From chokers to conquistadors

There was something delightfully fitting about Andres Iniesta providing the decisive touch to the Spanish quest for the football Holy Grail. As John Dykes of ESPN observed, the sprightly Barcelona midfielder had embodied the ethos of the Spanish campaign at FIFA 2010 more than any other player. The present Spanish team under Vicente Del Bosque had distinguished itself from its earlier “flattering to deceive” World Cup avatars with a grittiness and tenacity that had empowered it to see off challenges from mighty adversaries like Germany and Portugal. And it was Iniesta that singularly exemplified these qualities – often dictating the tempo of the Spanish game and, ultimately, sealing the victory against the Dutch with that knock-out punch of a goal in the dying minutes of the extra time in Soccer City.





Despite the shocking defeat against Switzerland in their opening group game, the Spanish campaign this time around was marked by a resolve to refute the choruses of skeptics who had billed the team’s European Cup win in 2008 as a flash in the pan. The Spaniards were determined to bury the tag of chokers once and for all. And bury they did, and thus broke their World Cup jinx with their final win against the much-fancied Dutch.

    

Spain's monumental achievement has generated a flood of commentary seeking to read a wider political meaning into it. Many an animated pundit has found it hard to resist the temptation to elevate the Spanish triumph from merely a great sporting achievement to an event that portends a path-breaking and durable realignment in the Spanish political and cultural landscape. That a team comprising players from the various nationalities of Spain, a veritable melange of Basque, Catalan, and Castilian flavors, could project a united face on their road to world football domination is touted as a pointer to a collective Iberian yearning to wiggle out of the strong current of fragmented regionalism that has shaped Spain's identity as a nation for long. It has been remarked that the Spanish people are all set to dismantle the divisive legacy of General Franco for good.

However, this excessively sanguine view, smacking almost of a pitiable ignorance of the fractious and highly contested character and history of European nation states and national identities, has not gone completely unchallenged. Writing for the Counterpunch magazine, Harry Browne instills a measure of sobriety into the largely overblown examination of the Spanish World Cup triumph and its implications:

"Not only are sporting victories fleeting, but as much as we love our football it turns out we usually know the difference between the carnival politics of a soccer tournament and the real ones of our divided societies."

The Italian fiasco

You have to feel for Marcello Lippi. In posterity’s assessment, his failure to retain the FIFA World Cup in 2010 for Italy may overshadow his winning it for them in 2006. And, going by the political fallout in Italy of the Azzuri’s unceremonious exit from South Africa 2010, especially the alacrity with which the xenophobic Northern League latched onto it to advance their anti-immigrant rhetoric, Lippi may even be judged to have contributed massively to a neo-fascist risorgimento in southern Europe. That might seem a bit far-fetched. But if you know ‘posterity’ by now, you sure know it will find a way around it. Tony Blair gets it. That is why he is adamantly banking on posterity to ‘exonerate’ him for a misadventure that many among the ‘contemporary’ feel too close to the bone to exonerate him for. Given posterity’s well-documented penchant for the grotesque, Lippi may be praying to Santa Maria that he may be condemned merely as a failed football manager.


Lippi’s hope of successfully defending the title was pretty ambitious and a bit ahistoric to begin with (as P. Govinda Pillai might put it in one of his frequent hyperbolic moments, it was ‘diametrically opposed to the dialectically ordered trajectory of history’). There have been only two instances of nations winning the most sought-after crown in world football in consecutive fashion: Italy itself in 1934 and 1938; and Brazil in 1958 and 1962. And only Italy’s feat was accomplished with the same manager at the helm on both occasions (the matchless Vittorio Pozzo). So, Lippi might have guessed that his expectation of a comeback victory strayed a bit beyond the zone of the probable. In the inimitably street-wise lingo of the stand-up comedian Chris Rock, if you want to be guaranteed of making money on the ‘comeback’, you either have to be a drug dealer or a medical practitioner. And, needless to say, Lippi was neither.  


To be fair to Italy, they were not the first defending champions to bow out in the first round of the FIFA World Cup – the most recent instance being France’s disgraceful stumbling at the first hurdle in Korea-Japan 2002. Having drawn a blank in their first two matches, France had to beat Denmark by a margin of two goals in their final preliminary-round match in Incheon. A victory by two goals was achieved – by the Danes. What was unique about Italy’s departure was that it had seemed eerily inevitable from the start. And, when it finally happened with that shocker of a defeat against Slovakia at Ellis Park in Johannesburg, it hardly generated the sort of shockwaves that would normally accompany a high-profile team’s upset by minnows. 


Part of the reason for this collective nonchalance may have been what was evident all along – the elephant in the room – i.e. the team Italy brought to South Africa was, technically and talent-wise, million miles away from the one that triumphed in Germany four years ago. While the absence of Del Piero and Nesta was glaring, the presence and performance of the likes of Cannavaro and Zambrotta was hardly convincing. And the legendary rock solid Italian defense, the team’s kingpin in the normal run of things, crumbled like a pack of cards when exposed to hardly intimidating attacks from Paraguay and New Zealand. Midfield was often in disarray and Iaquinta’s and Di Natale’s striking abilities lacked the sting and predatory instincts of Totti and ‘Pippo’ Inzaghi. And, Gigi Buffon’s early exit due to injury deprived the team of a world-class goalkeeper. Italian team at South Africa 2010 was simply not championship material, period. 


Nevertheless, it’s not yet time to pen Italian football’s obituary. Italy has bounced back from disastrous tournaments before. In fact, on any given day, they are far superior to the grossly overrated but invariably ill-equipped sides like England. In Cesare Prandelli, Lippi’s replacement as national coach, they have a tactically accomplished and hard working manager. He has spent almost half a decade with the Tuscan outfit Fiorentina, enabling it to regain some of the spark that characterized the club when it had Gabriel Batistuta among its ranks. Italian football is all set to be on a road to recovery, and FIFA 2010 will soon be a distant memory.

Messi makes his mark

By the time Argentina took the field to meet South Korea at Soccer City, Johannesburg on the 17th of June, it was plainly high time some spark was woven into the jaded narrative of FIFA 2010. Instead of the stuff of dreams that had been hoped for, the world had been treated to a display of languid and uninspiring football. The tame affair that had unfolded often resembled a ludicrous comedy of errors. Pundits and commentators had started to dish out thinly disguised doomsday predictions. Airwaves and blogs were abuzz with heated debates as to how intense was the death knell of the beautiful game being rung in the Rainbow Nation. Big stars of the more fancied teams had especially come in for the most stringent type of flak. English tabloids had a field day mocking the “buttery fingers” of their goalkeeper, Robert Green. In fact, goalkeeping blunders and frequent near misses at goal were becoming the leitmotif of FIFA 2010. The much-vaunted Portuguese and the Spaniards appeared woefully short of ideas. Even the Germans’ relatively respectable performance against the Aussies was shorn of the habitual Teutonic, well-oiled efficiency. An extraordinary touch of brilliance was deemed necessary to steer the world event to a respectable level of reckoning. A gush of flair and fluidity, a dash of the spectacular were called for. A player of the caliber of Lionel Messi–the player who had enthralled Catalonia and rest of the world with his sublime skills–had to deliver. And he heeded the call on that sunny afternoon in Soccer City, and the Koreans were left to bear the brunt of a performance par excellence that ripped the fabric of the lethal ennui of the status quo.

All great players have had to deal with crushing burden of expectations throughout the bulk of their careers. While some are weighed down by it (remember the incredible fizzling out of the Columbian ace Faustino Asprilla at USA 94; the striker who played a key role in dismantling the mighty Argentines by 5 goals to nil in Buenos Aires at the South American qualification stage fell well short of replicating his feat at the Finals; he remained an ineffectual onlooker through Columbia’s ignominy, which petered out with that fatal own goal by Andres Escobar), others like Messi use it as a launching pad to excel and raise their game at its highest levels. That Messi was going to be instrumental in Argentina’s World Cup campaign had acquired the status of received wisdom even as the South American giants struggled through an unusually mediocre qualification campaign. When, in late 2009, Argentina was languishing at the bottom of CONMEBOL points table, Franz Beckenbauer articulated the thoughts of millions of football devotees all around the globe when he categorically told the Spanish daily El Mundo that “There cannot be a World Cup without a player like Like Messi”.

The Catalan powerhouse F. C. Barcelona had hitched its fortunes to a playing strategy heavily centered on Messi’s phenomenal abilities on their road to revival after a brief but agonizing spell of playing second fiddle to their loathed Castillian rivals, Real Madrid. He had an exceptional La Liga season in 2006-7. While his goal against Getafe in the Copa del Rey semifinal attracted instant comparison with none other than Maradona’s ‘Goal of the Century’ against England, it was the equally (in)famous ‘Hand of God’ that was invoked by the pundits to refer to the cheeky strike he made against the fellow Catalan outfit Espanyol in a league match. He played a stellar role in Barcelona’s successful 2008-09 UEFA Champions League campaign, topping his efforts with a goal to wrap things up in the Final against Manchester United. His crowning glory came in 2009 when he was awarded the FIFA World Player of the Year.

Only the seriously aesthetically challenged could have been oblivious to the verve and dynamism of Messi’s game against the Koreans. He produced moves of exceptional quality; turned, twisted and rammed his way through the defence. His passes were a delight to behold. And, a la Maradona, he exhibited an uncanny ability to slip away from his markers. He donned the role of playmaker and provider with ardor and panache. His presence and impact were so decisive in the game that it seems almost a travesty of justice that he didn’t make it into the scoring sheet. Gonzalo Higuaín may have emerged the top scorer, but it was Messi’s game all the way. And, hopefully, he may have raised the bar for other great players and provided a template for them to perform to their potential in the forthcoming matches at FIFA 2010. It’s still early days, and it’s conceivable that Messi may find it too demanding a task to sustain his excellence as the tournament progresses. But if he does continue to deliver his best, and guides Argentina to their third World Cup triumph, the Pele-Maradona greatness debate will be relegated to the footnotes of history.

Another "Italia 90" in the making?

If we were to prepare a list of epithets to reflect on the just-concluded preliminary round of matches of the 2010 World Cup, ‘damp squib’ would definitely be somewhere at the very top. Despite all the proclamations about superstars such as Messi, Rooney and Ronaldo ripping their rival teams into shreds, it’s their mighty reputations that lie largely in tatters. The skills, brilliance, and mastery of the game held in high esteem by the legions of their fans have been conspicuous–by their absence. The celebrated footballing abilities that enthralled Europe’s club circuit in the past season have apparently not crossed over to the ongoing edition of the game’s biggest spectacle. And, instead of the thrilling, free-flowing football the fans were hoping to savor, what has been on offer is an insipid brew of ineptitude and lackluster. And if the quality of the matches so far is a pointer to the way the event is evolving, what we can anticipate is a letdown of gigantic proportions.

The agony is compounded by the overwhelming sense that this is not how it was supposed to turn out. For some years, the whole soccer universe had held it as an article of faith that an event of the stature of the World Cup, the game’s hallowed ground, would never revisit anything akin to the horror that was Italia 90. Fans of the game still recoil at the thought of that nightmare of a tournament, in which certain venerated notions about the beautiful game came a cropper in the face of an unprecedented display of a negative and defensive approach to the game. A spell of serious soul-searching and an endeavor to revamp the tarnished character and philosophy of the game followed the debacle, and a consensus centered on the idea of a conscious and relentless rejection of attempts to ‘dumb down’ the game tactically and technically gradually emerged. Although never an unalloyed success, a deep-rooted conviction never to revert to the brief but horrendous fling with the foregrounding of the defensive game has been embedded in the outlook of the football fraternity at all levels post Italia 90. Even the rampant commercialization that reshaped the game in manifold ways since the early 1990s failed to a large extent to dismantle the project, and the football universe was thrilled to witness the game gaining back its stellar elegance and excellence with the roaring success of subsequent tournaments such as France 98 and Euro 2008.

However, the first few days of FIFA 2010 have generated an eerie sense of dismay and dread among the fans, as the quality of the tournament so far has been patchy at best. A sense that this is another Italia 90 in the making is slowly but steadily gathering momentum. Let’s hope that the ensuing round of matches will prove us wrong. Its time to keep our fingers crossed. Let’s keep believing that the spirit of Joga Bonito will ultimately prevail, and that the ghosts of Italia 90 will not be resurrected.