Even A Little Khvicha Kvaratskhelia Goes A Long Way

As fans in America, it's important to remain grateful for the ease with which we can indulge a truly gluttonous appetite for elite soccer, our consumption unshackled from the regional restrictions, splintered broadcast rights, and timezone issues that make it much more difficult for everyone else to watch as much of the best teams and leagues as we can. That being said, I do regret the fact that it's recently become a lot harder to keep up with the international game stateside.

For a couple years now I've spent most midseason international breaks spotting tasty UEFA Nations League matchups and CONMEBOL World Cup Qualifiers on the schedule, only to learn that watching them would require expanding my already bloated streaming service subscriptions to divorce-threatening levels. I'm about as motivated a soccer fan as there is, and yet even I refuse to stump up for the Fubos and Vixes and Fox Soccer Pluses of the world, especially when you can't even rely on those services to air every match in the competitions they have the rights to. It's gotten to the point where I've now all but given up even thinking about catching non-tournament national team games.

But where there's a will, there's a way, and social media's enterprising amateur videographers have presented us benighted Americans a way to enjoy at least a semblance of what we're missing from all those paywalled international matches. I'm speaking, of course, about the noble compilation makers, who bless Twitter and Youtube with marvelous, often ephemeral reels of the best actions from a match's standout player.

During any given day of an international break, after checking the schedule and confirming that I can't watch any of the cool teams or players I'd like to, I then wait until the matches are over, when I start to go through the score lines. If in my perusal of the stats I see that one player had an especially big day, I then go searching for one of those individual comp videos to get a taste of what that performance actually looked like. As it often does, this process led me to Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, who last weekend had a typically explosive outing for Georgia in a 1-1 draw against Ukraine.

Individual highlight reels are by nature extremely narrow in scope, and they don't give a very good sense of how a match itself played out. But for some players, the form is great at capturing something of their essence, the electricity that accompanies their every touch of the ball. Kvara is one such player, and the compilation of his best moments in the Ukraine game is a two-minute, non-stop cascade of sparks and jolts and light.

To my taste, Kvaratskhelia is one of the very coolest players in all of soccer. He is first and foremost a dribbler, which by itself places him in the most fun category of players. And, boy, was he dribbling those Ukrainians. The stats give him six successful dribbles out of nine attempts, though of course you have to actually see some of them to really understand what makes a Kvara dribble and why each one is so special.

Kvara is a big guy, with long legs and a powerful stride that's difficult to keep up with when he opens them up. But, to me, his most impressive dribbles are the ones he pulls off below top speed, shifting up and down the lower gears with lurches and pauses and little stutters and abrupt changes of direction, handling his body the way a street racer would a souped-up Civic while weaving in between traffic to flee the cops. My favorite style of dribbling is the kind that could be described as a dance of deception, more about feints and delicate touches and lying hips than high-end speed, a style often associated with South America. There's not a moment in Kvara's Ukraine comp where he wows you with how fast he's moving, but the entire time you're amazed by how much faster he's thinking and reacting than his opponents.

The climactic moment of the compilation starts at the 1:18 mark. Kvaratskhelia welcomes a pass into his feet, feels the pressure from two Ukrainians collapsing onto him as the ball arrives, and makes the instantaneous decision to pirouette past them with a roulette spin that takes him into open space down the left flank, where he then cuts back a pinpoint pass to the penalty spot, where a teammate shoots it straight into the night sky. It's a remarkable play, to be sure, attesting to his command of the ball, the genuine creativity of his thinking, the seemingly effortless exercise of his skill of deception, and the balletic appearance of his body in motion. It's not for nothing that Kvara's exploits resemble a dancer's, and call to mind the dribbling style synonymous with South America, given that Georgian soccer has always been associated with dancing, with invention, with beauty, and likened to the South Americans. Little historical rhymes like that—how Georgians were long considered the Brazilians of the Soviet Union, and how Kvaratskhelia proves that tradition's endurance—are so much of what I find fascinating about this sport's irreducibly global nature, and nowhere is that more fully expressed in the international game.

But if I had to pick a single sequence out of the Kvara compilation as the most indicative of what I miss about not being able to watch as many international matches as I'd prefer, it'd be the one that comes after his roulette. In it, collecting the ball where the halfway line intersects the left-wing touchline, Kvaratskhelia sizes up his marker. He makes to lunge down the touchline, but then stops, the defender's corresponding lunge to meet the run that never comes opening up more space for the Georgian to maneuver. He lunges and stops a couple more times, this time to lure the defender closer for a potentially killer dribble, but ultimately passes the ball backwards instead. Kvara's teammate passes the ball over to a nearby midfielder, while Kvara's marker jogs back down the pitch, the danger seemingly cleared.

Unsatisfied with the state of the play, Kvara then trots directly into the path of his teammate in possession, an act that is in effect Kvara stealing the ball off said teammate. The teammate obliges and boots a little one-yard pass to the imperious Kvaratskhelia. Back on the ball and without any obvious options, Kvara just sort of ambles into the center circle, turns around when a defender cuts off his path, and looks back up-field. After idly kneading the ball for about 10 seconds all on his own, he finally spots an interesting thing to do with it and plays a line-breaking pass behind Ukraine's midfield to a teammate who'd drifted into the gap.

The eventual pass is a useful one, but the overall sequence is hardly awe-inspiring. But I like how it shows how much of a fiefdom the Georgia national team is for Kvara, a place where his position of prominence is entirely unquestioned, where he is free to do exactly what he wants at all times. I like how it shows how expansive Kvara's control can grow amidst that freedom, as he refuses to make the safe, obvious, systematized play in favor instead of holding the ball, thinking, searching, and only releasing it when he's decided the resulting action is actually worth something. I like how the international game is less regimented than the club game, and I like how it's where a country's best talents can exhibit themselves in their most unbounded forms, and I like what it looks like Kvaratskhelia's talent is so unbounded. I wish I could watch more of it, of him, and of other non–North American players in similar conditions, but settling for a Kvara highlight reel is pretty damn good still.