The Fenland Gent

I thought the 2010 World Cup was an odd tournament with the best bits being easily good enough to remind me why I really like football but with the bad bits doing more than enough to remind me why I’ve been struggling to work up any enthusiasm for the game over the last season or so.

Anyway here are my 10 best bits.

1. Germany.

The opening round matches of the group stage were pretty terrible but the Germans brightened things up by thrashing Australia.

Watching this team and the efficient, moody and tedious (and narky) German side of Effenberg, Bierhoff, Kahn and Matthäus seems a distant memory.

I reckon this “new” German way of playing began in the 2002 finals when the Germans annihilated an atrocious Saudi Team 8-0. It is a direct, adventurous and at times thrilling way of playing and it really flourished in the 2006 World Cup in front of a German home crowd. The players and the fans made football feel like a big adventure and that spirit was still there in this World Cup and the way they took Australia and then England and Argentina to pieces were high points of the tournament. They should have won this World Cup. As it was they had to settle for third but the game in which they they won that, against Uruguay, was the best game of the whole tournament.

2. Uruguay.

Forlan was my player of the tournament (and was voted player of the tournament by whoever voted for these things) and Suarez looks like he may have a long career playing at the highest level. Fucile looked a proper talent as well.

There was one cloud over Uruguay’s tournament and that was the Suarez handball against Ghana. This saw him being hated by a whole continent, which is impressive, but I doubt there is a professional player who would not have done the same. The Ghanaians had 120 minutes, a penalty and a penalty shoot out to win the game but they didn’t and that’s the way football works – you need GOALS not EXCUSES.
Suarez got his punishment, and whilst it may be of no comfort for Ghana, that punishment may be one of the reasons Uruguay did not get to the final (- that and a dopey linesman and the fact Van Bommel was allowed to kick whoever he wanted).

Uruguay were not a dirty team (unlike some of their European opposition), a couple of Forlan’s goals were as good as any in the tournament and they helped make the 3/4th playoff the game that it was (which was everything the final wasn’t).

3. Argentina’s Mad Experiment.

I reckon that Argentina had the best team going into this World Cup but so as to make it fair for the rest of us the Argentine FA appointed Maradona as manager and he is no more a manager than my Mum is – though I reckon my Mum would have selected Zanetti and Cambiassio what with them both being really, really good players. It was a disaster waiting to happen and happen it did but for a while there it looked like the mad experiment might have worked.

Maradona leads a life that reads as a story and in the chapter entitled “Diego Goes to Africa” the story even has a proper story arc.

Act 1. Argentina do not win the 2006 World Cup despite having brilliant players and a decent manager and playing some brilliant football. The view is that they bottled it. The Argentine people turn to their wayward hero Maradona. He’s no manager but he’s no bottler.

Scene 2. But he really is no manager. His team scrape through the qualifying rounds and, as doubt turns to the realisation that he is the wrong man for the job, the wayward hero makes a mad team selection for the finals. This is a low point in Argentine football.

Scene 3. But wait there. What’s this? In the finals, this team, albeit with no real structure or organisation, are playing out of their skin. They look brilliant. Has the wayward hero delivered? Can Argentina win this?

Scene 4. No.
No they can’t.
Tragedy or farce? Make up your own mind but without structure or organisation of course you cannot win the World Cup. Germany make this point to Argentina in one of the most dramatic games of the 2010 World Cup. The wayward hero has failed. It’s over

Scene 5. Or is it? Maybe the wayward hero goes back to Argentina and gets the girl, or finds redemption in the eyes of a child. Or maybe there really are no happy endings in football.

Turns out quite a lot of people I know hate Maradona. I don’t. In this World Cup Argentina were fun and everything about them was very entertaining.

4. Okazaki’s goal against Denmark to make it 3-1.

Okazaki scored the goal but it was Honda who made the goal with a Cruyff like turn, a faint to shoot and a little dinked pass. There wasn’t enough of this sort of stuff in this World Cup

5.New Zealand.

I don’t care much for underdogs in the World Cup. I want to to see the best teams and the best players play each other in games that I’ll remember for years and I don’t want to see the underdogs screw that up. However New Zeland were a well organised team who utilized what little talent they had available in a way that was effective. Good for them and it would have been nice to have seen them get out of the group stage. They were the only unbeaten team at the World Cup.

7 The view from the BBC Studio window.

Just a nice view.

8. Mick McCarthy as a pundit.

Phrases like: “He spanked that“, “Something as industrial as chasing as ball“, and “He hit that with violence” littered what was effectively a sustained argument against the rules of the game delivered in a broad Yorkshire accent . McCarthy’s punditry was an absolute treat.

9. The Brazil N Korea game.

We went to the pub to watch this and the pub was packed with Brazilian kids. The atmosphere was great.

10. The lack of goal line technology.

I love mistakes, controversial decisions and terrible decisions. It all adds to it. Long may it stay the same.

Read the Ten Things I Didn’t Like About This World Cup here

Tags: World Cup

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.