World Cup 2006 : London Review of Books

Meh

1. There was something particularly disappointing about the brawl at 
the end of the Germany v Argentina game. I’m not talking about the 
girly flailing that passed for a fight—a classic example of the 
‘handbags at ten paces’ style of on-pitch confrontation. No, the 
problem was the way the tv played it down so unforgivably. Where were 
the slow-motion replays, the we-name-the-guilty men close ups and 
freeze-frames? When a fight breaks out in a rugby match they show it 
about a dozen times; it’s tacitly accepted that though these things 
are regrettable, they do happen, and if they’re going to happen, we 
might as well enjoy them when they do. (Basically, it’s the argument 
advanced by Thomas DeQuincey in ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine 
Arts’.) Football used to take a similar approach. When Frank RIkaard 
spat at Rodi Voller in 1990, we were showed the flying lump of gob in 
slow motion from about ten different angles. But this time, we get a 
lot of shouting and pushing and at least one man down, and the whole 
thing is briskly glossed over and wrapped up as if were the murder of 
Lavrenti Beria.

I smell Fifa at work. The idiots think this kind of thing is bad for 
the brand. They think what people want to see is every single player 
coming on the pitch hand-in-hand with a five-year-old. We fans can 
just about stomach that, but we’re much happier with a mass brawl 
that we can all cluck and shake our heads over.

2. The bookies are offering 11-4 or better for Portugal to win by the 
end of normal time. That seems like good odds to me. But it’s bad 
karma to bet on the team you don’t want to win...

Actually, I find, to my surprise, I’m not that bothered who wins. The 
mass hysteria around England’s participation in the World Cup is so 
whipped-up, so coercive, that it will in lots of ways be a relief if 
we don’t go any further. For years I’ve suspected this moment would 
come, and now it has. I’m not quite ready to go over and actively 
support our opponents, but as of this moment, my anticipated reaction 
to England’s going out would be as follows: meh.

Call of the wild

1. As the Fifa World Cup enters its decisive stages, it’s a good 
moment to note that one of the world’s other footballing competitions 
has already come to an end. I speak of course of the Fifi Wild Cup, 
played at St Pauli in Hamburg, the super-cool team beloved of lefties 
all over the world. The Fifi Wild Cup—this was the inaugural year—is 
contested between national teams which aren’t recognised by Fifa or 
the UN. This year the six contestants were Tibet, Zanzibar, Greenland, Northern Cyprus, 
Gibraltar, and the Republic of St Pauli (which seceded from Germany 
specially for the occasion). Nothern Cyprus won, beating Zanzibar on 
penalties in the final.

It would be great if it caught on.

2. At the risk of seeming a bit sad, I have to admit that I keep by 
my side while I’m watching games a copy of the Match of the Day Guide to the World Cup (as well as the Thinking 
Fan’s Guide). Alongside the team and player write-ups are  short pieces by 
Tottenham’ Dutch manager Martin Jol, and also his predictions of 
who’s going to win each game. These are also printed in the 
tournament schedule, so at each stage you have a handy reminder of 
what he said would happen, to go alongside what actually happens. A 
whopping great hostage to fortune, you might think; but Jol’s 
predictions have turned out to be remarkably accurate. In fact he got 
all eight quarter finalists right, and the only thing he got wrong is 
that he had Ukraine topping their group instead of Spain, and France instead 
of Switzerland. Impressive. He unpatriotically called the Dutch defeat in the 
Netherlands v Portugal game. He has the semis as Argentina v Italy, Brazil v England, with the Latin American teams heading into the final.

3. Germany v Argentina is a tough one. I usually decide in advance 
who I want to win, on the grounds that it makes things more 
interesting, but this time I’m not so sure. Germany for non-
footballing reasons, Argentina because of how they’ve played. I think 
I’ll be Buddhistically neutral and let the game itself decide. NB, 
the Footynomics prediction would be for a German win.

4. Sometimes I hate London. This morning I went to look at a friend’s 
pictures in a college degree show, paid a cheque in at the bank, 
picked my son up from nursery, and bought a piece of fish. Time 
taken: three and a half hours.

The Travelator effect

1. There’s a nasty bump when you go into the later phases of the 
World Cup. Up until yesterday there was a game a day. Now, suddenly 
and horribly, there are these gaps. It’s like when you’ve been going 
along one of those travelators and you come to the end of it and step 
of and there’s that jolt as you forcibly decelerate down to normal 
walking speed.

The temptation, of course, is to try to compensate with alcohol, 
drugs or online poker. This should be resisted.

2. The National Basketball Association has announced that it’s 
bringing in a new ball next season. It’s the first time they 
have changed the ball since 1970, and only the second time they’ve 
changed the ball in the last 60 years. So in the time it has taken 
Fifa to change the ball ten times, the NBA has changed the ball 
once.

The point has been made before, but it’s yet another example of 
the benign form of semi-socialism practised in American sport, 
enjoying as it does legal protection from many forms of free market 
mayhem, not least in the way the draft-pick system systematically 
attempts to even out the differences between weaker and stronger 
teams. By contrast, football in England has been growing steadily 
less interesting since the eighties, when the League decided that 
home and away teams would no longer share the gate. SInce then, 
inevitably, the rich have grown steadily richer, and the interest (as 
opposed to the manufactured frenzy) has steadily leaked out.

3. Buckets of ink have already been spilt on the number of red cards 
referees are handing out—25 already, as opposed to 22 for the whole 
of the last tournament. I’m not sure it’s having all that much effect 
on the way the games are played, other than to introduce yet another 
element of unpredictability and randomness to a game that has always 
been, in that respect, horribly lifelike.

4. I have a new version of my old e-mail programe, Mac Mail. This one 
makes a  high-energy whooshing sound whenever I send something. I can 
see how some people like that, but for me, it’s completely 
inappropriate. I need something that sighs, or groands, or does the 
audible equivalent of a shrug.

OK, time to fire up a spliff, crack open the Absolut, and hit 
PartyPoker.com.

N-word

They did brilliantly well. The last African team had got to the 85th minute of their last game before it happened. Ghana were 2-0 down against Brazil. They’d fought hard against temptation...and then suddenly it was all too much. I felt for them, I really did. To have come so very, very close. But perhaps it was too much to expect. In any case, it was not to be. The irony was that it wasn’t Brazil’s third goal that caused it to happen, but the replay. The Ghana defenders pushed up, the Brazilian midfield advanced towards them, the pass was slipped through to Ze Roberto. As he prepared to slip the ball past the goalie Richard Kingson, the excitement became too much to handle, and the commentator, cracking under the strain, came right out with the n-word. He just said it. With just five lousy minutes to go...It’s so easy to dream of what might have been. But there’s no point. He just had go use the bad word. The Ghanaians were—I can hardly bear to write the word— ‘naive’. Specifically, they were guilty of ‘naive defending’.

I can’t have been the only person listening who let out a low moan of Noooooooooo. When Channel Five (I think it was) broadcast the African Cup of Nations they had, instead of a swear box, a ‘naive’ box, in which everybody who used the n-word had to drop a fiver. Obviously, the adjective never appears without the noun 'defending'. If memory serves Channel Five had a naive-free tournament. The message seemed to have caught on, and Tunisia, Cote d’Ivoire, Togo and Ghana had played all their matches thus far without the n-word being flourished once. I caught one use of ‘silky’—another word which, in a football context, means ‘black’—but no ‘naive’, until last night. We came so close.

Flash bang smoke

Not long after I moved to London, almost twenty years ago, I had some friends around to watch the FA Cup Final. (The idea of the Cup Final being a big deal dates this
story; today, hardly anyone I know even bothers to watch it.) About an
hour before everyone was supposed to turn up, I switched on the tv, and
it exploded. Not like one of those famous imploding Russian tvs, but
there was a bang and an electric flash and a smell of burnt plastic and
soldering. Oops. After a worried few minutes, I managed, via the yellow
pages, to find someone who could come and fix it—another period detail,
since the practise of fixing broken electronic devices is now seen as
belonging to the distant past. The electrician fixed the tv and pointed
out that what had caused it to blow up was a leak in the roof directly
above the set, so that water was dripping down into the wiring. I tried to look
as if that wasn’t even a teeny bit my fault. He left just as the first
people came to watch the game. As for the match, I don’t remember a
thing about it.

I had a flashback to that on Sunday night, when, having retreated to
our hotel room to watch the England v Ecuador game, I switched on the
tv and got the contemporary equivalent of the bang, flash and puff of
smoke: a message saying ‘video service temporarily unavailable’. So I
burst into tears, rang the front desk, begged for a repairman, let him
in, and dragged my son to a bar to watch the first half. Then at half
time we went back to the room, where the tv guy was still struggling
with the modem—apparently the problem was that it was being ‘upgraded’,
a wonderful IT guy phrase for ‘we broke it on purpose’—and managed to
get it working just as the second half kicked off.

Add to this the fact that the commentary was in French and what we had
was the perfect Brechtian alienation device. Or nearly perfect: it
lacked someone marching up and down in front of the set wearing nothing
but underpants and carrying a banner saying ‘It’s only a game’. Still,
I was so preoccupied with trying to get things set up so I could watch
the game, that I barely took in a thing of what happened. England
looked pedestrian, and highly unlike a team going to progress any
further in the World Cup. Ecuador looked passive. The French
commentators seemed to regard Gerrard with particular reverence.
Er...that’s about it.

The format adopted for these last two World Cups, with only two teams
going through from the group stages, and drawn matches settled by
penalty shoot-outs, seems to lead to lively group stages followed by a
less gripping round of 16. In the knock-out stage the weaker teams have
a strong incentive to hang on and wait for the coin-flip of penalties,
and the stronger teams are worried about leaking a goal and then having
to play 11 defenders. Let’s hope for great things from Brazil v Ghana
and France v Spain.

As for Disneyland, there’s lots to say, but the thing that’s relevant
here is that it was like travelling to a parallel reality in which the
World Cup isn’t taking place.  And where people walk around dressed as cartoon characters. And where all the coffee is made by Nescafe.

Wider better

Astonishing though it must be to the great minds behind the selling of
the tournament, the FIFA Fussball—Weltmeisterschaft Deutschland 2006 ™
has not achieved 100 per cent market penetration in the Lanchester
household. I am at times outnumbered 3 to 1 by people as keen not to
watch the football as I am to watch it. So I did what a man has to do
and bought a new tv for the bedroom.

It’s a widescreen tv. By this I don’t mean a pimptastic 60 inch Sony or
anything, just a normal-sized telly in a 16:9 aspect ration. And here’s
the thing: the 16:9 screen is a zillion times better for watching
football on than the old-school 4:3 tv. The main differences that you
can see who the player is passing to, and what his options were; you
can see what the players who haven’t got the ball are doing, instead of
being focussed solely on the man in possession. You can watch the whole
trajectory of passes, instead of scanning around as the ball flies. I
couldn’t believe how much better it is.

I thought this was a blinding revelation, but it turns out that if you
say this to someone who has a widescreen tv, they stick their tongue
under their lower lip, assume a vacant expression, and say, ‘Durr’. In
other words they regard it as a famous self-evident truth that
widescreen tvs are much better for watching football. But the thing is,
I don’t think people do know that. Certainly I’d have bought one years
ago if the adverts for them, instead of wanking on about lifestyles of
the rich and famous, and pretending that the pictures are better, which
they aren’t, had just said, ‘buy one if you like football, because you
can see where the ball goes’. A bit like Kingley Amis’s character
Garnet Bowen, who dreams of marketing his own brand of beer with the slogan: ‘Bowen’s
beer. It makes you drunk.’

Other business. As I said in yesterday’s post, despite being very fond of France I
wanted them to lose to Togo on the grounds that this would somehow be
good for them. I asked a Scottish friend if this was similar to the way
people north of the border react to the England team. He said: ‘No,
it’s more that we hate you.’

Spain v France, Netherlands v Portugal, Brazil v Ghana; the round of 16 should be fantastic. I’m going to Disneyland now (?!?!) with my elder son and may not post til Monday. On the
other hand if I find a computer I’ll post tomorrow. The excitement is
hard to take.

Footynotes

1. When I was totting up the number of former Yugoslavs at the World
Cup I didn’t know that seven of the Australian team were of Croatian
ancestry. Add them to the official Croatians (of whom three were born
in Australia), the Serbian and Montenegrins, the Swedish striker
Ihabrimovic, and that makes a pool of 50 players who could have made up
a Yugoslavian national side.

2. 44 games played, and it is till the case that a country that is both
poorer and smaller than its opponents has only won once: Ecuador 2
Poland 0.

3. I said that only Latin players wear Alice bands. Since then I have
spotted a Croat and an Australian wearing them. I remembered the thing
it reminded me of: it’s where Anthony Bourdain, describing super-macho
chefs he has known, depicts them as standing in conversation lightly
fondling each others’ testicles. The message, according to Bourdain,
is: ‘I am so not gay, I can even do this.’

4. Ghana are 13-1 underdogs to beat Brazil. That seems over-generous to
me, given how good they look, and in particular how strong they are
athletically.

5. Mark Ford pointed this out to me in an e-mail: ‘Since 1966 England have beaten
five teams in the knockout stages of a major competition—Paraguay,
Belgium, Cameroon, Spain (on penalties), and Denmark.’ Hmm. Not overwhelmingly impressive, is it? Ecuador could fit on that list, but not too many teams of the teams we might meet later on.

6. Generally pro-French though I be, I still want them to lose to Togo
today and get knocked out. I wonder if this is a little like what Scots
feel about England?

Role model

My favourite player of the World Cup so far is the Argentinian
midfielder Juan Román Riquelme. It was not love at first sight. I saw
him for the first time playing Arsenal in the Semi-Finals of the
Champions League, and couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. He
didn’t have all that much of the ball, didn’t do too much with it when
he did have it, and missed a 90th minute penalty. Just another case of
a moody dead-ball expert being overhyped, thought I.

There was one thing, though. The camera was on his face when he ran up
to take that penalty—and Riquelme looked half-asleep, heavy-lidded,
even as he was about to strike the ball. ‘He knew he was going to
miss,’ was a friend’s comment. But that didn’t seem quite right. He
looked more like an athlete in a state of near-trance. Even though the
penalty was saved, he didn’t look as if he minded too much. He looked
like he was deep inside his own head.

He still looks like that, only now he is hitting balls through
opponents defences in that way that seems always to invite metaphors to
do with slicing, cutting, carving. (‘A left foot like a can opener.’
What the hell does that mean?) He’s also been compared to a slide rule,
a pre-digital age comparison which surely must be meaningless to anyone
under the age of 40. What all this boils down to is that he is very
good at hitting super-accurate, beautifully weighted passes into space
just behind opponents, just as his own teammates hit the space.

Riquelme is, though, going to have a disastrous effect on amateur
football all around the world. It’s a sad fact that about half the
players on any pitch in the world are, in their heads, secretly
pretending to be somebody else, usually a former great from their own
youth. No harm in that. But Riquelme  is the first great player—if he
is truly great; it might be a bit early to say that for sure, but let’s
just for the sake of argument—who almost never runs. Or rather, he does
run, but not usually for more than about ten metres at a time. I can’t
think of another great player about whom that was true: Pelé,
Maradonna, Cruyff, Beckenbauer, Charlton, Neeskens, Netze—all of them
covered a lot of ground. They always seemed to have an uncanny amount
of time on the ball, but they got around the pitch too. Riquelme looks
like he just potters about, then hits perfect passes out of his
near-trance.

What this means is that every rubbish footballer in the world has a new
fantasy self. Denounced for idleness by teammates, they will, to a man,
say, ‘you don’t hear Argentina slagging off Riquelme for his work
rate’, or ‘you don’t see Riquelme rushing around like a blue-arsed
fly’, or ‘I’m like Riquelme, I let the ball do the work’. This great
athlete looks certain to become a role model for the older, slower, fatter, more delusional player.

Hair today

By tonight, we’ve played 40 of the 64 total games in the World Cup. All
the most important things remain unresolved, but it is possible to
reach one tentative conclusion: footballers’ hairstyles are less silly
than four years ago. (‘Silly’ means a hairstyle which, if you
encountered it on a person you knew, would immediately cause you to
think that the only reason they looked like that was because they had
lost a bet.) Last time, Beckham had a sort-of mohican, Seaman had a
ponytail, many of the Latin American players had gigantic perms, and a
colossal number of people had shaved their heads—for one game, I think
it was England v Denmark, there were seven totally bald people on the
pitch.

Last night, in England v Sweden, there were only two shaven-headed
players, Paul Robinson and Henrik Larsson. The stupidest hair belonged
to Christian Wilhemsson, who has a ten-inch stringy bit, too long and
too stringy to be a ponytail, trailing off the back of an otherwise
perfectly normal haircut. The only other person who you could say had
stupid hair was Rio Ferdinand, who was bald four years ago. If you did
say that, however, I’d disagree, because I think his braided hair
rather suits him. But it must be fantastically high-maintenance. On the
other hand, professional footballers do have a lot of time on their
hands, and as Lady Bracknell says, a gentleman should have an
occupation of some kind.

Another candidate for the silly hair award is Brent Sancho. He has
colossal dreadlocks. These are culturally appropriate in every way,
since he’s from Trinidad, but they are silly for the reason Peter
Crouch made apparent when he gave them a firm yank on the way to
climbing over Sancho for England’s first goal—they give opponents
something to pull on. This is why long hair is discouraged among
policemen and soldiers and the like (including martial arts students):
in close combat, a firm tug on the hair is an unanswerable move.
Thinking about it, central defenders, who do a lot of heading, are the
footballers least likely to have big hair.

Probably the worst hair in this World Cup belongs to the same person
who had it in the last World Cup, the Argentine midfielder Juan Pablo
Sorin. Our planet has millions of poodles who would come second to
Sorin in a poodle-lookalike competition. This was true four years ago
and it is still true today.

No, the big news on the hair front is not so much any single hairstyle
as the trend for men to wear Alice bands. The first footballer I saw do
this was David Beckham, after Alex Ferguson kicked the boot which hit
him in the face and caused him to need two stitches above his eye, and
also, it turned out, to change his hairstlye to show the stiches off.
He soon tired of that, as he does, but the fashion seems to have caught
on among footballers from Latin countries. Nothern Europeans, Asians,
Africans and Middle-Easterners don’t wear Alice-bands, but Southern
Europeans and Latin Americans do. As I write, the Alice-band wearing Maniche
of Portugal has just scored a goal partly manufactured by the
Alice-band wearing Tiago. This must, I suppose, be one of those
reverse-psychology macho things: ‘I am so butch I can wear a hair accessory which
is otherwise the exclusive property of upper-middle class Englishwomen
and 12-year old girls.’

Cheese, robots

For Europeans, the last World Cup was a little weird from the time-zone
point of view. We’re used to watching games from the Americas in our
evening, but it felt peculiar to be watching games from Korea and Japan
before, during, or instead of breakfast. Also, for the more demanding
nail-biters, you could end up utterly drained and knackered for the
rest of the day—and for most of us, it feels odd to have had your most
intense experience of the 24 hours over by nine in the morning. By
contrast I thought this World Cup, with games at 3, 5 and 8pm, was
going to be perfect. Especially the 8pm game. What’s not to like?

But there is a worm in the bud, and it’s to do with supper. The issue
is when to eat. If you have small children it’s hard to eat before
they’re in bed; if you leave it till after the game, which means
sitting down at about ten, you’re bug-eyed with hypoglycemia. The
grown-up thing is probably to rustle up and exquisite little snack at
half-time, along the lines advocated by Delia Smith in her World-Cup
specific Guardian recipe column. But I find that an impossible addition
to the already packed half-time schedule of going for a wee, fixing
another drink, taking more valium, wiping sweat off brow, checking my
e-mail, watching the highlights, putting the children to bed for the
second time, etc.

So last night I tried eating before the game. That worked OK (thanks to
the microwave). Except as I dragged myself to bed at about 11.30 I
suddenly realised that, because I’d had dinner an hour and a half
before I usually do, I had a bad case of the munches. Fridge
inspection. Yoghurt? No. Pizza? Don’t be stupid. Keen’s cheddar?
Perfect. Then I went upstairs and read Emmanuel Carrère's biography of
Philip K. Dick, already mentioned in this blog, for half an hour or so.
Then I tried to sleep.

There are quite a large number of books about how to get a good night’s
sleep, and good ‘sleep hygiene’ in general, and not a single one of
them recommends a combination of late-night cheese-eating and reading
about Philip K Dick. I was awake about half the night, at first trying
hard to make myself fall asleep (which always works so well), then
resigning myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to sleep, and then
finally falling into a half-dream, half-reverie about what Phil Dick
would have made of the World Cup.

Carrère's book is emphatic about Dick’s belief, which throughout his
life was intermittent but overpowering, that the world as we see it is
an illusion. He thought that he was the only person who understood that
reality is not real. He had visions of ultimate evil lurking just
behind the surface of things, and most of his books play with the idea
of being trapped in an illusion or simulation; an idea whose emotional
texture is, in Dick’s work, more or less horrific.

So anyway, as I was lying there sweating out cheese and half-awake, I
suddenly thought: Dick would have said that the England team have been
replaced by robots. That’s why they’e playing so badly. They’re not in
fact the England team at all, but physically identical cyborg replicas,
who’ve been programmed to adopt a style of play based on the long-ball
game prevalent in the English leagues about ten years ago. That’s why
great players like Lampard and Gerrard suddenly look like they’ve been
drafted in from Howard Wilkinson’s Sheffield Wednesday. And the
accompanying thought: where are the real England team? Who’s keeping
them hostage? Will they escape? Will they turn up in time?

I know this sounds like a joke, but the tone of the Dick biography is
so dark that this sort-of-dream arising from it was actually rather
troubling. That’s definitely the last time I eat cheese at bedtime.

I hope the real, non-cyborg England show up tonight. Please feel free
to insert here your own gag about how if Eriksson was replaced by a
robot, nobody could tell.