A Brazilian Dawn
By Mark Daniell
12/06/2014
Oh happy days of June. Another year, another World Cup. That right isn’t it?
No, wait a second, World Cups take forever to come around, and this one’s in Brazil! This is a once in a lifetime occasion! What are we doing going to work? We should be celebrating carnivale! Out in the streets with feathers in our hair, drinking in the sun (literally, drinking, in the sun), writing blogs and annoying friends with our idle meanderings, especially if they request to be removed from the mailing list.
Once school holidays are no longer part of your life, summer is always an illusion, a promise that never fully materialises. But summer when there’s international football thrown on the barbecue is the real deal! And we’re about to get stuck into the biggest bacon double cheese burger of our lives: a genuine, bonafide World Cup in Brazil, with England as underdogs and a moustacheless Freddie Mercury as our nemesis… Bring on the predictions and the permutations (you don’t want to know how much time I wasted trying to think of a third applicable word beginning with P before realising not everything has to be delivered in threes.) Let the xenophobia fly and the plucky support of dictatorships continue. It’s World Cup season and anything goes!
The World Cup is a throwback from childhood. A memory as charming as the simple delight of shining a torch in your bedroom for the first time, or riding your bike so fast the stabilizers don’t make any difference. Now I know that in recent times the innocence of our childhood has been distressingly shattered, I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if Operation Yewtree had Morph up in the docks next, but in spite of what Sepp “are you a racist?” Blatter may say, the World Cup remains sacred. It’s a time when all that noise from club football finally makes sense; when women are allowed to show an interest without being patronising; when plastic flags made in China, flutter out of the sealed windows of German cars driven by Afghani minicab drivers to capture an English zeitgeist. And we get to see Australia get hammered three times in a row! Bonus!
So here we go: three games a day; upsets, red cards and last minute equalisers; injustices, superstitions and early knock-offs from work; goalline clearances, penalty shootouts and foul throws? (things really do work better in threes, I should have gone with predicaments). Smugness on the BBC, considered racism on ITV and straight-up idiocy on the radio. If you’re anything like me, you’ll absorb most of this subliminally until your team wins, then read every newspaper article and report you can, even though they tell you nothing new.
As for the winner (once I come to terms with Argentina being knocked out) I won’t really mind who takes it home, as long as they don’t win by playing like Spain. Yeah it was impressive, but I’ve pretty much had it up to my gills with tiki-taka. Ooh, so you guys pass and move in small areas of the pitch, big deal. Where are the thirty yard pile drivers and the half-pitch dribbles? And what about the bicycle kicks? Tiki-taka was the death of the bicycle kick, and for that reason if no other it deserves to be put to bed. Let Brazil 2014 not be remembered for who won it, but for how they won it. (But please, not Germany, not Germany…)
To kick things off, the question is a simple one: who’s going to win? I’ll go and put a fiver on whoever gets the most votes. (oh, and get your asses down to www.fantuti.com there’s still time!)