So here
we are again and at the risk of being premature, let the recriminations begin, let
a thousand fulminations of manufactured anger spring forth from the pens of the
press pack and the FA arse-sheathing commence. England are useless once more
and we can engage in our real national sport- debating why we're rubbish at football.
There is
something fitting in the fact that the final act of the ‘golden generation’ against Uruguay has
been to comprehensively instruct the next on the mechanics of failure. That
hope was ignited by an all too brief glimpse of Rooney’s talents before an
avoidable error by Gerard was a delicious end to the era that began with David
Beckham’s appointment as captain at the start of the Millennium.
Now we
look to the future - we’ll see the FA argue that this is why their ‘League 3’
scheme is necessary, despite the fact that young English players already play
at a higher level than the one it suggests.
One man
got his criticisms in early, a ‘disappointed not angry’ Chris Waddle, who said:
“I’ll
tell you what the biggest problem is when you think about it all – the Premier
League. They have a product which they sell around the world. It’s entertaining
but it’s doing our players no good whatsoever.
It’s here. The greatest festival of football on its greatest stage – Brazil,
the game’s most beautiful team surging to 3-1 win over Croatia with the tournament’s poster
boy Neymar grabbing a brace in a pulsating game.
Except that’s not how many fans will see things today. Instead the
talk will be of a dive, debatable refereeing and whether Brazil are a bit rubbish
but FIFA will see them right because the alternative doesn’t bear thinking
about.
It’s strange that the backlash should be so strong – opening games of World
Cups are often turgid affairs, and this one had incident, goals and was a
genuine contest between teams who for periods looked to take each other on
rather than spar and wait for easier assignments. In 1998, a far more strongly
fancied Brazil struggled to beat Scotland.
But then this is Brazil we’re talking about – a team whom neutrals feel
obliged to be dazzled by or feel let down. A slightly cynical group stage
victory over tough but less storied opposition by the Germans, Italians or
Argentinians (despite their talents) brings grudging admiration – its ‘typical’
of them. By Brazil it’s viewed as a form of sacrilege.
The brilliance of Brazil's unsuccessful 1982 team
Brazilian football fans almost certainly take a different view – understandable
given the trauma of watching the 1982 team go from a seemingly indomitable
force to a key component in the World Cup ‘if only’ industry. More recently the
2006 team looked to field a ‘Magic Square’ of the world’s most talented attacking
players, only to look listless and run into Zinedine Zidane.
But surely Brazil not quite living up to their billing deserved little more
than an exhalation of disappointment and the shuffling of a few fingers
rearranging Betfair accounts? Instead it got anger, disappointment and in some
wildly disproportionate cases outrage, with Twitter awash and ludicrous
declarations that people would be supporting ‘anyone but Brazil' after last
night’s game.
Fred dropping as if dead for Brazil’s vital penalty was unedifying and a
poor piece of refereeing, Neymar could have seen red – but if he had then the
referee would’ve been accused of spoiling the game. Home and big teams getting
marginal decisions is hardly a shock in football, with a number of papers showing how refs are influenced by partisan crowds. The World Cup is littered
with cases of questionable decisions going in favour of the hosts or its more
storied nations, most famously in recent times facilitating South Korea’s extraordinary
run to the Semis in 2002 –that's not to mention Azerbaijani linesmen, 1966 and all that.
Part of that backlash is the universal rule of social networks magnifying
idiocy, but there is something deeper in at least the lack of enthusiasm for a
Brazil victory outside the host country– despite the fact that it would make
the tournament into a footballing party we’ve never seen the like of before.
That anger or at best lack of enthusiasm, for this might come from a
different place than fans discovering their often absent sense of aesthetic
ideals or exacting sense of fair play. Instead it may be a result of this
Brazil side’s conflicting roles as front men for something rather less
beautiful than the country’s footballing history and culture.
Brazil's victorious 1994 team
I remember during the first World Cup I watched in 1994 their seemed a moral
duty to support Brazil. They hadn’t won since 1970, with the previous ones
being won by the unromantic Germans, the streaky Italians (who’d stopped Brazil’s
wonderous 1982 team despite not winning a game in the first phase) and the
cynical if talented Argentinians. Despite Dunga’s side not being particularly committed
to the ideals of ‘Joga Bonito’ there was a sense that after the dark side had
been defeated and football was back in the hands of its moral custodians.
By 1998 Brazil had far more fantasy players, but that sense of organic joy
was now a marketing tool. Rather than celebrating the sheer joy of Ronaldo in
full flow for its own sake we had to buy the Nike gear and listen to endless lazy
media droning about their virtues. They were in short, just another (very good) football team with
jazzier marketing.
In 2014 the Seleção are not just a collection of talented players
representing a fascinating nation but the conflicted nature of this World Cup
in concentrate. While a part of us wants to see Rio in full carnival mode as
Neymar sashays through defences, another part sees this as what FIFA and its
sponsors want us to think - a position
unwittingly and shamefully articulated by Pele when he said in ITV’s build-up
program that protestors would pipe-down once Brazil began winning.
If you define a good course of action by doing the opposite of whatever pseudo-rap
abomination Pitbull does then seeing him defile the storied golden shirt in the
opening ceremony was a stark reminder that this World Cup's Brazilian flavour also comes served with a dollop of homogonised crap. For Brazilian protestors the presence of an emaciated Vin Diesel lookalike is the least of their worries, with the World Cup circus' demands of a poor and unequal country symbolising just how cut off the competition is from the reality of the culture it is supposed to 'celebrate' (read use on marketing material).
That reluctance to be charitable to Brazil when they understandably don’t
thrill as much as expected, or adopt them as a second team perhaps tells us
less about their merits and more about the fact that even a win
will not live up to the past's lofty ideals. They will no doubt thrill us at times, but we'll be unable to view them with quite the same wide-eyed innocence and joy
that we did them, and football in the past.
Gary got on with Michael like a house with rising damp
With the Premier League winding up this weekend, attention
will soon shift to The World Cup and everything that goes with it. Of course it’s
the football that matters, but it’s impossible to ignore the media paraphernalia
that goes with it, of which the primary example is of course the World Cup
song.
For this year’s effort the FA have shown their usual
imagination by roping in the one man ‘Can I have a Knighthood?’ campaign that
is Gary Barlow, and the result is like every electron in the former Take That
man’s body – bland.
Despite the fact that it’s not even a new song or a
substantial reworking of an old one, ‘Greatest Day’ seems to perfectly fit our
footballing era. Like most things involving Barlow it’s ever so slightly
insipid – Our Gary’s default expression being that of a man who’s mildly narked
that you haven’t used his favourite brand of tea bag. Like most X-Factor montage songs, any inspirational qualities it may have once had have been destroyed by a thousand saccharine shots of teary meetings with elderly relatives. Rather than a battle cry to go into battle for Harry and St George, it’s
the sort of song that might inspire you to do your tax returns early (or possibly not in Gary’s case).
Jade Dernbach - The worst international cricketer ever?
Jade Dernbach - officially the worst International Twenty20 (and ODI) bowler
of all time. The fact that Dernbach has the worst economy rate ever is not an
easy one to shake off. But is he really the worst ever, or merely a man put in
the wrong place by those lacking the imagination to do otherwise?
Dernbach isn’t an easy bloke to sympathise with, having the
air of a man who looks like he’s been dragged from the VIP area of a club in
some God forsaken satellite town. That’s not to mention those tattoos that make
him look like the lovechild of a lizard and a Liverpool defender.
David Cameron is deeply annoyed. Could it be
that he’s furious at the sell-off of The Royal Mail on the cheap? Or at Putin’s
territorial ambitions? Food banks even? Nope, it’s because Nike’s New England shirt is selling for £90 (the bespoke ‘match’ version, rather than the ‘stadium’
one, which actually sells for £60).
The marketing bumf that’s used to justify the price of these shirts,
essentially a piece of nylon cut into panels and then reassembled to accommodate
Wayne Rooney’s midriff, may actually be worth that on its own.
This year according
to Nike: “"Two references really stood out during the design process for
the home kit – that stunning all-white kit England wore in Mexico in 1970 and
the idea of the armour of English Knights.
Ready for war? The England team take their new kit very seriously
