A little comment-rant here has expanded. There's lots of irrationality about the World Cup (I'm not even going to bother to look, it's all irrational, all of it, look everywhere...) and for the benefit of the considerable number of readers who really couldn't give a shit about it and feel that the blanket mania/depression is manic and depressing, I feel the (irrational) need to explain:
The World Cup is a dream, it's designed to be and it has to be. It will never matter that these early games are a little dull, this is entirely expected and will not effect the excitement levels at all because even while we're watching we'e editing the games, flicking back and forward in time and space, making our own best case scenarios - Thank God for the South African goal; that was enough to kick start everything... enough to start the splice, the edit...
The splice must flow.
Open Your Eyes, which became Vanilla Sky, is where we should be looking now; it's what every World Cup believer sees - a perfect simulation, a dream-cast, a BBC montage with a Rudyard Kipling Voice-Over (Even ITV are edited out in our memories)...
It's why 3D isn't necessary; won't be*. It's not like you're there, you are there. It's perhaps also why the Vuvuzelas are so scorned; they are blanking out the other sounds, the crowd swells - their pinky-white noise is making things a little less lush: maybe those beautiful Brasilian fans are blighted by a horn in their mouths, are evocative of the flipside of Carnival Culture, are faintly redolent of blow-jobs sold under motorway bridges....
cf: poor South Africa... those pitches, those houses... "It's like a waving flag..."
*“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
The early World Cup matches need to be regarded in terms of their overall purpose - they are foundational, they are there to support the future (better, flair-filled) matches; to pay the bills.
They are work, then comes play.
They have the Makele role - the more exciting matches will play off these early dull ones, will play around them until, hopefully and inevitably, they are subsumed via social cryptoamnesia and successfully integrated into the Best World Cup Moments Ever! show of 2014...
Of course, this is not destiny. There may be no great moments in this World Cup. Others have already commented on 1994's nadir, the collective amnesia that wiped everything... but perhaps we forget that 1994 existed because it's key moments were absences: Baggio missing, Diana Ross missing... even the winning Brazilian team is deemed inferior somehow to it's predecessors... we prefer the fluid, chain-smoking, beautiful lapses of the losing 1982 Brazilians to the hard-working Dunga-beetles of later Brazilian sides... better to die with a pretty face 3-2 than to grind a 1-0 victory and start parading about it...
The World Cup is about grit, determination, effort.
The World Cup is not about grit, determination effort.
Maybe this is England centric - maybe we like the grit; our winning side was rather solid and that achievement has thrown dangerous echoes down through British Football (why the hell wasn't the team built around Gazza, or Le Tissier? Because Le Tissier was lazy, was a bit, well, continental... Thank God for Rooney, who'll run himself dry and then do some little flicks...)
Our magnificently losing side of 1970 (considered better than 66, remember i.e. more flair-ful, less earnestly workmanlike)is the equivalent of Brazil 1982. Even the multi-winged side of 1990 was rather more Brazilian...
(((Even then, we look at Beardsley and Barnes and Gazza but we forget David Platt. How can we? He did most of the work, didn't he?)))
The World Cup is a dream, a string of Rorschach blots, a loose assemblage of unrelated factors, statistics, best-guesses and wishes thrown together to give the semblence of a whole... it's like a war, seen from the future... it appears to have coherency, to have real meaning, to illustrate the times even when, really, it's a clot, a delicately balanced thrombus... and the coagulant is belief; belief as noun as much as verb, belief in it's terrible raw essence: they will win, they will win, they will win.
Win, they will - is Germany via Schopenhauer, a tickle of Nietzche, is the characteristic of German football and the greatest threat of all - that organisation itself could conquer...
Of course, this is a terrible, tenacious stereotype - the 4-0 win was full of flair, albeit against a criminally odd / old side (who nevertheless had the first decent chance), but the Germans will never be a flair side, not unless they start using Brazilians (which must be cheating, mustn't it?). You see, even the Germans are in awe of the Brazilians of 1970 and 1982 because those Brazilians are the World Cup, whereas Germany just win it, and Italy just win it and...
Would even they prefer to lose beautifully?
The threat of organisation conquering all has overtaken everything else except the World Cup perhaps, which is why we still desperately need to think that Barcelona (or Arsenal) will win the Champions League even if they insist on this ridiculous pass and move, these silly little spirograph patterns, this flair, this beautiful game...
We might tell our mates to 'put yer foor through it' but in real footie (i.e. notreal football) we want a bit of ponce... and we selectively ignore that the Brazilian team of 1970, the team, were hard... they'd been brutalised in 1966 and they came back harder, faster, fitter, angrier... they destroyed teams and then played around them... you watch all the matches rather than the misleading highlights and you'll see that they put in real effort... they could grind and knew they had to...
Posession is overrated. Flair is overrated. Remember Christiano Ronaldo in his first year at Manchester United? - Just get it in there, son...
But still, ask yourself if you're really happy when Barcelona lost to the rigorously organised and magnificiently sufficient Inter Milan. Ask yourself if you wanted the angry skills of Argentina to beat the total football of Holland in 1978.
Patterns appear to be there but in a sample of, what, 20? It's difficult to generalise, but if we do...
Then England are going to win; they've been unlucky in the past, that's all, luck... there's a pattern here and we're on a surge, an upward trend, we're the winners that started small...
The World Cup is a dream, my frontal lobes have been deactivated. I look and I can't see. I've already started editing highlights in my head, games I haven't even seen yet. It'll be fantastic. It's not going to be 1994. It's going to be 1982. The sun is shining. Bryan Robson's shoulder is Okay. Kevin Keegan puts his had through that cross. Those mini-leagues of three have gone. The moon is out. The shining. There's some people on the pitch. Trevor Brooking isn't ill; he's pulling cartwheels, he's joining the Crouch robot procession. The fifth goal has gone in against Germany. Emile Heskey has scored. Lineker's coming in now...
My frontal lobes have been deactivated. Yours have too. Realism isn't an option. England to win. England to win. England to win.
Goddamn the sun.
Fuck the Enlightenment.
I'm off to put a tenner on Heskey to win the golden boot and it's only partly to see the look on the Bookie's face.
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