The World Cups of our youth played a huge role in fostering our love for football at its purest. Then we discover football with agendas…
I PLAYED A golden game on Friday night.
A golden game is one of those rare occasions where everything you do in a match comes off. Every block is true, every pass perfect. Not only that but I was vocal throughout and somehow helped the team keep shape. We won 2-1.
I get a golden game about once every two years. I’m more susceptible to the more ‘awful game’ variant. I’m an absolutely terrible footballer.
I should also point out that this was a very, very low-level game. Tubby lads in Norfolk rather than something involving uniform kits, but I’m taking it all the same. There are some talented lads — one of our number (get this!) was a semi-pro at Fakenham Town. But in the main the scouts stay away.
But what it did do was give me a buzz all the way through to the following afternoon. Not just the performance, such as it was, but the lovely feeling of being in control of the ball, of having a laugh with your mates and of not embarrassing yourself for once. The sort of feeling you used to get after a seven-hour game with your mates in the summer holidays.
You have to hold onto that for as long as you can and not read about the wider issues unless you want to be disappointed.
I read this week that most people’s favourite World Cups tend to be their firsts. Mine certainly was. Argentina 1978 was incredible. I was allowed to stay up late and watch grimy pictures from the other side of the world. Kenny Dalglish was there in a different kit wearing a different number. The Dutch looked amazing, Peru had one of the greatest kits of all time and Argentina didn’t go anywhere without a ticker-tape parade. It had an incredible effect on my nine-year old soul.
It reached into my chest and tweaked my heart. Even the ball was fantastic.
It was years later that I learned what was going on around the football. The non-football people using the world’s greatest game for their own ends.
The whole tournament was tainted with accusations of bribery, of deportations and of political chicanery.
Argentina jailed its most vocal dissidents before the tournament and there were reports of the home nation’s dictator visiting the Peru dressing room shortly before their game which Argentina had to win by four clear goals. Whether it was a mere hello or threats of sanctions from its larger, more powerful neighbour are not known, but there he was, talking to the Peru team in the presence of U.S Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Argentina won 6-0.
Just a coincidence, maybe – just like that the coincidence of the Argentinian government issuing Peru with a ‘non-refundable credit’ just ten days after the final.
Football is beautiful until it grows to the point of corporate and political opportunism.
Maybe that level of manipulation doesn’t exist here, but there are certainly power-grabs that have nothing to do with a bouncing ball on a green pitch.
This week the online pundit Mark Goldbridge publicly slammed Gary Lineker’s appearances on ITV where he plugs his podcast. ‘Cheap move for a decent presenter with below average football analysis’ the Big Chair lad said of the former Barcelona striker and World Cup Golden Boot winner. ‘Average football analysis.’
Baffling, though perhaps Goldbridge and his new cohorts on ‘The Overlap’ are a little jealous of The Rest is Football’s daily Netflix appearances and thought that this dig would sew unrest. In any case it’s a bit weird given that one pundit can talk about his glittering European and international career and the other can do that weird fake grimace when he’s not happy with something, which is most of the time. Another sideshow beef to the great game we can all do without if your interest in football is predominantly football.
And there are plenty of those. The current tournament being played in a country wrapped in draconian foreign policies, referees not being allowed to attend because they’re from certain countries, FIFA’s President telling the world to chill out about that, the last World Cup being played in a country with an appalling human rights record and the one before that a place where the ‘international LGBT movement’ is viewed as an extremist organization. Those three venues, all sanctioned by FIFA, whose motto is, almost inevitably, ‘For the Game. For the World.’
It’s easy to fall out of love with the game when it gets to that level of hypocrisy. The essence of it all but forgotten.
Last week, Liverpool sent me a travel coffee mug in thanks for my continued membership of my home club. A week earlier they told me that, though I applied for pretty much everything, I was now on 0 credits and have a better chance of playing for them than watching them at Anfield. It’s the most expensive mug I’ve ever inadvertently bought.
This game being THE game now.
But then you see the Ghana fans celebrating their late winner before it was actually scored (they had a notification from a live betting site) and the DR Congo fans celebrating on their own in Lisbon, in a sea of Portugal shirts, and realise that this is where we began our buy-in with the game. The rest is just corporate power blocs draining all the joy and money they can out of it.
And sometimes that’s enough. I had a freakishly good game on Friday. I’ll be average to awful again next week, but it won’t matter as playing the game at any age at any ability is what brought us all in in the first place. This is football without agenda.
I may have failed to mention my deflected own goal in this game, but corruption gets everywhere these days.
