The World Cup: Between and beyond the goal posts

The Queen presents Bobby Moore the 1966 World Cup at Wembley

Rajan Philips-July 14, 2018, 8:57 pm 

"It’s coming home" – football is coming home, is the chant of the English football fans, first started when England hosted the Euro in 1996 and revived this year as English hopes rose over the last two weeks after a surprising run by a very young English national team in the 2018 World Cup in Russia. England led by the legendary Bobby Moore won the World Cup for the first time and only time in 1966 when it also hosted the tournament. The hopes of winning again after 52 years were doused last Wednesday by Croatia, a country of four million people, who defeated England 2-1 in the second semi-final to clinch a place in today’s final. Croatia will play France, who got the better of Belgium in the first semi-final on Tuesday. This is Croatia’s first appearance in a World Cup Final, and France’s third. France, 1998 winner and 2006 runner-up, is the favoured team, but they will have to prove it later today in Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium. The World Cup will be ‘coming home’ to either Paris or Zagreb, not London.

It should be an interesting, even riveting, final, as indeed the whole tournament has been – unpredictable, open ended, with extraordinary individual and team talents in full competitive display. The tournament favourites have fallen and gone one by one. Two giants of European and international soccer, Italy and Netherlands, did not even qualify to play in Russia. Reigning champions, Germany, could not go past the first round, finishing fourth in their group of four. Germany lost to Mexico in the opening game, squeezed out a last second victory against Sweden thanks to an awesome set-piece goal by Toni Kroos, but thoroughly imploded in the final group game going down 2-0 to plucky South Korea. The German team had all the great names but not the legs to match the younger usurpers. With Germany’s exit, the last four reigning World Cup champions have failed to pass the group stage while defending their championship title.

The South American teams after initial good showings also perished in the knockout stages, leaving the 2018 semi-finals an all European contest – France v. Belgium and Croatia v. England. Brazil, the perpetual favourite, was done in by talented Belgium in the quarter finals. Brazil had earlier eliminated Mexico in the first knockout round. Uruguay could not maintain its early promise in the quarterfinals against France. France had seen off Argentina 4-3 in the first knockout round. That match was described by pundits as one of the great contests in World Cup history. It indeed was a great game, with Argentina putting up a strong show after its lack lustre performance in the group matches. Alas, it wasn’t enough for Argentina, previous winners in 1978 and 1986, to give its icon Lionel Messi, considered the greatest ever soccer player, another chance to win the game’s biggest prize. Argentina and Messi were the losing finalists to Germany in Brazil in 2014. It was a touching sight of sportsmanship and camaraderie after the game to see every member of the young French team hugging Messi with empathy and respect. Messi’s torch, it is said, has now been passed to Frances teenage sensation at this World Cup, Kylian Mbappé, one of the many French players with African roots.

The other and the more self-promoting all time soccer great, Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal began with a hat trick in the drawn group game against Spain. Portugal was eliminated by Uruguay in the knockout stage, but that did not stop Ronaldo from upstaging the World Cup in Russia with his inter-club self-trading elsewhere in Europe – selling himself out of Spain’s Real Madrid club after nearly a decade with them and buying into Juventus in Turin, Italy, for a pricy sum of $130 million on a four year contract. Big money dominates big sports. And the commercialization of sports as mass entertainment is now an integral part of global capitalism. And bigger the event or organization more fertile they are for corruption to sink roots and thrive. The World Cup is the pinnacle of all commercialized sporting events, and there are millions more events of varying sizes in myriads of sports in thousands of cities in hundreds of countries. Marketing and moneymaking in sports goes beyond and between events and permeates all aspects of the commercial culture – from fashions to food to music and films and to betting. Ronaldo’s purchase by Juventus was celebrated in Turin with a new ice cream flavour, a pizza named after him, and fans lining up to buy his fashion line shirt.

"It’s coming home" – football is coming home, is the chant of the English football fans, first started when England hosted the Euro in 1996 and revived this year as English hopesrose over the last two weeks after a surprising run by a very young English national team in the 2018 World Cup in Russia. England led by the legendary Bobby Moore won the World Cup for the first time and only time in 1966 when it also hosted the tournament. The hopes of winning again after 52 years were dousedlast Wednesday by Croatia, a country of four million people, who defeated England 2-1 in the second semi-final to clinch a place in today’s final. Croatia will play France, who got the better of Belgium in the first semi-final on Tuesday. This is Croatia’s first appearance in a World Cup Final, and France’s third. France, 1998 winner and 2006 runner-up, is the favoured team, but they will have to prove it later today in Moscow’s LuzhnikiStadium. The World Cup will be ‘coming home’ to either Paris or Zagreb, not London.

It should be an interesting, even riveting, final, as indeed the whole tournament has been – unpredictable, open ended, with extraordinary individual and team talents in full competitive display. The tournament favourites have fallen and gone one by one. Two giants of European and international soccer, Italy and Netherlands, did not even qualify to play in Russia. Reigning champions, Germany, could not go past the first round, finishing fourth in their group of four. Germany lost to Mexico in the opening game, squeezed out a last second victory against Sweden thanks to anawesome set-piece goal by Toni Kroos, but thoroughly imploded in the final group game going down 2-0 to plucky South Korea. The German team had all the great names but not the legs to match the younger usurpers. With Germany’s exit, the last four reigning World Cup champions have failed to pass the group stage while defending their championship title.

The South American teams after initial good showings also perished in the knockout stages, leaving the 2018 semifinals an all European contest – France v. Belgium and Croatia v. England.Brazil, the perpetual favourite,was done in by talented Belgium in the quarter finals. Brazil had earlier eliminated Mexico in the first knockout round. Uruguay could not maintain its early promise in the quarterfinals against France. France had seen off Argentina 4-3 in the first knockout round. That match was described by pundits as one of the great contests in World Cup history. It indeed was a great game, with Argentina putting up a strong show after its lack lustre performance in the group matches. Alas, it wasn’t enough for Argentina, previous winners in 1978 and 1986, to give its icon Lionel Messi, considered the greatest ever soccer player, another chance to win the game’s biggest prize. Argentina and Messi were the losing finalists to Germany in Brazil in 2014. It was a touching sight of sportsmanshipand camaraderie after the game to see every member of the young French team hugging Messi with empathy and respect. Messi’s torch, it is said, has now been passed to Frances teenage sensation at this World Cup, KylianMbappé, one of the many French players with African roots.

The other and the more self-promoting all time soccer great, Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal began with a hat trick in the drawn group game against Spain. Portugal was eliminated by Uruguay in the knockout stage, but that did not stop Ronaldo from upstaging the World Cup in Russia with his inter-club self-trading elsewhere in Europe – selling himself out of Spain’s Real Madrid club after nearly a decade with them and buying into Juventus in Turin, Italy, for a pricy sum of $130 millionon a four year contract. Big money dominates big sports. And the commercialization of sports as mass entertainment is now an integral part of global capitalism.And bigger the event or organization more fertile they are for corruption to sink roots and thrive.The World Cup is the pinnacle of all commercialized sporting events, and there are millions more events of varying sizes in myriads of sports in thousands of cities in hundreds of countries. Marketing and moneymakingin sports goes beyond and between events and permeates all aspects of the commercial culture – from fashions to food to music and films and to betting. Ronaldo’s purchase by Juventus was celebrated in Turin with a new ice cream flavour, a pizza named after him, and fans lining up to buy his fashion line shirt.

Sports stars are bigger celebrities than film stars and the big names in sports have huge social media followings. And major sports have become the new religions of capitalism, if not quite the opium of the masses. The moralists on the left insist it is, and call it a new form of social control and a modern day projection of Darwinian competition. Sports stadiums and events are interpreted as current versions of the old Roman colosseums, where gladiators fought, and slaves were forced to fight themselves or animals unto death in front delirious crowds. New sports stadiums are indeed the arenas where state agencies and corporations meet to squander and pilfer public money. But society’s interest in modern sports preceded the current phases of commercialization, globalization and corruption, and sporting events from the time of ancient Greece have been providing the stage for gifted athletes to excel and entertain quite positively their audiences with consummate skills and athletic feats. There have been copious displays of them at this World Cup. Ronaldo himself showed his greatness scoring off a free kick goal against Spain, kicking the ball on a trajectory that seemed to bend both along the curve and the tangent. England’s Kieran Trippier produced another peach of a free kick goal against Croatia that was remarkable for its precision as well as a thing of beauty. The poet Keats would have been proud.

Great athletes are now richly rewarded, as they should be, unlike their predecessors thirty years ago. They invariably become role models for children and younger players, many of whom make enormous sacrifices to become individual sports stars themselves. But the vast the majority of aspiring youngsters do not make the cut and find it difficult to readjust to normal life. So much so that Michael Jordon, his lofty ‘Airness’ of Basket Ball, when asked if he would consider himself a role model for African American children, he said his example was more a curse than a role model to them. Jordon said, he would rather have children pursuing normal careers as doctors or lawyers or accountants instead of burning themselves to become sports stars. Commercialization has also deprived sports of its educational usefulness in schools, as it used to be in the old days, for cultivating team spirit, role playing and leadership skills. On the other hand, commercialization of education has created non-state private schools that are veritable cram shops devoid of creative life and recreation.

Sports and Politics

Hitler, his name keeps coming up more frequently nowadays, tried to racialize sports during World War II. Jesse Owens, the African American sprinter, repudiated Hitler with a stellar performance winning four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. There was also a German hero at the Olympics, long jumper Carl Ludwig (Luz) Long, who ignored Hitler and the instruction to win gold, by advising Owens who was on the verge of being disqualified for foul jumps in the first round, to jump from a foot behind the take-off board to qualify for the final round of jumps. Owens went on to win gold, Long settled for Silver but was the greater for it. The real story of Owens is that he returned to a formally welcoming but racially segregated America. The barriers of segregation would not start coming off for another fifteen or twenty years, and America’s racial innards were exposed to the world when American gold and bronze medalists in the 200-meter event at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raised their fists from the medal podium in Black Power salute to their American flag and national anthem. Donald Trump, the present disruptor in chief, is exposing the remnant innards again by insisting that American footballers should stand up for the national anthem after some of them started going down on one knee to protest against police violence targeting Blacks.

The 2018 World Cup is remarkable for the racial blending of West European football teams. The Latin American teams have always been racially mixed, and the mostly monochromatic teams in Russia, are the few East European, the two Asian and the two African teams. Indeed, the French team has more Blacks than Whites and there is hoping in France that their team will win today to boost national unity. The English team includes more Blacks and Muslims than any time before, all of them sang God Save the Queen quite lustily, and they were also the more inconsolable after England’s loss to Croatia. The colour changes in team composition have been occurring over the last twenty years or so and they are in stark contrast to the teams that competed in 1966 when England won the World Cup.

1966 was the epicentre of the Sixties, the famed postwar decade for socio-cultural and political convulsions. 1968, the year of universal turmoil was still two years away. Charles de Gaulle was in power in 1966, and Croatia was not even a country – it was part of the Yugoslavian Federation under Josip Tito, the Croatian federalist who vowed that the Danube will flow backward before Yugoslavia could break up. Kennedy had come and gone by 1966. So had his counterpart Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, which seemed unassailable in the Cold War of that time. Paul VI was the Pope in the Vatican, the only Pope in history from the ranks of the (Milanese) bourgeoisie. Harold Wilson was Britain’s Labour Prime Minister. Pakistan was still under Ayub Khan’s military dictatorship, while Indira Gandhi became India’s Prime Minister in January 1966.

Sports as a cultural phenomenon, along with art, music, not to mention the mini-skirt and bell-bottoms, was intertwined in the political and cultural controversies of the day and the decades that followed. The English Team’s 1966 World Cup win against Germany was a factor in Labour’s election victory later that year, even as the same team’s defeat to the same German team in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico contributed to Labour’s defeat four years later. 1966 also precipitated healthy soccer rivalries, which also became the source of nationalist angsts, between England and Germany as well as between England and Argentina. Argentina mourned its loss to England in the 1966 quarter-finals, as the "robbery of the century." It would have its revenge twenty years later in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, when Argentina defeated England 2-1. Diego Maradona scored both of Argentina’s two goals. The first was the infamous handball goal which Maradona famously explained as "the hand was the hand of God (Diego) and the foot was the foot of Maradona!" The second goal was best described by a salivating Scottish commentator on live television: Maradona took the ball in midfield and "ran through the entire English side to score the goal of the century."

England’s continuing lack of success in international football after 1966, especially its chronic inability to prevail in penalty shootouts, became a major source of national anguish and the rise of soccer hooliganism in England in the 1980s and 1990s came to be seen as a social consequence of Margaret Thatcher’s harsh and insensitive politics. England’s defeat to Germany in the 1990 World Cup semi-final penalty shootout in Rome, did not affect her politically. She is said to have quietened her cabinet ministers who were distraught about losing to Germany again in the game that England invented, by reminding them that "England defeated Germany twice this century in the game they invented." No minister would have had the courage to tell her that that she too played the war game against Argentina quite unnecessarily over Falklands. England wouldn’t risk a game with China over Hong Kong. Quite apart from football, England is now a house divided within itself and from its British constituent parts – over what to do with Brexit. An England-France final today would have Brexit written all over it. Never mind.

To end on a homeward note – 1966 was also the year when JR Jayewardene addressed the annual conference of the then Ceylon Association for the Advancement of Science (CAAS, now SLAAS), wherein he mused about an executive presidential (EP) system for Sri Lanka. Nobody took it seriously then and for a long after, until eleven years later, in 1977, JRJ won quite fortuitously a tyrannical majority in parliament to implement his idiosyncratic constitutional model for Sri Lanka. Thirty one years later, the debate is continuing as to whether the EP system should be maintained or modified. At the same time, candidates and potential candidates are lining up for the next presidential race, consulting astrologers and receiving ecclesiastical birthday blessings.

In the spirit of football, it is fair to ask where the current candidates were in 1966 and how many of them would have had any interest in politics, let alone the constitutional and a presidential system. Well, here is a list of facetious answers: Of the main contenders: only Chamal Rajapaksa could have been considered an adult in 1966; he was 27. Mahinda Rajapaksa, now disqualified, was breaking into his twenties. Ranil Wickremesinghe and Gotabhaya Rajapaksa were seventeen, and it is an open question which one of them would have been the terrible teen then, or now. The two political scions, SajithPremadasa and Namal Rajapaksa were not born in 1966. Last but not least, Mangala Samaraweera who apparently is being touted as a common yahapalanaya candidate for 2020 was an innocent ten year old in 1966. The prospecting of future presidential candidates would have been the last thing on JRJ’s mind when he addressed the CAAS in 1966.