World Cup 2006 : London Review of Books

Going for gold

Fingers on the buzzers, please. Which character in Ulysses went on, in
real life, to win a medal at the Olympics?

Pause...whirr...give up? OK, I admit it's a tricky one. Answer: Buck
Mulligan. In real life, under his real-world identity as Oliver St John
Gogarty, he won a bronze medal in poetry in the 1924 Olympics. The poem
was called Ode to the Tailetann Games. Jack Yeats won a silver medal
in painting at the same Olympiad; in fact they were the only medals won
by the new-born Free State .

These non-sporting medals, a notion of the Baron de Coubertin, were a
part of the modern Olympiad from 1912 to 1948. There were medals
available in poetry, painting, town planning and architecture. Now, the
host country in the Olympics is allowed to suggest a new sport for the
competition, along the lines of beach volleyball and snowboarding. So
the obvious thing for Great Britain to do would be to return to the
great tradition of non-athletic medals, and restore poetry, painting
and town planning to the games. Whose heart does not beat quicker at
the thought of Les Murray v Benjamin Zephanaiah in the semis, Geoffrey
Hill having been controversially knocked out by Maya Angelou in the
round of 16? Who wouldn't want to see Georg Baselitz go out to Howard
Hodgkin on penalties? Who wouldn't queue all night for tickets to the
Renzo Piano v Daniel Liebeskind smackdown?

But we wouldn't be absolutely guaranteed to win those contests. No, if
we're serious about the medal count—and we are, since the Treasury is
coughing up £49.5 million just to win medals—the new Olympic event for
London in 2012 has to be power-drinking. Evidence for our prowess is
available in any city centre any night of the week; at weekends you
don't have to look for the evidence so much as step carefully to avoid
treading in it.

For those who like to quantify such things, there's plenty of strong
activity in this area in Germany. After the Trinidad and Tobago game, a
group of 10 England players wives and girlfriends—WAGS, as the tabloids
are calling them—went out to a nightclub in Baden-Baden. ('Death's
waiting room' is the German nickname for Baden Baden; in fact the term
'Baden-Baden nightclub' pushes hard for status as an oxymoron. The WAGS
put away seven bottles of champagne, 23 vodkas (lemon or Red Bull
flavour, according to preference), 12 lagers, five orange liquers, four
Sambuccas, a Bacardi and coke and, movingly, two bottles of water. I
make that over 100 units of alcohol. Impressive. And then on the Today
programme this morning there was an, on the whole, rather warm item
about the behaviour of England fans in Nuremberg, which held mostly
good news, but did point out that they were, in the nicely chosen words
of one restaurateur, 'thirsty'. He had one party of nine who drank 124
beers before breakfast.

So power-drinking it must be. In fact, since there is talk of getting
rid of the modern pentathlon, since it isn't, you know, actually very
modern (horse-riding, swimming, fencing, shooting, running), the thing
to do for London 2012 is to bring in a post-modern pentathlon,
featuring, say, drinking, fighting, swearing, shouting, being sick.
We'd clean up!

Well, not literally. We�d get some nice cheap immigrant labour to do
that. But you know what I mean.

A Grand Day Out

Despite the title of this blog I do occasionally, with varying degrees of reluctance, get off the sofa. Yesterday I went to Lord’s to watch England lose to Sri Lanka in a one-day cricket international. After the upsetting  victory over Trinidad and Tobago there was something deeply soothing about it: the polite crowds converging on St John’s Wood, carrying their cool boxes of lunch and clinking bags of booze; the bored wives and girlfriends with their precautionary paperbacks to read during the match; the men listening to the radio commentary while watching the match, in order not to miss a nuance; the way England slowly and inevitably slid to defeat.

A good day out. I’d forgotten, though, how physically demanding it can be to spend a day at the cricket. I met my mates at quarter past ten and left the ground at quarter to seven. Eight and a half hours in baking sun; it wasn’t the Pamplona bull run but it was still pretty taxing.

A consequence of this is that I don’t anything particularly contentful to say about the football, since to watch a game in the highlights package is not to have any idea about what the match was actually like. I’ve sat through games that put the crowd into a narcoletpic trance, which look like all-action thrillers when boiled down to three minutes of clips. You also can’t tell anything about the balance of a game; a team can have had 80 per cent of the dominance, but look even-stevens or worse when it’s boiled down to a few unrepresentative moments.

So, all in all, I can’t comment on either Ghana’s magnificent victory or the Battle of Kaiserslauten, other than to point out that on the Xbox360 simulation mentioned in an earlier post, the USA were supposed to beat Italy 3-2. Kaiserslauten’s population is one-third American, according to the Beeb, so this was virtually a home game for the USA. The Italians do tend to feel that other teams get ‘helped’ in the World Cup—in fact, they never shut up about it, with particular reference to the game they lost to South Korea in the last World Cup—so I wonder how they’ll react to the fact that the USA had two men sent off and a goal disallowed.

On the way to the cricket I was reading Emmanuel Carrère’s biography of Philip K. Dick. Favourite fact so far: Dick once got 17 rejection letters in a single day.

On Beauty

Is it just me or is this World Cup-if you leave England’s opening crapness out of it for the moment-showing signs of being the best since Italia ‘90? And yesterday we had the first properly great performance. The contrarian thing to do here would be to explain how Argentina were actually not all that impressive, how Serbia and Montenegro were clearly thinking about secession rather than football, how this and that…No, it won’t wash. Argentina were freaking brilliant. For passing and movement and first-touch skill their 24-pass second goal was as good as thing I’ve ever seen. You could take that goal and show it to someone who doesn’t get football, and if that doesn’t convert them, then they beyond in the category whom the Catholic Church calls the ’invincibly ignorant’. At times like this football approaches the definition of baskeball, ‘chess with soul’. My one worry, if I were an Argentina fan, is that this might be a little early to be showing such sensational form.

So farewell then, Serbia and Montenegro. At least you played in a game that will be remembered for a long time. Note that Yugoslavia, if it still existed, would have a hell of a team, since both the. Croats and Serbio-Montenegrins qualified for the tournament; and Sweden’s most prolific striker, Ibrahimovic, is the son of Bosnian immigrants. This pool of players would have been a classic example of one of those Yugoslav teams who were hard to love and even harder to beat.

Are we having fun yet?

Edmund White says somewhere that he has always found pain and pleasure hard to tell apart. He was talking about sado-masochistic sex, but I’m starting to think the same thing applies to watching football. During the England v Trinidad and Tobago game yesterday I found myself wondering why I was putting myself through all this; anxiety, irritation, steadily lowering spirits. Then we nicked our two goals and were guaranteed qualification, and what I mainly felt was tired.

Obviously there’s something I’m not doing right. Perhaps the problem is watching important games—i.e. games whose outcome I mind about—on my own. Watching a game on your own you concentrate harder and in one sense get more out of it, but you also miss being carried off on the collective highs, and the presence of other people definitely helps you get over a bad game. So maybe that’s the thing to do from now on.

Or perhaps it was that England played so crappily and seemed to determined to do their usual thing. From here that would be as follows: one classic performance to get us all excited about what might happen, and then defeat in a thrilling game against the first good team we play. Say, a 3-0 win over Sweden and then defeat by Ecuador on penalties. That would be to take a thoroughly taken road.

Still, we’re through, which is something. Perhaps it’s that in itself which is hard to cope with. I don’t remember England ever qualifying for the knock-out stage of a tournament before the final group-stage game. It could be the unfamilarity of the position which is the trouble. I know—I’ll try a sports-psychology type visualisation exercise, to try and get back in the comfort zone. OK: repeat after me: ‘going into the final game of the group stage, our destiny is in our own hands, provided we beat Turkmenistan by a three-goal margin, and there’s a high-scoring draw between Alpha Centauri and Mount Athos.’

Parroting

So the Germans are the first team to go through. I’m glad, for several
reasons involving general Germanophilia and the fact that some of the
interest leaches out of the World Cup if the host team are knocked out
too early.

Also, I’m pleased for Jurgen Klinsmann. At least I think I am. He is a
likeable man but there is something odd about his affect; hard to put
your finger on but it’s there. I remember a couple of things. He was
something of a hate figure to England fans when he arrived at Tottenham
in 1994, owing to his egregious diving in the 1990 World Cup, so when
he scored his first goal he celebrated by doing an elaborate swan-dive.
Lots of people thought that showed he was a good sport...It made me
think, though, of that category of person who is so eager to show they
get the joke that it makes you wonder if, deep down, they ever actually
get any jokes at all. And then when he gave a press conference to
announce he was leaving Tottenham, he held it at the Comedy Club.
Geddit? Because Germans don’t have a sense of humour, so he holds a
press conference at the Comedy Club, yok yok...Even hacks, who are the
keenest people in the world at showing that they’ve got the joke too,
felt that was a bit odd.

Still, you have to give him credit for living in California. How about
that for working from home? He doesn’t just live in a different
country, or in a different continent, but on the far edge of a different continent.
This also shows how, when national sterotypes are contradicted, nobody
knows what to say. If he were French or from a Latin country the papers
would be full of stuff about his being detached, laid-back, shruggy. As
it is, they reach for the received-opinion file—which doesn’t have
anything in it about the not at all rare phenomenon of the New Age
German—and draw a blank.

But the long-distance thing is a hoot. I think this trend should be
encouraged. After the World Cup, when Steve McClaren takes over the
England manager’s job, it is essential that he moves to Antarctica.
Deal with that, paparazzi scum!

Other business. 1. Hard to know who to want to win today in Costa Rica
v Ecuador. On the one hand, Ecuador are still (after 18 games) the only
country to have beaten a richer, bigger country. On the other hand, a
country with no armed forces and lots of parrots will always be
popular. We South Londoners feel a particular bond with Costa Ricans
over the question of parrots.

2. There was a brief moment yesterday, while the Saudi Arabian players
were celebrating their second goal against Tunisia, when the ref ran
towards them and it looked as if they were all going to be booked for
over-prolonged prayer. That would have been funny.

Forte

By and large, fans feel a certain affection for fat players. There’s
something humanising about the extra poundage; it makes a player look
more like one of us, perhaps because it hints at what we would look
like if we were out there on the pitch, our team’s shirt proudly
stretched over our stomachs. Steve McMahon and Jan Molby were two
noticeably porky players whose podginess helped win a place in fans’
hearts. I remember Molby used to be greeted by affectionate chants of
‘Sumo’—at least, until he was done for drunk driving, when the chant
was replaced by the song ‘He’s fat, he’s round, his car is in the
pound, Jan Molby, Jan Molby...’

The drink/fatness link was no coincidence. Back when I used to write
match reports, if a player looked—to use a favourite euphemism of the
milieu— ‘chunky’, your working hypothesis was that they were hitting
the bottle. That was on the Occam’s-razor principle that booze was the
likeliest place for them to be getting the extra calories. The point
being that for a professional athlete in training for an aerobically
intensive sport, it takes a phenomenal calorie intake to put on weight.
Either they’re eating cake after training all day every day, or they’re
on the sauce.

Nobody says that Ronaldo is on the sauce. In fact, he cheekily said
that the President of Brazil was on the sauce, when President Silva had
the temerity to ask the national team’s coach ‘Is Ronaldo fat?’ (‘It’s
as much a lie that I am fat as it must be that he drinks a lot’, was
Ronaldo’s not-totally-unambiguous response.) Ronaldo says that his own
chunkiness is down to the fact that he has been off training with an
injury for a couple of months. This may be so; but the truth is he if
anything looks a bit thinner than he has done playing for Real Madrid
in the last couple of seasons. I think he’s a bit porky for no other
reason that he likes his pies. I also think there is something noble
about a professional athlete’s managing to put on weight like that, and
that we should celebrate Ronaldo’s heroic, principled, against-all-odds
fatness.

The trouble is that he looks so glum. His head appears to be elsewhere.
It’s that, I think, which Brazilians mind, much more than the weight
issue. We fans love a fattie. A distracted, depressed, half-hearted
fattie, not so much.

Let it come down

I sat down to watch South Korea v Togo wanting Togo to win—and that rather selflessly, too, since it would have disproved yesterday’s Footynomics hypothesis. As I was watching the less-than-gripping first half, with Togo a goal ahead, I picked up the Thinking Fan’s Guide again, began reading Binyavanga Wainaina’s brilliant piece about Togo, and found myself changing my mind. I have to admit I knew absolutely fuck-all about Togo and didn’t know that the former dictator’s one son Faure Gnassingbé ran the country and his brother Rock ran the football association. There were democracy protests in Togo last year. But Faure ‘had good fortune on his side: amid all the unrest his younger brother delivered the best gift his family has ever received: qualification for the World Cup’.

Musing on this, I found that I wasn’t wanting Togo to win any more. Just as well, too, since Jean-Paul Abalo gave away a free kick from which the Koreans scored, and was sent off in the process. Togo went on to lose 2-1. So f it’s bad news for the Gnassingbé family that’s a good thing, right? Leaving 5.4 million Togans, citizens of one of the poorest countries in the World Cup, the only one of the 32 currently getting poorer every year, even more depressed than they were when they woke up this morning. Well, when you put it like that...Football has questionable links with nationalisms and governments everywhere on earth, so surely it’s a type of cant to think that the Togans aren’t quite miserable enough to deserve a cheering World Cup run. And yet anything that’s good news for the Gnassingbés...

Hmmph. Better to keep it simple. I think I’ll stick to a clear-cut view of who I want to win for the rest of the tournament.

As I write, it’s started to chuck it down, and the air has that distinctive London smell of diesel fumes and pollution brought down to ground level by the rain. The smell of rain. It occurs to me that this would make a brilliant title for either a bad novel or crappy film. From the trailer: ‘He was a something something. She was a something something else. Together—they smelt the rain.’

Footynomics

I was slightly surprised to learn that Australia is richer than Japan, in terms of GDP per capita: $30,700 as opposed to $29,392. That statistic is from The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, which among various other interesting data publishes the GDPs of the countries in the competition. The reason I was looking it up was because something’s been on my mind. As of this moment nine games had been played. That means the World Cup is more than one-eighth over (boo! waah!). Guess how often the poorer country has beaten the richer one. Answer: once. Poland 0 Ecuador 2.

Why would a country’s being rich confer an advantage for the national football team? Perhaps because the richest countries will tend to attract the best players to its leagues, and that will in turn raise the standards for indigenous players in the leagues, and therefore the national side. Or something. Do I look like Steven Levitt?

Now, it’s obvious that the richest country doesn’t always win. Brazil, for instance, is 22nd out of 32 in the GDP table among the 32. But Brazil is the most populous country in the World Cup. (I’m leaving out the USA from these calculations, on the grounds that it is too big and rich and indifferent to football to count.) So we could propose the following hypothesis: the richest country will win, except when the most populous one does. It’ll be interesting to see how many exceptions there are to this: how many times a poorer, smaller country will win. Not too many is my guess.

I don't want to make it sound, in typical dismal science fashion, that Australia's victory was predetermined and inevitable. In general, Ozzies are almost as indifferent to football as Americans, and that makes their win all the more impressive. Football is about the only team sport in which Australians aren't routinely world champions. This might partly reflect the ethnic tilt of the sport Down Under. In his autobiography, Steve Waugh, who played with success as a kid until his cricket career took off, says that the game was only played by non-Anglos and was generally known as 'wog ball'.

Argentina 2 Cote d'Ivoire 1

Ever since I heard about it I haven’t been able to get out of my head
the fact that the Cote D’Ivoire goalkeeper, Tizié, lost a testicle
after an on-pitch collision a year ago. At the time he was playing for
his club Esperance; a name that must at moments have had an ironic edge
to it. Tizié was in intensive care for two days and they didn’t think
he would live, but he was back playing for the national team a month
later. I’m aware that it’s possible to make bad-taste jokes about
goalies and goolies, but for me it’s a reminder of how much physical
courage the players have, repeatedly going into collisions any one of
which could have a determining effect on the rest of their lives.

Let’s take a moment, though, to imagine what it would have been like
if, instead of breaking his metatarsal, Rooney had (God forbid) lost a
testicle and an anxious nation was waiting to see if he would recover
in time for the World Cup. The papers, hard enough to take during the
world cup under normal cicrumstances, would have gone beyond the
darkest reveries of Karl Krauss. Imagine the editorials. Imagine the
diagrams. Imagine the cut-out-and-keep souvenirs. Imagine the Sun's daily coverage, under the heading Nadwatch.

England 1 Paraguay 0

One never likes to join in a chorus, but there’s something truly odd
about the effect Eriksson’s half-time talks seem to have on England.
Not every time, but more often than not, and especially in crucial
games when they have a half-time lead, they go in fired-up and come out
seeming drained, enervated, and with less of a clue about how they
should be playing than they had ten minutes before. It’s as if they go
into the changing room whistling the Dambusters march and come out
humming whale music. I know it’s possible for a coach to pump a team up
too much—but this is going too far the other way. You have to wonder
what goes on in there. Yoga? Aromatherapy? Tibetan chanting?

Notwithstanding all that, yesterday’s was about the best possible
result, especially when combined with Sweden’s draw with Trinidad and
Tobago. The points we needed, plus a bit of a kick up the bum and
reality check.