taken from the temple.

The hand of God appeared and wrote on a wall that Belshazzar would be deposed and killed. It happened that night. From this story, as you may have guessed, comes the saying: “The writing is on the wall.”

Rembrandt depicted the moment Belshazzar first saw the hand and some of the guests, gazing only at him, realised something was wrong.

“Other artists paint the aftermath,” Rembrandt wrote, “but the moments I look for are the turning points. The king startles. The drink is spilt. And the others know only that their great king is suddenly unmanned.”

Malcolm Allison coached Manchester City in the 1960s and 1970s. He wrote a book called Soccer for Thinkers. He referred to breakdowns rather than transitions.

“The breakdown period,” he wrote, “is the instant or age between the ball changing possession and each individual changing gear. In good teams it is a fraction of a second, in bad teams an age... Many footballers stop, relax, stand, look, decide, and then act when the ball changes hands… Chelsea, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester United work hard at this problem.”

That was written in 1967. Liverpool make even more of those opportunities today.

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