YES, IT'S ANOTHER FALL REFERENCE. I know. Look, I know! I mean, what about it? What abloodybout it, hmm? Two years ago, I never got to use the headline I'd lovingly prepared for after the Euro 2008 final: "They'll be soliciting perverts in the streets of St. Pauli tonight!". So I'm having my fun this time. It's either this or "They'll be abusing animals horribly in the streets of Pamplona tonight!". Which would be insincere anyway, because I'm not that fussed about that sort of thing. If God hadn't meant for us to stick a spike through a bull, he wouldn't have made it get angry by some fella waving a cape in his face, would he?
The keen-eared Fall fan may notice that the above performance is the one that ended up on the Perverted by Language LP. There you are, now.
And to prove there's a Fall song for every occasion, here's one about England's elimination:
Back in that innocent age we called "June", when it looked like every group in the first round of the World Cup (the first round? Remember?) might end up in one of your actual lotteries, we pondered on the last time that happened: to wit, when Ireland and Holland finished joint second in Group F of the 1990 edition. More precisely, we wondered whether we were imagining things when we thought that said lottery had been televised. We were, after all, quite young, and were probably outside playing football at the time.
But the Après Match team were way ahead of us, and they dug out the footage at the beginning of the tournament as they gathered their showbiz pals to make one last plaintive plea for Ireland's rightful place in South Africa.
Take, if you will, Hungary's Golden Team. The story may be familiar to you: a near-perfect marriage of radical tactics with great players (Puskás, Hidegkuti, Kocsis, Bozsik, Czibor...), producing a new, adventurous style which was seemingly irresistible; an Olympic gold medal, won with five straight wins by an aggregate score of 20-2; a tying-up of the loose ends of the Dr. Gerö Cup; the Wembley 6-3, with the "people from outer space" and the "fire engine heading to the wrong fire" and the "utter helplessness"; the 7-1 return in the Népstadion; the four-year, 28-game unbeaten run (if we don't count a loss to a Moscow representative selection. And we don't, apparently) the team took into the 1954 World Cup, and not just any unbeaten run, but one in which they truly trounced opponents; the breeze through the group stage (two games, seventeen goals); the Battle of Berne; the thrilling victory over champions Uruguay in the semi-final; the final against a West Germany team they had beaten 8-3 (a real 1954 score, that) earlier in the tournament; the two early goals that would surely see them on their way to fulfilling their destiny as the greatest ever football team; Germany's quick replies to level the affair; a third German goal with five minutes to go...
...and then Puskás is put through on goal, with a chance to salvage this, the game of games. He slides the ball under the goalkeeper Turek and into the net. He gets to his feet, is embraced by his team-mates, turns around and sees that it is, in the words of Cris Freddi in his Complete Book of the World Cup:
Offside. For ever.
Johan Cruijff, one of another bunch of beautiful losers, and the only man cool enough to lead wearing fewer stripes on his sleeve than his men, once said:
There is no medal better than being acclaimed for your style.
To which one may reply: well he would, wouldn't he? (Or, this being our Hendrik: he says a lot of things, doesn't he?) Which is fair enough. But there is too a poignancy to his words. It resides not just in the (not entirely unreasonable) effort to rewrite the terms in the wake of scoring fewer goals than Holland's West German opponents did in 1974, but also in the way that, in an attempt at self-justification, he unwittingly points in the direction of what we scienticians call a Law: the World Cup is not about winning, but about losing. Or, more exactly, about losing and not losing. Which is not the same as it being about losing and winning.
Bear with me.
The World Cup, or any similar competition, whittles the participants away until one remains. It is an arrow, and without a winner, it is pointless. That one should remain matters immensely; the ones remaining become indelibly marked on the collective consciousness. After all, it's the winners of the 1970 edition who have become football's horizon. And it's the 1954 West Germany team who have had a feel-good movie made about them, whereas the development of the musical Aranycsapat! has presumably been held up as the producers try to fashion a jolly singalong ending out of the team being forced to hide out in a small regional town upon their homecoming so as to avoid the angry mob in Budapest ("It's Tata, Tata for now!"). I've not seen Das Wunder von Bern, but even watching the trailer makes me feel fidgety. Of course it should focus on Germany: it's a German film, and the story of the "Miracle" is easily compelling enough, on several levels, to warrant being reduced to cinematic treatment. But for me, to look at the match like that would be gnawingly incomplete without the gnawing incompleteness of the Hungary story.
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203 teams entered the World Cup. Were this post instead an item on a Transworld Sport-type programme (such as, for instance, Transworld Sport) reporting from the South Pacific Games group match/Oceania World Cup qualifier between Fiji and Tuvalu in the Toleafoa JS Blatter Complex in Apia, Samoa in August 2007, this would be the point where we ponder that, no doubt, these players are dreaming of taking to the field in South Africa, and maybe — just maybe — holding aloft that gold-plated replica of a ruptured, upside-down semi-scrotum that people still sometimes call the Jules Rimet Trophy for some reason. These dreams are dreamt, naturally, but in full awareness that they are dreams. Every team may begin with the notion — however fanciful — that this may be their year, but most know the real score. At a conservative estimate, two-thirds of the teams who begin World Cup qualification do so knowing that they will not qualify; occasionally, one of this number will leak into the final thirty-two. Even then, few of the finalists will truly believe that they can win it all, let alone aim for it. Only seven countries have ever won the World Cup. More to the point, only one can win it at a time. We are led inexorably down the path towards coronation, whose climactic nature is, like any good ceremony, powerful enough to make us buy into its magical properties and essential gods-bothering purpose. As we should. But the World Cup would be unbearable if that was all there was to it.
If a football match is, in part, a metaphor for a battle, then defeat is a metaphor for dying, and victory is a metaphor for ... not dying. I trust that at some stage of your existence hitherto, you have discovered that you are one day going to join the majority. (If not, it's time to have a word with your folks as to the precise nature of this "puppy circus" they told you Snuggles had run off to join.) We are the only animal equipped with this awareness, and it bothers us. We are programmed to fight our own mortality — by, say, making babies, or taking pictures of each other. It's a form of madness: a madness that makes us human. But we cheat death in an altogether more basic way: we stay alive. The universe will kill us if we stand still. It wants us to sate its entropic appetite; it wants us to fulfill our fate and return to the chaos whence we came. We inevitably will, of course — that's what fate means. All organisms may possess a mechanism for self-preservation, but our foreknowledge gives our fear of death a unique profundity. Merely to hold our destiny off for another day, to postpone it until some indefinite point after now, is a triumph and a matter for celebration. If this appears meagre to you; if it appears doleful; defeatist, even ... well, you lead an existence either most lucky or most unlucky.
Any sporting contest, especially a competition which gradually pares down its number of participants, simulates this spirit; it ritualises it. The end of the journey is always a step away; annihilation is forever on call. To see each successive phase of a tournament as a step towards its ultimate resolution would not be to miss the point, exactly, but it would be to give it a glancing blow at best. Each stage is more than just an increment. Such is the sense of foreboding in the face of elimination, and such is the prospect of the deep joy of avoiding it, that a match becomes a universe within a universe. It takes on a meaning that, without detaching itself from the "championship" element of the tournament, is self-contained and keener than keen. Thoughts of the sweet hereafter are of limited use. There may be no future after the final whistle. For all you know, this is all you've got. A competition is a series of survivals and demises.
I say "a competition", but the World Cup embodies this most of all. A unique admixture of circumstances makes it uniquely grand, uniquely mad: its globalness; its co-option of the peculiar neurosis of the national football team; its three-year duration and quadrennial period, epic spans in sporting terms (the Henry-triggered meltdown in Ireland was ludicrous in its extent, but it can be partly explained by the fact that 2014 may as well have been 3014 at that point); and so forth. Above all, it is so through the force of an extraordinary consensus; it is so because we (or as great a "we" as can be reasonably imagined) have willed it to be so. The desperate, magnificent vitality intrinsic to sport is lit up by this extrinsic investment. It is heightened beyond a point where it is simply "sport, only more so"; it is alchemically converted into something other.
The ennui that prevailed in the first week of this World Cup was understandable. It was hardly the most exciting of beginnings, even when only compared to its 2006 counterpart. When we watch games ... well, we want them to be good, and the cumulative effect of so many not-so-good matches in a three-a-day schedule can be wearing. What were less understandable, however, were the glum pronouncements on the quality of the tournament — indeed, on the state of football itself — based simply on the evidence of these matches. The unearned definitiveness of this mopetastic palaver was puzzling, for one assumes that at least some of those so quick to judge had at least some previous World Cup-watching experience. Feverish anticipation can be the enemy of patience, but this was silly. A World Cup is never defined by its first week. This is in part because of a kind of recency illusion: the last few games are more memorable because they happened last. Moreover, it is because the full Worldcupness of the World Cup exists only as potential in the opening batch of games. It begins to coalesce only in the second round of group games, when those teams who started badly are starkly confronted with the consequences. It becomes more real with the final group games: dead rubbers aside, these are decisive (although some teams go into them with a head start). It becomes urgent and inescapable from the first knockout round.
And it is in the light of the very Worldcupness of the thing that it must be seen. Of the five World Cups I have seen prior to this one, none has approached the 2000 or 2008 European Championships for concentrated excellence. (It may be that it's not even possible with a 24- or 32-team competition; in which case, savour Euro 2012 before the mediocrities are granted squatters' rights for France '16.) Yet for all that (and it's a pretty substantial "all that" to be getting on with), neither of those tournaments approached any of those World Cups for depth of meaning and feeling, because the European Championships lack the particular insanity of the World Cup. This insanity is the riptide that sweeps everything and everyone along with it. The meaning of a moment in football cannot be fully discerned by pickling it and examining it later; it always depends on context. In a World Cup, you can't move for context. Every act is performed from Dionysius' chair. This is why the third-place playoff is reduced to being a thank-you gig for the home fans, or a present to the mid-level team for not getting too far above their station. No matter how good a game it may be, it's still just a chummy natter between two benign ghosts — ie. the boring-as-shite kind. It could be the greatest aesthetic feast, but it would still be pallid next to the dourest last-sixteen encounter.
Paraguay-Japan wasn't quite that, but it was almost indigestible for the neutral. Nevertheless, the Worldcupness was still there, still very much there, in a place inaccessible to the dubious feed-me squeaks of a billion hungry chicks. It took Eamonn Dunphy, of all people, to draw the attention of viewers in one country to the parallels between the match and a certain Monday afternoon in Genoa twenty years ago, which happened to be the greatest day in that country's soccer history and, in its way, one of the greatest days in the modern history of the country itself.
It was also a prime example of the capricious nature, as we might see it, of the World Cup. That Nike ad (I can't believe it is Focus!) rang hollow not just because of its FIFA intro-movie stylings and its apparent belief that Homer is still funny (it pains me to say it, but can't someone slip him a Dignitas email address?). It falls flat in its inference that the future would necessarily be written by those players under contractual obligation to them, or at least by those of a similar, if (grumble grumble) non-swoosherrific, stature. If everything is magnified by the World Cup, it is this that gets magnified the most. In our minds, our hopes and forecasts are a kind of Platonic form. The World Cup reveals them to be subjective wishfulness. No, worse than that: it reveals them to be bunkum. This is not "Nike curse"-induced, 20-20 hindsight. This is reality, as borne out time and again. The failure of Hungary in 1954 is the perfect World Cup story. The result was "wrong", though it was so close to being "right" — to elevating the Golden Team to a state of perfection. It was so close to being "right" that the juxtaposition between the ideal (something seemingly tangible, yet still hypothetical) and the actuality (where the current has dragged us to this point and no further) was demonstrated in the starkest manner. It brought up the tyranny of the irreversible moment like a new scar: time's arrow and what have you. The story attained a perfection in its exquisite imperfection. It was the very essence of the drama that is the life force of the World Cup, the very essence of the Worldcupness that informs every knockout game. Perhaps this was the Platonic form of the World Cup, after all.
Not to belittle West Germany's, or anyone else's, success by focusing on failure. If defeat is a metaphor for death, then a championship is a metaphor for immortality. A metaphor, mind: no matter how many times the word gets repeated, it doesn't make it literal. Neither do I think we mean it in the sense of belonging as firmly in the psyches of those future generations, as they tend to their wounds after the sandbag riot, as it does in ours. Are we quite sure that they will buy into the magic of the thing as much as we do, that it will matter more to them than, say, the standing high jump at the 1906 intercalated Olympic Games does? (Ray Ewry ftw, btw.) It's immortality on a scale we can comprehend: immortality that's artificially induced, that refers to the history we have chosen to buy into, that will be immortal for as long as we (as individuals) are. It more than suffices.
But even then, there are limits to this immortality, if that's not too paradoxical. A portion of it is reserved as a tithe to the continuation of this rite. Because it will begin again, and the glory will become a burden, an anxiety. It will become something to be defended — something, maybe, to be lost. Sunrise, sunset. Cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon. Yes, we have no bananas. And so forth. Forever.
Firstly: WORLD CUP! Get, mar a deir na Sasanaigh, in!
I can't deny a hint of sadness, though. I may have basically gotten over certain events (y'know, like a grown-up), but even though Ireland never quite managed to get a lead in that tie, it was close — not last-minute-equaliser-by-Macedonia close, but easily close enough to prompt reveries quickly rendered insolent by reality. Watching your national team walk out for their opening game in a World Cup is one of the most special feelings a sports fan can have: a unique mixture of joy, pride, trepidation, pessimism, optimism, giddiness. To see South Africa and Mexico line up before their game was to experience this by proxy, diluted. I figured that by the time the anthems before France-Uruguay had been sung, I'd be wrapped up in a duvet penning self-pitying blank verse in red ink.
But, in truth, once the actual football began, the weirdness sidled off to make way for the WORLD CUP! This shouldn't have been surprising: it's not like we're short on practise when it comes to watching a major tournament without Ireland's participation. But more than that — and I don't know if this is universal — though Ireland's World Cup successes remain so vivid and, dare I say, important to me, I have always been able to perceive a tournament as a whole separately from the vagaries of my team's performance. My love of the game partly arose out of Ireland's qualification tournament for Italia '90 and the subsequent good times, but also out of moments such as my first finals game (an upset, a brutal and hilarious red card, and the San Siro — what's not to love?).
I suppose what I'm trying to say is — WORLD CUP!
And it's the very Worldcupness of it all coupled with my immense maturity, my oh-so-mature maturity, that allows me to see the France team as they really are. I don't wish to make sweeping judgements based on one day's play, but France are quite possibly the most interesting team in the tournament. They drip with interesting. They are the very concept of interesting in human form.
You will be told that the game was dull, turgid, abject, nothing to text home about. You will be told wrongly. This may not be a team that "practically have the best players in the world at every position", as Patrice Evra claimed (listen here, Podge, no-one plays the Bendtner Role like Bendtner), but they do possess the ability that ought to make them one of the favourites. That such talent flounders so is grim and thrilling. One's inner aesthete may be pining for some good play, but this is almost as beguiling. One doesn't connect with it partially, but not strictly impartially either: it's the fascination of a natural phenomenon. The pleasure one takes from this is not schadenfreude: it's the beauty of decay. It's like witnessing a fruit rotting in time-lapse. Any guilt one may feel about it is soothed by remembering that France's woes, such as they are, are self-inflicted. If they can't pull together, if they can't rein in their madness so that it at least becomes good madness, then they become a specimen in a cage, a group of Big Brother contestants.
However, this would be hollow if it weren't for the suspicion that change is forever lurking. The talent is still there, and against Uruguay there were glimpses of the good it could be used for. Many's the team whose qualification was squeaky or whose finals began dodgily yet who reached the heights of there or thereabouts (eg. France, 2006). Were things to fall right, or were, Raymond, the constellations to blah blah blah, received wisdom could, shock horror, be turned upside-down. A long stay in South Africa would be tremendous fun: for the quality of football that would probably ensue; for the continuation of the unhingedness; for the possibility that the big fuck-up will merely have been postponed, not cancelled.
For that possibility is always there. And its effect is enhanced by the peeks at greatness that France reflexly grant us. Really, it's as conceivable that they could match World Champions 1998 France as it is that could match goalless 2002 France. Either way, this is spectacular.
it takes an absolute genius to make so many talented players play this badly together
The last word goes to me. At a team meeting on Thursday, Florent Malouda and Raymond Domenech, shall we say, vigorously disagreed with one another on some matter. Who was the player who had to restrain Malouda?
Out of Their Hands ― Title of RTE television's review of Ireland's World Cup qualifying tournament
A thing happened in Paris last November. It upset Irish people. You may remember.
There had been national splutterfests before. When it was suggested that Michelle Smith may not have stumbled upon her remarkable pre-Atlanta Olympics improvement simply by means of the coaching skills of her coincidentally banned-from-discus-throwing-for-taking-drugsdrugsdrugs husband, we formed a four-million-strong human shield to protect our innocent golden girl and her four medals from the jealous rantings of jealous loser jealous weepy jealous American jealous swimmers. (Two years and one whiskey-and-androstenedione test sample which shockingly contained traces of urine later, we said "Michelle who? Oh, you mean Michelle de Bruin".) Other times, the anger has been directed inwards: brother against brother, friend against friend, random drunken stranger against random drunken stranger. The Keane/McCarthy showdown in 2002 made similar civil wars — such as the Civil War — seem like little more than brutal conflicts whose effects on the very fabric of society could still be felt decades later. (See also: abortion, divorce, the EU, that kind of crap.)
This, however, was dynamically different. This time, we were indisputably in the right. This time, we weren't tearing each other apart or fighting from the back foot. We were on the attack. We had God on our side. This rage was a Rubicon moment for Ireland. No previous tournament elimination for the national team had provoked such a response. Your correspondent's stance on the import of this phenomenon to our land of rampant tea addiction and basically underwhelming weather patterns was ambivalent. One the one hand, it seemed a shame for us to surrender our exceptionalism on this matter: this type of thing happened in other countries. It happened in Spain in 2002; it happened in Italy in 2002, and they made up for their continuing absence from the Eurovision Song Contest by calling Scandoconspiracy in 2004 (that Giovanni Trapattoni was Italy's manager in both competitions is coincidental, though since Paris he has, more than once, invoked the name of a certain Sr. Moreno); the end of every tournament for England prompts an intoxicating mixture of neurotic introspection as people try to figure out why the fact that the game was invented there does not translate into trophies a century and a half later, and the identification of an enemy from without or within, an effigy of whom will be chucked on the giant bonfire on Guy Fawkes' Night in that nutcase village. When we get knocked out, it's a cause to head to the Phoenix Park and watch Duffer sheepishly try to address the cheery throng. Of course, it's silly to believe that we should be immune to these forces, but then everyone likes to think their pile of dirt is in some way special (let me tell you, you won't find a better hare duodenum and mango curd tartlet anywhere) and it's somewhat sad to see our no-claims bonus disappear.
On the other hand, here was a chance to experience this wonder in its raw, bloody state. I'd never driven into a tornado before.
Your wind joke here.
The immediate aftermath — the howling, the keening, the Facebook petitions, the march on the French embassy (there was a march on the French embassy!), the editorial promising revenge in the forthcoming France-Ireland Six Nations match (ie. a game in a different sport involving an entirely different set of players), the Minister for Justice of an actual nation state blathering on about injustice in a football match (maybe he thinks the Hand of God is blasphemous), the FAI's absurd quest for a replay or for a place as the 33rd team at the World Cup or for some other sacrificial offering (which wasn't even quixotic because Quixote believed in what he was doing and wasn't just a béal bocht chancer who got lost on his way to the county hall) — has been well documented. The really fabulous part of all this is how rapidly the episode has become fastened within the mythology of Irish football. And not just of Irish football either, but of the society as a whole, which is a testament to the rapid transformation of the national team from peripheral Ban-suppressed concern to (at least when success is a real prospect) key component of our self-identity, just like in those exotic lands of skilfulness and cups we'd seen on the telly. The intensity of feeling has, naturally, diminished since the heady initial rush, but the substance of the feeling has not. Our suffering and righteousness has solidified into scripture with nary a trace of wastage. The still image from that behind-the-goal-line TV camera of the diabolic moment has been reprinted so frequently, it's in danger of becoming our Zapruder film.
(If you're planning on having a drink for every superfluous mention of Thierry Henry during the World Cup, can I borrow a tenner?)
Even when the flame burns at this lower level, it requires a fierce amount of energy to maintain. Only so much of this energy can be supplied from within when it concerns such a small country as our own. Some countries are big enough and loud enough to sustain themselves with ire, but we needed outside validation. This wasn't hard to come by given the stature of the team's opponents and the offender in question; rarely is anything involving Ireland afforded so much international coverage. Luckily, if that's the word, Irish football is a satellite of English football, and English football's primary chroniclers are the artists formerly known as Fleet Street and their broadcast pals, who tackled the incident with customary brio. And why wouldn't they? It involved so many elements of their staple diet: Thierry Henry, one of Britain's foremost car salesmen of the last decade; a conspiracy theory; a Scandinavian ref (an exciting recent development in English football theatre); The French; Sepp Blatter (even though it didn't really involve Blatter at all); Michel Platini (who is triply evil: French, allied to Blatter, and the man English sportswriters warn their kids will snatch them away if they don't eat their dinner); heresy against the god Technology; the chance to remind us that they are the guardians of our moral purity; the chance to side with plucky underdogs Eire (sic); the chance to break out the Eau de Humanity reserved for the most special of occasions.
The handball, the referee's call and the subsequent (correct) refusal of FIFA to alter the result became co-opted into the peculiar strain of Eurosceptic paranoia that still exists in England, as surely in the sports pages as elsewhere. This paranoia is shared only residually here, but that was none of our concern: we were right, and we had the second opinion to confirm it.
The will needed to keep this death cult going is impressive. It entails a substantial feat of selective memory to turn justifiable grievance into an anger fetish. It entails characterising an entire tie — an entire tournament — by its most memorable moment, when it's really an accumulation of details. It entails a cardinal's belief in his own purity. It entails marching under the flag of eternal justice and forgetting the misdemeanours on one's own side (Shay Given's uncalled foul on Nicolas Anelka was far sneakier than Henry's handball — after all, who's ever talked about it?). It entails a sudden belief that we existed in a prelapsarian paradise until the sin was committed. Approached like this, the anger becomes detached from the event that caused it; it exists for its own sake, for the sheer thrill of frivolous martyrdom and for the sake of the void that its removal would leave. One can never know for certain, but all evidence points towards an absence of retrospective embarrassment in the future. This isn't something that can be relinquished just like that. It's the difference (with all due apologies to Eavan Boland) between history and the past. It's history that we crave more instinctively.
Sport is a passionate pursuit, and passion is immoderate. The World Cup wouldn't be the World Cup if this weren't so. From the very start, its greatness has come from the fact that it really matters, or that is at least always has the potential to matter. Victory isn't mere victory: it's triumph, it's glory. Just as success is taken to heart, so is failure; and if failure can be seen to have a face, all the better to make sense of it (never mind how sensible that sense is). It's said that deep down, the real reason people watch motor racing is because they want to see a crash. Half the fun of watching a World Cup match comes from the knowledge that it carries in it the germ for this sort of thing. It's the wondering whose spirits will be uplifted and whose lacerated that makes it exciting.
Of course, creepiness is a form of excitement, and this vexation can be deeply, fantastically creepy. Observing it is like being in a horror movie where the entire population bar you has undergone a mass personality shift at precisely the same moment. It's not so much the first flush of insanity that was so weird: it's the way that unreason has become calcified, the way the words HENRY and BASTARD now run through our core like we were seaside rock. It's the outrage unsweetened by even a hint of irony or self-awareness; it's the suspicion that people really, really believe what they say about it. It's disquieting to see your people wish they had a giant wicker man handy.
I don't speak here from the moral high ground. I am far from immune. For instance, there is barely a team in the English league against whom I don't bear a grudge for some real or perceived slight against Arsenal. One day, I will have my revenge on QPR for that 1990 FA Cup fourth round replay defeat. My Twitter feed is a welt on the face of the internet when the Arse are playing, a frightful cauldron full of bile and irrational hatred. I pretty much cursed Hull fans for having the temerity to turn up and breathe the same air as Nicklas Bendtner. I have a stable of high horses at my disposal. No: my outsiderdom on The Handball doubtless arose, in part, from a synaptic malfunction at the moment of the fateful meeting of hand and football. The seed just so happened to not take root. This is my fate. I must traverse the fields and the glens, the bogs and the islands, the semi-pedestrianised main streets and the mile-long tailbacks caused by the banjaxed toll gate, tending to the unburied dead while shivering and muttering George Pringle lyrics to myself, and waiting for my compatriots to descend the staircase too early next Christmas morn and find out who really leaves the presents under the tree.
That said, it's funny when it happens to other people. So enjoy the World Cup, folks! I certainly will! I've been the uncreated conscience of my race! You've been wonderful! G'night!
This weekend, following yesterday's World Cup draw, you're going to see a ton of would-be insights from people who have seen, like, six of the teams play since the last tournament, using whatever lame prognosticatory capacities they possess.
75% identical in composition to Group D in the 1994 finals. Which makes South Korea this tournament's Bulgaria, Park Ji-Sung the Stoitchkov of the East and Lionel Messi a very naughty boy. (See? This prediction stuff is a cinch.)
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GROUP C (The Group of Meth)
England USA Algeria Slovenia
USA-England: a recently-diagnosed manic depressive versus a lifelong sufferer. The broadcast will end with "If you've been affected by any of the issues raised in this programme..."
Secondly: the Thierry Henry thing. I'm going to steer clear of the tabs for the next few days, while judiciously picking my way through the broadsheets and having my finger poised by my radio's volume dial. (Can you imagine what Liveline will be like if they start on this topic? Kill me. Kill me now.) There is going to be such a lot of hysterical nonsense emitted about Henry's deed. We are firmly within the English football sphere of influence, for good and ill. It'll still be a shame if we replicate the worst, unbecoming, Fleet-Streety aspects of that culture, Henry's handball taking its place alongside Cristiano Ronaldo's wink.
Of course, Ronaldo's wink was utterly irrelevant to Wayne Rooney's red card (not that the message has got through to everybody). Henry's handball counted. Sweet Jesus, did it ever. But here's the dealio, campers, something you should have figured out a long time ago: this type of shit happens a lot — a lot — in sport. Sport disguises itself as life honed and concentrated, as a palace of justice in Lego, all instant judgements and inevitable punishments. It dissembles its true nature: that it's just like the rest of the universe. As a matter of course, players will skirt the fringes of legality, and will sometimes cross the line: our guys, their guys, everydamnone's eyes. You just have to hope that the arbiters can do their best. What Henry did was wrong. But to pick on this one incident as being somehow especially contemptible is to be wilfully blind to all the sport you've ever seen. And if we're to demand Henry's head on a spike, shouldn't we have done the same for, say, Damien Duff for his dive against Spain in 2002? (That Ian Harte missed the subsequent penalty is irrelevant, of course.) Remember Alan McLoughlin's guilty look towards the linesman in Cagliari in 1990?
While we're at it, a request: can we leave Platini and Blatter out of this? Blatter is everyone's favourite punchbag, usually with due cause. Platini also deserves some of the criticism he gets, though he has preposterously been turned into a Napoleonic bogeyman for our time by many in English football. The seeding issue stank somewhat, but bear in mind that the refereeing in both legs was consistently excellent and fair. From neither performance could a sane mind deduce interference from on high. Any fears of homerism in the second leg were unfounded. I did feel that more could have been done to curb the excessive physicality of Gallas' and, especially, Squillaci's aerial challenges. But a ref bent on nudging the big team towards victory would have given Anelka a penalty. (Not that I'm saying the ref was wrong, but did anyone else spot Given's right hand making contact with Anelka's shin?)
The anger is understandable. That doesn't mean it's right.
(And to those who are shocked that their favouritest player could have stooped so low: are we to think that his soul was pure just because his game was so enchanting at Arsenal? Give me a break.)
What should keep us awake at night are the chances. I struggle to recall them all right now without recourse to video; trauma has mushed the immediate memory of this game into two hours of terror, mixed with optimistic dread and that unclassifiable feeling you get when the other lot score. But there were chances, that much I do remember, and if you don't take your chances, blah blah fucking blah. If we need an emblem for the defeat part of this defeat, let it be that.
Because the defeat was not just a defeat. If we'd let ourselves admit it more often, we'd realise that the brutal frankness of the scoreline is rarely all there is to sport. Take Giovanni Trapattoni. I hesitate to say that the nature of the defeat — and the fact that he got us this close at all — are a vindication of his management; not because I think he has failed, but because it asks the question from a false basis. Far too often, we go in for the adversarial system in sport, with the incumbent as perpetual defendant. More often than not, a straight guilty or not guilty verdict is unsatisfactory. Some of the coverage of Trap since his arrival has been odd to say the least. Denis Walsh of the Sunday Times — a fine writer, mind you — lamented the absence of romance in Ireland's style a couple of weekends ago. A writer for another Sunday paper, who shall remain anonymous on the principle that it is wrong to kick a man while he's stupid, has wailed on that baby for what seems like forever. One wonders whether they remember the history of this team. When has it ever been about even tipping a wink towards the, *cough*, beautiful game?
One wonders whether some even remember two years ago, how godawful things were in the freefalling Staunton era. Memories can be short in sport, but some of the criticism of Trapattoni has foolishly neglected to bear in mind his greatest achievement: giving the players their belief back. I reckon that some of this renewal has come from within the players themselves; despite the sniping aimed in their direction amid the rubble of Nicosia and Serravalle, they've always come across as a proud lot. But Trapattoni's role in this should not be downplayed. The methods by which he chose to do this may have displeased many, but how was this supposed to be easy? What the team needed was someone to take control, to systematically give them new life.
Systematic need not always mean boring. Sometimes, though, it, um, does; Ireland have been that at times. Some of this has been exaggerated in the retelling. One feels that had Trapattoni not come from Italy, he might have been cut more slack. Some have tried to classify Ireland's system as catenaccio, which is patently false. Indeed, Trap has consistently fielded four attacking players: not exactly the epitome of derring-do, but not the most negative of mindsets. However, there have been times, especially when defending a lead, that timorousness has overtaken the team, the midfield retreating glacially until they are almost duplicating the roles of the backline. This backfired away to Bulgaria (though what mainly backfired was the concept of Kevin Kilbane, left-full).
I myself have been sucked into believing in Trap's innate suffocating negativity. I imagined that Ireland would try to lock the first leg down to prevent the concession of the away goal. Yet Ireland went for it, in a way. They didn't go about things with reckless abandon, exactly, but not was it as negative a display as characterised. It was honest if unsuccessful toil for two-thirds of the game, fatigued chasing for the rest
In the main, Trap's ways have worked. Again, remember how recently it was that we were talking of the worst performances in the team's history. To get so close, so soon, is remarkable. Maybe if, say, Andy Reid were in the team, it would have made the difference. I have my doubts, though I can't disprove it. Thing is, you can't prove it, either. It's certainly not the cut-and-dried situation many believe it to be.
But then, what is? Not this match, not this sport. I don't want to go too far down the road of declaring moral victory. I don't quite believe in the sainthood of Roy Keane, but he was pretty much spot on in Amsterdam in 2000, declaring himself mightily unsatisfied. But the emotion one feels in the wake of last night is not neat despair. Another consequence of being a subset of English football is that while technique is not prized as it ought to be, fight is. In England, they are going through a difficult phase in which they try to reconcile themselves with the notion that most of the rest of the footballing world has different priorities (how this goes is one of the most fascinating issues in the sport today). The old gung-ho attitude is becoming gauche. But it should be remembered that it is not an inherently undesirable quality; in fact, it is enviable, and this need not be a philistine position to adopt. Would that Ireland could even play like Croatia, a country with a similar population. But we can't, not right now. We've had to make the most of what we have, and with determination and organisation, that's what we've done.
Or have we? That's one of sport's eternal questions, I'm afraid. Sport's a fucker. That's what we take away from this game: a nagging sense of opportunity missed coupled with a great pride in how we've gone about things which, in this writer, has at least pushed against the squeamishness he feels about the idea of national-team-as-proxy-nation. We're proud, but it's not as simple as that. We lost, but it's not as simple as that.
There is so, so much more to say about last night, but I'll leave you with this thought: everyone who has ever mocked Richard Dunne can fuck off.Read more...Read more...
― The attendance at the Chile-Brazil semi-final in Santiago, Chile was 76,594. The other semi, between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in Viña del Mar, attracted 5,890 spectators.
― The referee of the highest-scoring match in World Cup history, the 1954 quarter-final between Austria and Switzerland — Austria won 7-5 — was a Scot named Charlie Faultless.
Source: Complete Book of the World Cup 2006 by Cris Freddi.
On the day of a big, big Uruguay-Argentina World Cup game at the Estadio Centenario, here's some film from the 1930 finals. The Centenario was built for this, the first World Cup, and was of course the venue for the final between the two aforementioned teams. If I were to draw up a list of the matches in history I wish I could have attended, this would be very near the top.
Also included in this film is footage from Uruguay's triumphs at the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Games and from the construction of the Centenario. Enjoy.
(Long-time readers may remember that I posted this film before. Two things: those videos have since been removed from YouTube; and, more importantly, it's wonderful, so sssshhh.)
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I had no idea of the existence of this until I chanced upon some clips from it while flicking through the telly last week. It is an official FIFA film containing footage of Uruguay's triumphant hosting of the first World Cup. We see footage of Uruguay's gold-medal-winning displays at the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Games, the construction of the Estadio Centenario in Montevideo, the World Cup's opening Opening Ceremony (note how the US team line up behind a sign saying not 'Estados Unidos' but 'Nte. América') and scenes of the Uruguay team in relaxed mood.
But best of all is the footage from the final itself, beginning towards the end of the first part. It's colourised, and even though it should therefore feel adulterated, for me it gives the whole scene an extra verve. And despite the quality of the film not being very high, it's thrilling to see this record of one of football's greatest days.
