Just the best thing ever
Let’s start with the obvious. It’s wall-to-wall football for a period of a month, when otherwise all we’d be doing is sitting in front of the telly pretending to give even the faintest of flying fucks about cricket/tennis/the Olympics/other people. Not our style. Other people are all well and good when there’s some football to watch with them; less so when they’re in your flat trying to have a ‘conversation’.
Wall-to-wall football is so great that I’m going on a stag do on Saturday at which the only activity is watching all four matches. On the flip-side, the prospect of wall-to-wall football made my wife leave her engagement ring at home this morning (she maintains it was by mistake), but whichever way you look at it, there’s a big month of wide-eyed incredulity on the cards.
Let’s move on to the bit we have to get out of the way. We’ve repeatedly laid into England on these pages but, as you’ll have read LITERALLY EVERYWHERE, it’s a bit more difficult to do this time. It feels wrong eulogising a group of players before they’ve achieved anything, particularly as Gareth Southgate’s record at major tournament reads ‘played three, lost two, finished bottom of the group’ – a Euro U-21 group which admittedly contained Portugal, Italy and Sweden. But, you know, we’ll see.
Instead, let’s move into familiar territory and absolutely (and needlessly) fucking hammer the former manager. It’s an unquestionable delight that we won’t be watching Sam Allardyce’s England at this World Cup. Rooney a guaranteed starter. Lurking throwback Andy Carroll on the bench. A 1-0 loss to a very mobile Tunisia, 0-0 against Panama and a dead rubber versus Belgium. This World Cup will be ace because at least England will try and play a bit of football.
Even though we don’t expect England to unduly trouble the hearts and minds of aspiring footballers at home and around the world, there are more than enough players that will. Some of them we know, some of them we haven’t heard a lot about yet. And this is the real reason the World Cup is ace. You can’t win it by buying the best players (although you can be rich enough to invest in decent infrastructure regardless of population, but let’s not split hairs). It’s about as near to a level playing field as you get in football these days.
And for that reason, there are always stories, and they’re better stories than Ronaldo has scored 80 goals in 40 minutes, or City have scored 100 goals that technically cost them £3.5 million per goal, or whatever. It’s the story of a team that embarks on a complete journey into the unknown, or of a player that single-handedly drags them there. Moments of drama, emotion, controversy that become etched in your memory because of the glorious detachment of it taking place halfway around the world, football seemingly from another planet.
Of course, there is a political and social context to every World Cup and any preview worth its salt can’t ignore that given the many and far-reaching effects the World Cups can have on host nations. But we measure value solely in apples and onions, which contain basically no salt, so you’ll excuse us if we just fucking crack on with the whole thing being amazing.
The best bit so far has been the reactions of journalists and commentators who have packed all their most ridiculous preconceptions and travelled to Russia truly believing that absolutely everything exists in the political theatre trumpeted by their own papers and TV channels. Most are wandering round one or more of the host cities genuinely baffled that they haven’t been arrested simply for being Western, or been detained by the FSB for some extra-curricular and surprisingly over-friendly ‘customs checks’.
And that’s because, whatever you think about a country’s state apparatus, that rarely, if ever, applies to its millions of citizens. Alright, there are undoubtedly heavy stenches of corruption surrounding the whole circus, and a lingering threat of hooliganism, but it’s not as if all 145 million Russians are in on it. The streets aren’t paved with Putin and its people don’t deserve to be tarred with the same brush. Russia is as football-mad a country as anywhere else and, at risk of making ourselves look like utter twats when everyone gets their heads kicked in at the opening ceremony, will mostly be there to enjoy the tournament. It may surprise some people, but football can bring people together and that’s why it’s ace.
The sport is at its most powerful as a shared experience, and part of the reason this blog was born was down to us standing in one of London’s many pubs, as people left us alone because they thought we were having a fight simply because we were northern, reminiscing about World Cups. And it’s specifically World Cups because your fairly tiresome club loyalties are set to one side. And it was specifically World Cup 94 that we bonded over particularly, probably because neither England nor Scotland were actually there. But Romario, Gheorghe Hagi, Gabriel Batistuta and Hristo Stoichkov were.
And, in case you missed it, and because far be it for us to let the opportunity for a plug pass us by, the World Cup ultimately led us to publish a book – a book sincere in its depiction of football as a uniting force, a book that features a huge number of international teams from those eras of grainy television coverage and players you’d generally never heard of. A book that attempts to capture exactly why the World Cup is ace (get it here).
Anyway. The World Cup 2018 is the next step on that journey. One that has already produced stories and memories involving all the greats: Eusebio, Charlton, Pele, Maradona, Baggio, Ronaldo, Zidane, erm… Danny Mills. Football at its simplest – you may not know about a lot of these teams, but you’re sure as hell going to find out over the next four weeks. It’s going to be gloriously unpredictable, surprising, exciting and above all, fucking ace.
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