World Cup 2006 : London Review of Books

After Mao

So it’s to be France v Italy. They say that the most important components of drama are conflict and subtext. This should have plenty of both.

Caught up with both sets of semi-finals. They helped me to crystallise my feeling about this World Cup, which is that it’s been great from most points of view; except in relation to everything to do with England, all of which has been big pants. So it’s been a roaring success and a massive downer at the same time.

Take the way Italy played in extra time, for example. I’ve never seen an Italian team so committed to attack. Why? Because they obviously didn’t fancy a penalty shoot-out. Fabulissimo. But why couldn’t England do something similar against Portugal?

Oh well. I’ve been saying for some time that football was taking on too much importance in England and that something needed to happen to get the game back in perspective. Perhaps this will be it. I had thought the likeliest thing would be Chelsea winning so many titles so easily that it would put everyone off. I remember making these arguments to Jon Riley and saying that I was a Chelsea supporter now, on Maoist grounds. He said, ‘I think that’s more Pol Pot-ist.’

Masterpiece

The function of a World Cup is to produce a masterpiece. Without it, 
a tournament can have drama and excitement and passion and all those 
other good things, but it lacks the ingredient which keeps it in the 
memory for years afterwards. It needs a Brazil v Italy 1982, a Brazil 
v France 1986, a West Germany v Netherlands in 1988 (actually that 
was the European Championship; same point, though).

Last night we got our masterpiece and...I missed it. I’d gone out for 
dinner and taped the game. I still haven’t watched it yet.

On the other hand, I did once stand beside Alessandro del Piero, who scored Italy's clenching second goal last night, at a 
hotel check-in. This was ten years ago. I’d gone to Turin, invited by 
the Slow Food foundation. The flight got in at night and we went 
straight to the hotel. It seemed oddly lively—there was a crowd 
outside, the lobby was full of men in suits hanging about, it took an 
age to get registered at the front desk, the bloke getting the 
attention of both receptionists looked oddly familiar, a bit like 
Alessandro del...the penny dropped. Juventus were staying at the same 
hotel, on the night before a home game. (Staying in a hotel the night 
before a home game was once seen as a ridiculously decadent foreign 
practise; now all the Premiership teams do it.)

Therer were a remarkable number of hangers-on attached to Juventus—
agents, journalists, advisers, middle-men of one sort or another. 
They all seemed to spend all their time in the lobby, waiting for 
whoever or whatever it was they were waiting for. The area where they 
did this was directly opposite the lifts, so every time you went down 
in the lift, as the doors opened, you would see a little surge of 
expectation as the doors opened, followed by brutal disappointment, 
mirrored on every face, as they realised it was just some civilian. 
It was a lesson in just how much disappointment it’s possible to 
cause simply by being oneself.

How to win

Fred Trueman's death on Saturday made me think, as I often do, of his 
old team-mate Ken Taylor. Ken played in the great Yorkshire team of 
the late fifties, the one captained by Brian Close; he opened the 
batting, came on to bowl at the first change, and was the star 
fielder. In fact he was the only fielder in front of the wicket on 
the off side when Trueman bowled. (When Geoff Boycott came into the 
team as a young 'un, he—Boycott—was at first a lousy fielder. By his 
own account, he asked Taylor to coach him, which Ken did, and that 
was how he became the competent fielder he remained throughout his 
career.) Ken played cricket for England a few times. He was also a 
professional footballer; he was centre-half for Huddersfield in the 
days when they were a first division team. Today he would be rich and 
famous. As it was, he played during the period of the maximum wage, 
and made enough money to live on while he was playing, but no more. 
After his retirement he trained at the Slade and became an art 
teacher. That was how I met him: he arrived at the school I was sent 
to in Norfolk about the same time I did. At the age of 10 he taught 
us football, and at the age of 16 and onwards, cricket. He taught us 
art, too, or those of us who were teachable, a group which didn’t 
include me.

I often think of Ken Taylor when I’m watching sport. I think of him 
when I read about players earning £100,000 a week, and wonder what he 
thinks about that. The sums seem obscene to me; they seem obscene to 
a highly well paid recent pro like Waddle; God only knows how they 
must strike someone whose salary was legally held down to below that 
of a skilled manual labourer.

He taught me very many specific things, from how to 
block a low skidding shot at football to how, if you’re fielding in 
the covers, you should start square of the wicket and gradually move 
round as the batsman gets his eye in and the ball gets softer and 
slower. High-level sport is all about detail; we were playing the 
opposite level of sport but his eye for detail was the same. His art 
was like that too, very precise. He was a warm man who gave little 
praise, but when he did praise you remembered it.

Since I began writing this, I Googled Ken and learnt a few things I 
didn't know, one of them being that the man who admitted him to the 
Slade was Sir William Coldstream. I also learned that the manager of 
Huddersfield when he played for them was Bill Shankly (and that Ken 
had an England Under-23 cap in football, to go with his cricket 
caps). Blimey. So he played cricket with Brian Close and Fred 
Trueman, was coached in football by Bill Shankly, and was taught to 
draw by William Coldstream.

One of my most vivid memories of Ken is from my last year at school, 
my second in the cricket first XI. We were unbeaten for the whole 
season, and only had one close squeak when, in what should have been 
a drawn game, our batting for some reason collapsed. Everybody 
suddenly got out to crap shots. I was left at the wicket with Eddie 
Thorne to bat out the last hour or so. (I liked Eddie; he and I were 
hockey fullbacks in the second team. His dad and his uncle were a. 
identical twins and b. generals in the British Army—though one of 
them was a brigadier and the other a major general.) It was tea time 
and there would have been a few hundred people watching. We blocked 
out the hour. I faced the last ball, and no doubt over-excited by 
having ‘saved the game’, waved my bat over my head after I’d done so.

Eddie and I came off the field feeling pleased with ourselves. I 
thought this would be an occasion when Ken Taylor gave some of his 
rare praise, but I was wrong. When I went in the dressing room, he 
shook his head, and then said the single most revealing thing I’ve 
ever heard about the psychology of professional sport. Remember he’d 
learnt his football from Bill Shankly, and been a member of the 
Yorksire side which won the County Championship seven times;  he was a graduate of two very hard, and very successful, teams. 
He said:

‘When you celebrate like that, it makes you look like you didn’t 
think you could do it.’

Not a school of thought which has many adherents these days.

Name the guilty men

If you spend some time out of the country, or reading other 
countries’ sports pages, what you notice when you come back to 
reading ours is that English sports writing is compulsively 
moralistic. Everything is seen as a moral issue. Victory is a triumph 
of character and will; defeat is a failing of character and will. 
This theme is always present in the way people talk about sport, but 
no-one stresses it as remorselessly as we do. Look at the New York 
Times or L’Equipe and you will occasionally encounter the idea that 
one team beat another because they were, you know, better. The main 
reason one football team beats another is because they are better at 
football.

At least, that’s what I usually think. But the England team’s 
performance in this World Cup has been a severe test of my view. It’s 
hard not to see their failure as in some sense a failure of 
character. Richard Williams is very firm-spoken on this point in 
today’s Guardian. He says that England got what they deserved, and the reason Hargreaves—who was born in 
Canada and moved to Germany at 16—was England’s best player is 
because he’s never lived in England.

I find the idea that they’re a bit spoilt hard to dismiss. They look 
and act spoilt. But they don’t look as if they’re not trying, and 
there was nothing fake about how upset they seemed to be on going out.

I know—let’s blame the Swede.

Among the thugs

1. I can’t remember exactly where it is but there’s a great moment 
somewhere in Beckett where someone launches their boot ‘among’ 
someone else’s testicles. Christopher Ricks used to cite this as an 
example of Beckett’s brilliant use of dead-seeming language. Wayne 
Rooney probably isn’t much of a Beckettian (or a Ricksian, come to 
that) but he certainly knows how to put his foot among an opponent’s 
goolies.

2. When was the World Cup last an all-European affair at the semi-
final stage? I'll have a nerdy look at the reference books later, but 
off the top of my head I can’t remember when. Does this make it less 
interesting? Probably it does, a bit.

3. I now want France to win for a whole set of reasons. The non-
footballing ones are that they are the most racially mixed team left 
in the competition, and also that they are the oldest. These days I 
find it important to support the oldies. The footballing reason for 
supporting them is that they come closer than anyone else to playing 
the beautiful game. And then there is Zidane, who is both a 
footballing reason and a non-footballing one.

4. Footynomics: Portugal v England was the third example of a 
smaller, poorer country beating a richer, more populous one. But it 
was on penalties, so I’m arguing that it doesn’t count.

Note that in one sense England’s penalties were better than 
Portugal’s. Two out of four of theirs missed the goal altogether; all 
four of England’s were on target. Normally that would be enough to 
win you a shoot-out. But Riccardo guessed the right way to move every 
time, even on the penalty Hargreaves scored and (if memory serves) on 
the one Carragher put in and then had to retake. So perhaps ‘guessed’ 
is the wrong verb. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a keeper move the 
right way on five consecutive penalties. This makes it official: God hates the England football team.