There are limits to the playing surface but “play in itself is groundless and limitless, taking place above the ground limit and between the goal limits” (Massumi 2004: 72). We would add that play can also exceed the grid of the playing surface, as when players use the space beyond the lines to position their bodies to keep the ball in play (a recent spectacularly skillful instance by the Manchester United player Dimitar Berbatov made headlines) or to evade a challenge. Such moves are, strictly speaking, contraventions of the rules of the game and amount to an unauthorised departure from the field of play. In sport rules are, in Massumi’s analysis, instances of “ex post facto captures that take precedence”. Sport evolves in response to forces of variation asserting themselves, and rules respond to such assertions by means of “usurpation”. A new unheard of variation in play emerges which is usurped in the future by an ex post facto capture.The hand of Thierry Henry operated right above the boundary of the playing grid. It kept the ball within the playing area by intercepting it as it moved to cross an imaginary boundary line; imaginary because projected upward vertically. All fouls in football involve crossing a line: a boot raised and rotated beyond a certain angle; a boot raised above a certain angle when considered against the angle of the leg it confronts: alter one or the other and the action may no longer be identified as a foul. Fouls are lines being crossed, but those lines shift.
One of the lines upon which certain sports such as football depend is the line between the predictable and the highly unlikely. The case of the Henry handball is ripe for discussion in this context. That there was an opportunity for a double handball was in itself an instance of rarity; that it went unnoticed even more rare.The match commentators, especially the radio commentators on BBC 5 Live, were acutely aware than this event would generate enormous debate; they knew a line had been crossed. That the line crossed was the one which separated fairness from cheating is one thing - but this is of course a line that no longer applies in modern sport - but quite another threshold was traversed marking the area between probability and the improbable.
In football occasions where players inform the referee that they have not been fouled by an opponent despite the official’s decision – Arsenal’s Andrei Arshavin and Ivan Egrich of the Turkish team Bursaspor (the subject of a tribute in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy) are two recent examples – are rare. The dictates of professionalism nullify any residues of the so-called Corinthian spirit. On the other side there is a more or less universally-observed example of players self-regulating in the interests of a putative fair-play: the common practice of kicking the ball out of play to permit an injured player to be tended to and then giving the ball back to the opposition from the throw-in won. A custom has built up in football for which there is no presiding legislation: the convention is that the ball is given back to the team which kicked into touch to enable the treatment. If a player or team does not play ball they are castigated.
When Henry handled the ball back into play and flicked it with his foot on to the head of William Gallas he induced a singular variation which is the mark of a star player’s style (cf. Massumi 77). It is a mark of such style to produce the unprepared for - Zidane's audacious high-risk penalty kick in the World Cup final against Italy in 2006 said, in one breath, I am transcendent, while his head-butt declared, in an inversion of the Christian narrative of resurrection, a commitment to terrestrial concerns.
In the same match, in what he knew would be his final appearance as footballer, on the biggest stage, Zidane pushed the limits of football in contrasting ways as far as outcomes were concerned faced with rules, but both actions belong to the same immanent field of style.
It is noteworthy that in all the furore surrounding the blatant ‘variation’ Gallas seems to have emerged blameless while Henry is derided as a cheat (even if praised for his 'bravery' by some Irish players in speaking publicly of his embarrassment). Yet Gallas could have stopped and not finished the move by heading the ball into the net. He after all had seen the double handball in close up, even if at full speed - an awareness of which emerges in Henry’s comments after Fifa rejected the Irish FA’s appeal for a replay, where he argues that television replay and slow-motion replay in particular (perhaps we should add, more crucially YouTube, which multiplies viewership and replayability) enable the exaggeration of his intention and distend the time-frame in which, he insists, he was merely intuitively operating. Henry was part of a team dedicated to winning by any means they could within the regulatory framework provided by Fifa and in football this means pushing the laws to their limit. In football every tackle is an exercise in awareness and a manipulation of boundaries and limits. Every piece of ball control is a deployment of the player’s body and mind to extract or prolong the advantage potentially already at work in the ball as it arrives. In Massumi’s account it is this play of potential in a field-condition which makes the ball take on a particular function: “Like the goal and the ground, the ball as a substantial term doubles the subject of the play, which itself is invisible and nonsubstantial, the catalysis-point of a force-field, a charge-point of potential" (73). At each moment the ball ‘stands’, the players likewise, in their formation, in their reformulation, in their dispersal and coalescence, all arrayed as potential. For a rare moment in the France-Ireland World Cup qualifying play-off the ball seemed to stop and fix to Henry, right on the end-line, with his palm perpendicular to the turf; with a palm which became a fence; with a palm which became a manifest boundary and blocked the exit of the ball from the grid, simultaneously blocking the exit of France from the competition. In so doing, however, he merely draws attention to the underlying condition of all play. The ball, Massumi argues, has a certain autonomy: it depends upon the continuum of potential which it doubles, and is nothing without this continuum; yet through the doubling it asserts itself as what he calls a “part-subject”:
The part-subject catalyses the play as a whole but is not itself a whole. It attracts and arrays the players, defining their effective role in the game and defining the overall state of the game, at any given moment, by the potential movement of the players with respect to it. The ball moves the players. The player is the object of the ball. (73)
This underlying condition of all play is brought into particular focus in the case of the arguments football has over ‘intention’. The recent high-profile case of the Arsenal player Eduardo who was accused of simulation (Fifa became good Baudrillardians some time ago), and had a case brought against him, was exonerated of any wrong-doing – of cheating. 
It will be interesting to see if Henry is hauled before a disciplinary committee to answer a similar charge. It is highly unlikely, because convention does not view an intentional handball with the same disapproval as it does simulation in order to influence a penalty kick decision. However, it is the force of variation in the Henry case which makes it one which seems destined to occasion Massumi’s usurpation (since I wrote this Michel Platini has backed plans to fast-track the use of 5 officials at the World Cup). No matter that the combination of events is so singular, the twist which he brought to bear on the operation of the field-condition, the play with the limits on several levels – on the end line, with the rules - prompted the instant predictions of Mark Lawrenson et al that we would never hear the end of this narrative.
Henry, like all players relates to other players, not empirically as discrete terms, but rather, as Massumi explains, in his and their “collective becoming”. This emergence, which is a “modulation of potential”, is captured by regulatory post-emergence appraisal, in concrete terms when the play is stopped for the referee’s assessment. The modulation introduced by Henry, involving a first disguised but intended handball, followed by a second blatant unmasked repetition, with the difference of its heightened and brash visibility, however, was a provocation too far. It will induce some form of usurpation by Fifa of this Henry variation. The adjudicators of this farrago failed to perceive any of the boundaries upon which the refereeing of a football game depends. A referee in a Sunday League veterans game, operating solo without the aid of a single further official, would have whistled for at least one of the four (arguably) infringements. S/He would not have missed the offside and the first handball and the second and the fact that the ball had crossed the end-line (admittedly the last is a fabrication clung to in my repeated lo-def YouTube viewings minutes after the final whistle). At the very least s/he would have seen the opportunity for a delay to consider the options, capitalising on the fact that everyone could see something untoward had occurred. S/He could have waved the players away and consulted the assistant referee. Between them they could have agreed on one infringement to identify as the reason for the refereeing decision. That the ball had gone out of play being the most obvious, even if fictitious. The simplest of lines, the simplest and most straightforward of the ways of crossing lines that football identifies as a reason for a stoppage in play, could have been invoked. The line however which modern television coverage has enabled cameras to cross - the line between mass visibility and hyper-visibility (itself in some ways the theme of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parenno’s film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait) - deprives the officials of this recourse; they themselves are under scrutiny as never before. In the absence of the cameras a consultation would have taken place. But this is football not as a sport but as a spectacle with a potential 1 billion pound pay-off for
The case will prove that human eyes and judgement alone without visual prosthesis cannot effectively sustain the capture required of the events on the field. In the end neo-liberalism will have the ultimate say in this matter. It was already at work in Fifa’s ex post facto decision unjustly to introduce seeding to make it more likely that desired elite teams (France, 
As a player he must exploit such fault-lines. Fifa just had not yet had reason to consider the miniscule opening for enormous potential in the play of part-object (le main de dieu) and part-subject (ball) at a limit whose play the governing body simply could not see, except now, when it is too late. Its argument, if it read Massumi, would be ‘football wins’, but ex post facto, which will of course offer little in the way of consolation to Trapattoni’s green armyTM.
Reference
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (
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