The planet holds its breath for a tournament full of unknowns
The World Cup needs thrills on the pitch and goodwill off it to retake its place at football’s pinnacle, writes Paul Hayward
Here is one route for the World Cup to come in from the cold. Greater warmth between Russia and the West would be handy – but on the entertainment front our needs are shallower. Eastern Europe’s first taste of Fifa-ville needs to match the thrills and spills of club football.
Judged against Champions League drama and the big domestic productions – the Premier League or Spain’s La Liga – the World Cup is a rogue satellite of the planet’s favourite sport, driven to the margins by Fifa crooks. In Russia and Qatar four years from now, it strains our loyalty. To restore the bond the stars must glow, teams need to attack and fans have to be able to move around this vast country free from violence and discrimination.
“Russia is vast. Russia is endless. Russia is timeless and eternal,” runs the blurb of a nation whose team are a long way short of the grandiose architecture of the stadiums where 32 teams will contest 64 matches in pursuit of a $38million first prize and global supremacy. Germany head east as weltmeisters, with their eternal coach, Joachim Low, saying: “Our team and the way we play has become an absolute benchmark in the last few years. As world champions, we always have to reinvent ourselves, redefine ourselves, to look for new ways.”
Low is what Mercedes and Hugo Boss would come up with if they combined to design a football coach, and Germany set the standard for player production and national cohesion. Gareth Southgate, another cool thinker, will consider England’s campaign a success if they return without the old neuroses, sense of entitlement and tendency to give the ball away under pressure in knockout games. A slower penalty-taking process – identified by FA boffins as a cure for past calamities – may even help Southgate’s men to find the net with the ball if spot-kicks come into play.
Around Southgate’s homeland, you sense a detachment from this World Cup: a resentment borne of the fiasco that sent 2018 to Russia and 2022 to Qatar. Big sporting events are used universally nowadays as political engineering, and as excuses to create vast construction budgets to be carved up by elites. Over the next five weeks, public scepticism will take some shifting. Yet England could
end up remembering Russia as the World Cup that changed their national set-up for the better and drew a line under the 50 years from 1966 to 2016, bookended as they are by a World Cup win and a defeat to Iceland at Euro 2016.
If that half-century can be entombed in St Petersburg, the nearest city to their base, England will be grateful that calls for the team to withdraw from the tournament after the Salisbury attack gained no traction.
All countries have their hangups, but none descends on Russia with England’s history of underachievement. The sick man of world football has faltered before against weak opposition (the 0-0 draw with Algeria in 2010 springs to mind), but beating Tunisia and Panama ought to be within their range before Belgium loom in Kaliningrad.
Eight nations have won the World Cup, but not since Brazil in 1962 has a country defended its title. Brazil’s numbing, identity-scrambling 7-1 defeat by Germany on home soil four years ago was the worst day at the office of any major footballing nation in modern times, and invites correction by a side who have recovered their poise over the past two years under Tite, a successful coach previously at Corinthians. Fashionably late, Neymar glides back from injury to join Roberto Firmino, Gabriel Jesus, Philippe Coutinho and Fernandinho – all Premier League idols, past or present.
Brazil have won five World Cups, and Germany and Italy four each, which is why you have to keep checking the fixtures to believe Italy really are absent. So are Holland, whose standards have plummeted. These two blows to Old Europe disguise the reality that Europe has won the past three World Cups with Germany (2014), Spain (2010) and Italy (2006).
Brazil, the champions in 2002, are favourites this time round, while Argentina, the other South American superpower and 2014’s beaten finalists, try once more to construct a
World Cup-winning side around Lionel
Messi the way they did with Diego Maradona.
Argentina’s last win was in 1986, when Maradona turned Mexico into his personal
Old Vic, by fair means and foul.
Jorge Sampaoli is their third coach of this qualification cycle. A country of technically gifted and mentally hardened players, Argentina’s pattern in World Cups has become one of instability and personality clashes. Russia will determine whether the travesty will come to pass of Messi departing without a World Cup winner’s medal. Another country where accomplished footballers roll off a production line is France, where Didier Deschamps is handed another chance to instil ruthlessness in the new wave of Antoine Griezmann, Kylian Mbappe, Paul Pogba and N’golo Kante. Team spirit and Deschamps’ man-management skills remain the unknowns for a nation with more question marks than Spain, world leaders from 2008 to 2012 and now re-energised under Julen Lopetegui.
When the World Cup was born, in 1930, the first match in Montevideo was won by France, but it was 1998 before those pioneers made it to the top of the podium, a win overshadowed by Michel Platini’s claim the draw for France ’98 was rigged to maximise chances of a France-brazil final.
The opening game of the tournament offers a nondescript Russia team an early chance to put points on the board. No host country has ever lost an opening match. The venue for Russia v Saudi Arabia is Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, the stage for the final on July 15, by which time Russian airlines will be counting their profits from shifting punters and teams from Kaliningrad in the west to Ekaterinburg in the east and Sochi in the south. The two newcomers, Iceland and Panama, have been handed a country of 11 time zones and 12 seas for their first taste of World Cup life.
Euro 2016 was won by calculation, with Portugal suppressing their natural urges to work the margins. A functional tournament played while France was in a state of emergency left a hollow feel.
At this World Cup, many will play three at the back – and the entertainment rating will depend on how many turn that into five, as good intentions run up against the fear of losing.
The World Cup mascot is a wolf, Zabivaka (left), which means “the one who scores”. In Russia, a country where icy realism shapes politics and economics, the world asks for a cuddle from a wolf and warmth and freedom of expression on and off the pitch.
Into the unknown we go.