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World Cup

Reads of the Day: There is No Methadone for This

The party’s over, and we’re already forgetting what she looked like. Futfanatico says reality has already been digested by the Spanish metanarrative, while David Gendelman at Fair Play says we’re all already losers. At True/Slant, Zach Dundas argued before the match that the two squads embodied the two sides of soccer: control versus incident, era versus accident. Fake Sigi says it wasn’t the worst World Cup ever, just “crap soccer masquerad[ing] as the pinnacle of the sport.” And The Globe and Mail’s John Doyle enjoyed watching the upending of North American notions of sport as a series of Hallmark moments.

(Image credit: mallix/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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Stop Defending Tony Meola’s Haircut

On the one hand, Americans are still faced with the “Soccer is Gay and Foreign and Makes My Shriveling Mind Hurt” genre of xenophobic sports journalism — which hasn’t evolved in two decades. But the counter-genre — “Will Soccer Now Make It in America?” as exemplified by Hendrik Hertzberg’s recent piece in The New Yorker — has grown equally tiresome and obsolete. The argument is over, and the TV ratings for the World Cup prove it. “It’s not 1990 any more; we don’t have to defend Tony Meola’s haircut.” (Zach Dundas/True/Slant)

Read of the Day: Is the World Cup a Grave?

The World Cup embodies time’s arrow and life’s implacable drama: survival for another day; a ritualized “series of survivals and demises,” on a scale like no other save a world war, with all of us watching and assenting. A winner emerges into immortality, sort of, only to become “a burden, an anxiety” in the next round. This is why the failure of Hungary 1954 is “the perfect World Cup story” — the failure of the most nearly perfect team, like the greatest king falling on the battlefield. “It brought up the tyranny of the irreversible moment like a new scar.” (Fredorrarci/Sport is a TV Show)

Read of the Day: The Inner Side of History’s Wind

“The sheer scale of the World Cup as an event probably smooths out our perceptions, and that’s also part of the memory problem: one game turns over onto the next so relentlessly that there’s no time to process it all, and even elevated moments start to feel like they’re part of an undifferentiated routine. One way or the other, these games sneaked up on me like an assassin who wanted a kiss…I hate this game, I love this game, I live only to forget.” (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)

The Best World Cup Referees: The Aura of Pig-Pen

Some World Cup referees are bad, as we know — while some work on their game presence and prepare as meticulously as Mourinho. “You should know in advance what could happen,” says Pierluigi Collina, once considered the best in the game. “You should be informed about the tactics by the teams and the characteristics of the single player, which part they normally play, which part of the field they normally cover, which kind of foot they normally prefer.” (David Gendelman/Fair Play)

The World Cup and the Wrong End of the Telescope

The World Cup imposes tunnel vision on us — we unblinkingly view our respective national soccer cultures through its tiny, four-week-wide lens, hopeful and fretful, mistaking the iris for the whole, especially if the side seems to underachieve. Then the whole apparatus appears defective; and then the telescope swings to the pipeline of talent that is or isn’t in place for the next Cup, poring over careers in their pupae stage for markers of future success. The madness of the nearly blind. (Jason Davis/Match Fit USA)

Read of the Day: US Soccer & the Course of Human Events

For the rest of the world, the World Cup is “a chance to flex their jingoistic love-muscle like never before.” Not so in the United States, where fans are often ashamed of their country and love soccer because it represents “liberated fandom…an anti-essentialist essentialism, a nationalism open to international possibilities.” That way lies snobbery, “expat fantasies and Third World exoticism” — but it also proposes a new path for the world. As long as we can avoid being all George Will about it… (Bethlehem Shoals/The Atlantic; scroll down a bit. HT: The Run of Play.)

Oh So Predictably Boring

The whispers have grown into groans, even from aficionados — this World Cup is boring. And even that boringness was oh-so-predictable — reflecting the altitude, increasing tactical defensiveness, and players’ refusal to risk their European club careers for what amounts to a series of exhibitions. “The World Cup may well be on its way to becoming something like baseball’s All-Star Game — a wonderful and memorable occasion but not a place where legends are made anymore.” (Steven and Harrison Stark/The Cup Running Over)

Is the World Cup a Turd Sandwich?

Is anyone else just a little discomfited by the mandatory Kumbayas to World Cup nirvana? “Everything about this tournament feels cold and inhuman to me. It feels like everyone is going through the motions and dancing around a giant — how do I say this? — turd sandwich…Having to watch Bono prance around on a stage while post-colonial third world teams labor impossibly against the debt-laden richer nations has convinced me that the 2010 World Cup exposes more about what’s broken in our world than what’s correct.” (Fake Sigi)

Read of the Weekend: Lebanon Hosts the World Cup

The first of the flags flew in January — two per car, fastened by next to nothing on the back-seat windows. Then from rooftops, balconies, across streets. Then on pizzas, tattoos, bikinis. No other people are as crazy for the World Cup as the Lebanese — not only did they stop their civil war to watch the matches, they crossed the lines to watch with the enemy when their own power went out. Everyone there has a favorite country, and the allegiances often make no sense, and are all the more fanatical for it. On Europe: “They don’t understand passion over there. They can’t love.” (Rahib Alameddine/The New Republic)

Read of the Day: In Praise of Diving

The countdown is on…not to the World Cup opener, but to the first appallingly operatic, transparent and uncarded dive of the tournament – and to the predictable outrage immediately to follow. Get over it, North America and England: The dive exemplifies the game in the rest of the world, “as much theatre as it is athletic endeavour.” Real men, it turns out, don’t adhere “to some redneck North American guy code of ethics. They are men. They intend to win. By any means necessary.” (Paul Doyle/Globe and Mail)

Read of the Day: Soccer and American Exceptionalism

Even as the World Cup depends on nationalism, it celebrates a game now reliant on a global labor market that undercuts national boundaries. But U.S. sports are historically tied to American exceptionalism — from assimilating new immigrants through compulsory school sports to the Miracle on Ice. So will soccer ever fit in in the United States — especially when rightists from the Wall Street Journal to the American Enterprise Institute deride soccer as European, socialist, and marked with “death and despair”? (Toby Miller/The Chronicle Review)

The Shame of Gijon 1982

Algeria’s first World Cup appearance since 1986 brings back memories of one of the most shameful episodes of soccer history — the non-football that West German and Austria played in the final match of the first round at Gijon, Spain, ensuring that both would go through and Algeria would go home. Was it a conspiracy? Or was FIFA to blame for not starting all of a group’s matches at the same time? (Ian/TwoHundredPercent)

The Cheated Destiny of Salvador Cabanas

Salvador Cabanas, the superb Paraguayan striker shot in the head in Mexico City three months ago, is on his way to a remarkable recovery — he’s playing kickabouts in hospital and wants to play in the World Cup. That he can’t possibly make it is a tragedy: At 29, he will be on the downslope in four years, and South Africa was to be the one chance at glory in his late-blooming career. (Tim Vickery/FIFA World Cup Blog)

South Africa: The Grass is Never Greener

Durban’s new $457m Moses Mabhida Stadium is gorgeous — especially the grass, “a green so bright it hurts the eyes, with every blade appearing as if it were painstakingly colored with a magic marker.” Grass created by constant irrigation in a country where water scarcity is leading to protests, in a stadium named after a anti-poverty fighter — this is “irony in its most lurid form.” And many South Africans are having second thoughts. (Dave Zirin/The Progressive)

The Cup Runneth Over

The Champions League has higher quality play, more parity, and more respect in the footballing community than does the World Cup. So why is the World Cup still #1? No, it’s not the anthems… (Neil W. Blackmon/The Yanks are Coming)

Read of the Day: Against Shootouts

Sepp Blatter promised a rethink four years ago…but here comes another World Cup that could be decided on PKs. Instead, what about overtimes with progressively decreasing squad sizes…down to seven on seven, say? (Christopher Clarey/NYTimes.com)

Petit Against the World

Emmanuel Petit still rages about how he was a better player than Zinédine Zidane for France in the ’98 World Cup — and how Adidas and French political correctness conspired to deny him that recognition. He’s crazy, right? Right? (Gabrielle Marcotti/The Times)

England = Fail

Wayne Bridge, Emotional Suicide Bomber? With the Bridge/Terry soapdish, the British press has its 2010 narrative of English failure: John Terry starring as The Man Who Shagged Away the World Cup. Oh, but stop blaming the press…