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.