Thank you for visiting TheHollywoodPass.com. This is a site dedicated to feature and long-form writing on Football. The Hollywood Pass will focus on football primarily from the English Premier League, the Spanish La Liga, the Italian Serie A and the UEFA Champions League. From time to time, we will also write on football from the Europa League, the French Ligue 1, the German Bundesliga as well as on international football.
Following in the footsteps of great sportswriters like David Halberstam and Peter Roebuck, and writers like Mitch Albom and JR Moehringer, articles published on this site will aim to tell stories in an engaging but simple and no-nonsense manner. That reminds me: what exactly is The Hollywood Pass?
WHAT DOES THE HOLLYWOOD PASS MEAN?
The Hollywood Pass is what most of us — amateurs who play for recreation as well as professionals who play the game day in, day out — aspire for while playing football: the sharp, piercing pass that cuts through opposition lines likes a surgeon’s scalpel and finds a teammate who now has acres of space to run into. It is also called a ‘Through Ball’ and ‘Killer Pass’ among others. More often than not, such passes fail to find the intended target. This is usually because the intended target is not where he should be to collect the pass. There is no shame in this. Hollywood passes are usually played by a team’s most gifted player — someone like Andrea Pirlo, Kevin De Bruyne or Luka Modric. These players routinely conceive of moves 2 or 3 steps ahead of everyone else on the pitch. But it doesn’t really matter if their pass finds its intended target. Because sometimes, all you need to see is the sheer pluck of the move that was attempted. This site is a tribute to that ability of football to astonish us with ingenuity and genius.
Below is a compilation of perhaps the greatest purveyor of the Hollywood Pass there has ever been:
He never won the Ballon d’Or but Michael Laudrup was a player of such blinding genius that he will never be forgotten, and perhaps never emulated. If you’re skeptical, notice in the video above how many times Laudrup plays a pass that dissects the defence in half or lifts the ball over the defenders’ heads and lands it near the feet of the striker. All that Laudrup’s colleagues needed to do was to run at the goalkeeper and beat him. They usually did. Bulgarian great Hristo Stoichkov, who played with Laudrup at Barcelona in the 1990s and who formed an unforgettable striking duo with Romario at the Catalan club, once said: “From more than hundred goals that I scored I’m sure that over 50 were assisted by Michael (Laudrup). To play with him was extremely easy. (We got) passes on the foot after you accelerated….Few people understand football like Michael.”
Michael Laudrup understood football. This website is an attempt at looking at the game closely and looking for the human tales behind everyday headlines, be it the fascinating personalities involved, the tactics and man-management employed, or what history teaches us about how critical moments have been traversed. Welcome aboard. We hope you enjoy your stay.