Socialism, Bloody Hell

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I was going to dissectJohn Barnes' comment on the failure of the English team coming down to their mental incompatibility with some forms of political practice, but Thomas Mueller took the wind out of my sails by offering a similar diagnosis of the breakdown of alien v/s predator man versus machine in the English team:

"It is difficult to have so many 'alpha males' and have them row in the same direction," said the 20-year-old.

Winding the clock back up

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"I do not want a single Italian soldier to be hurt," said General Mustafa Tlass to his Lebanese guerillas in 1980s Beirut, "because I do not want a single tear to fall from the eyes of Gina Lollobrigida." Whatever my differences with General Tlass, I must similarly warn Italy's football team with regards to the eyes of Andrea Pirlo. He may not start today. Injury may have prevented him from making it out to Soweto to accomplish the small matter of the symbolic handover of the World Cup to FIFA [irony forever, as all the gods are witness!]. He may be dormant in the memories of football fans everywhere -- in fact, pictures of Andrea Pirlo on field may offer strong evidence that he is dormant -- as in, asleep -- period. But for one glorious tournament, everyone recognised that Andrea Pirlo was worthy....

Favourites and Favouritism

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Dunga's Brazil is a fricking beautiful side. So effortless was their ability to press, build and rebuild play from the back, so relentlessly high their back line, so clever their crossing from the wings, that when Cote d'Ivoire scored their lone goal late in the game, it was honestly unexpected to see both Drogba and the ball run free out of Brazil's looming shadows -- if shadows can be canary-coloured -- and bomb past an uncharacteristically flat-footed Julio Cesar. Accusations of Europeanisation may stand, but boring? Stodgy? Lacking in creativity? Please. Creativity and productivity are not wildly oppositional things. Maybe this Richard Florida notion is why some people get the sinking feeling that the football of the future will be played in tree-lined avenues peopled by clever sweatpants-wearing software professionals when they watch Dunga's Brazil. And Kaká is hardly the sort of man to encourage you to use....

Argentina: Magical start, lazy end

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I took a moment to curse Eduardo Galeano during Uruguay's disappointing non-starter of an attack on France during their game's second half, and said that there can be no beautiful football without shape -- by which I suppose I meant I come down on the side of organisation, cold mechanical brains, well-rehearsed moves, collective acumen over individual spontaneity, science over nature, and other Enlightenment guff. Uruguay never threatened a surfeit of beauty, much less shape, but Argentina's opening moments in this first game against Nigeria did give me pause to re-examine this obviously Euro-indoctrinated prejudice. Unpredictable passing, seemingly fearless creativity, the lazy, easy attainment of Nigeria's box that was way more exhilarating than the blitzkrieg approach you usually see when very good club teams [such as the one our Leo plays for] meet less proficient ones: there were early intimations of magic. The end of....

More on Sports Diplomacy

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Once you start down this sports diplomacy route, it can only end in Earl Grey and almond biscotti. Famous sports journalist Dave Zirin, in a piece that Must Read Soccer labelled 'the worst writing of the week' is inexorably logical in his approach to the question.

"...if it is business as usual between nations on the field of play, then surely everything must be A-OK when our heroes shower off the sweat and the cheering throngs wander home. But things are, as Marcellus Wallace said, "pretty f--king far from ok." If a team wants to stand up and say "hell no" to business-as-usual in international sport, we shouldn't ask why they are doing it. We should ask why more teams don't. " [source]

North Korea among the Nightingales

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Over the years, the World Cup has quietly dropped out of the mainstream of history, making it less painful and less fraught to associate nationalism with it - unless of course you are reading a British tabloid - and I'm almost confident that we can now argue against Orwell's aphorism about football being war minus the shooting. It's actually more like diplomacy without the tea service. It's supposed to bring the nations of the world together, but really just consists of teams of specialists swinging wider and wider out of orbit, in a project that is really only tangentially relevant to our waking lives, if not to our dreaming ones. I'm trying to explain why I am bemused that Paul B Stares at the Los Angeles Times appears to think that the whole world can be stadium-ganged into 'shaming and further isolating' North Korea for its sinking....