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The world’s most watched sports tournament delivers on a number of levels to more than half the world’s population, whose emotional side gets a fearsome workout during these few mad weeks.
The other side of our brain is telling us that it’s just a game, just a football match. Life goes on.
We can’t help reflecting on the Socceroos’ performances and a triumvirate of honourable losses. We would have beaten the Dutch if only Tommy Oar could have made a decent pass to Mathew Leckie, I hear them say.
What about Tim Cahill’s goal? Best of the tournament. Best Socceroos goal ever. Still, we lost all three games and conceded nine goals to be the first to arrive and the first to leave Brazil.
The Uruguayan manager Oscar Tabarez accused FIFA of making Luis Suarez a scapegoat. He said the blow-up of the biting incident was racially motivated and had been whipped up by “English-speaking agitators”. If English isn’t your native tongue, then it wasn’t a deliberate bite.
Poor old Luis couldn’t resist the tasty chip on the shoulder of saucy Italian Giorgio Chiellini. Circle the Uruguayan wagons and support your man, we need you in the knockout phase Luis. Predictable reaction to a nine-match, four-month ban on Suarez for his extraordinarily delicious actions. It did raise some interesting thoughts about what exactly drives people in a football World Cup tournament.
Arjen Robben, one of the best attacking wingers in world football, just can’t keep his balance when bumped in the penalty area. Instead of enhancing his reputation as one of the world’s best players, he’s now renowned as one of its worst cheats.
Host nation Brazil severely embarrassed itself and the footballing home of Jogo Bonito with a 7-1 thrashing at the hands of Germany. No doubt attributable to the Colombian assassin Juan Zuniga, who now needs a personal bodyguard and police protection to move anywhere around South America.
Neymar was very gracious and very thankful that he wasn’t made a life-long paraplegic from the accidental knee in the back.
Throw in a good dose of match fixing, illegal betting, FIFA corruption, illegal drugs, crimes against tourists, sexual gratification and exploitation, terrorist bombings of fans watching the World Cup, religious and social differences, ticket pricing scandals, social inequality, poverty and then chuck in some bad refereeing decisions for good measure.
They call football the universal game, the world game. Does it have universal values to which all countries and cultures subscribe? Or are we still the unsophisticated, rough, muscular amateurs who formed the Football Association in 1863 and devised the original laws and rules which standardised the fashion and spirit in which the game is played?
Do the Western Europe nations and their colonies approach to the game differ to that of Latin, Mediterranean, South American or African nations? Is this simply down to differences in culture and the way in which different people do things? Corruption, cheating and bribery seems to be a way of life for some countries. We can’t understand it.
The football is the glittering light that hypnotises and takes attention away from the things that aren’t right. No one is talking about the investigation into Qatar being granted the World Cup hosting rights for 2022 any more.
Brazil are impoverished and in debt up to its eyeballs for having to pay for the World Cup, while FIFA takes nearly all the money generated.
Brazil has strict laws against selling alcohol in stadiums due to the previously high incidences of fan violence and death rates, but FIFA has conveniently overruled because of its rich sponsorship deal with American alcohol giant Budweiser.
You can either be horrified by that or relieved that you can still get drunk at games. Let’s be glad that FIFA isn’t also sponsored by Colombian cocaine, Swedish chainsaws, Winchester rifles or New York crime lords.
It’s common knowledge now that FIFA and bribery go together like a horse and carriage. One US commentator said that, “FIFA and corruption go together like peanut butter and jelly”. FIFA and bribery should go together like peanut butter and a child with a deadly nut allergy.
And by the way, FIFA is a non-profit organisation. They’ll pay no tax on the five or six billion dollars they collect from Brazil 2014. They are running out of ways to spend their money and running out of Swiss bank accounts. Is any of it spent legally?
FIFA President Sepp Blatter said the allegations surrounding the Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup are racist.
“There is a sort of storm against FIFA relating to the Qatar World Cup,” Blatter said.
“Sadly, there’s a great deal of discrimination and racism.”
Makes one smirk and chuckle to oneself, doesn’t it?
This man will return unopposed at the next election as the leader of the world’s biggest and most profitable non-profit organisation in the world.
Let us not forget the football. There is a FIFA World Cup final on this weekend between Germany and Argentina. It will be an intriguing game to watch and hopefully a bit more entertaining than Argentina’s last match against the Dutch.
The rules of football haven’t basically changed that much in more than 150 years since the Football Association was formed, but have the people who play it and follow it, or those who run it, changed for the better in that time?
Not just Suarez’s bite, but a number of things about FIFA and this World Cup leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth. Kenny Dalglish once said of the Liverpool Football Club, “The world hates us, but we don’t care.”
One of the good things about this World Cup or any World Cup, is the diversity of the nations in their emotions, passion, spirit and culture and the way their heroes play the game of football.
To see football players from every continent in the world coming together in a quest to win a single unifying trophy is a wonderful thing. And haven’t there been some great moments and breathtaking revelations in this tournament.
Against the backdrop of the unimaginable commercialism and money that underpin the World Cup and the modern professional game, it would be even better, not least in the context of the lives of the people who follow it, if FIFA did so in an atmosphere in which the fundamental integrity of the sport could reign supreme.
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