How will we remember
waves of ticker tape in Buenos Aires; great goals, brutal tackles, legends and history-makers like Mario Kempes and Marco Tardelli made immortal.
It was wonderfully stirring, though still a little startling, when the lights came on, to see the woman next to me dabbing her eyes. I asked if she was OK. ‘‘So emotional,’’ she said. ‘‘So beautiful.’’
Perhaps you are also thinking so nostalgic and sentimental. This was football as Fifa would like to package it, to sell it – down to leaving the organisation’s HQ with a new Telstar 2018 ball with which, in the back garden, we will imagine ourselves to be Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo or, possibly, Ashley Young.
Of course, the global game is not just the best of human life, far from it – when Albert Camus said that all he knew about morality he owed to football, did he also mean the dark arts?
But to watch that film, and to revel in the history so close to leaving for Russia, was to be reminded of football’s power to lift us out of the humdrum, to leave behind the ordinary, to transcend the political, which might just be as important as it has ever been over the next month.
On Friday morning (NZ time) the 2018 World Cup will begin in Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium and, for all the discussion of Neymar and Messi, we have also wondered, a little queasily, how much Vladimir Putin will be the victor.
Some may say he has already won, going back to December 2, 2010, when Sepp Blatter, then president of Fifa, opened the envelopes to reveal that Russia and Qatar would host the 2018 and 2022 tournaments – to shock, then outrage and then righteous anger when so many of those who voted were disgraced.
Still, Russia kept its tournament. Putin had not attended the vote for fear of embarrassing defeat, but promptly jumped on a private jet to bask in the success. For him, this soft-power influence, respectability and global PR is worth about NZ$17 billion to stage a jamboree. After all, considerably cheaper than the NZ$70 billion for the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.