By Ben Knight

 

Into the second batch of World Cup matches, and random thoughts rule. 

As the matches blur by, and every clearer pattern could turn out to be a murkier one by nightfall, here’s an early list of things I love – and don’t love – about whatever in the blessed name of heck is actually transpiring on the sacred soccer pitches of South Africa.

LOVES:

- Goals!  Suddenly, they’re coming.  Get the opening-match jitters out of the way, and now we’re seeing some real attacking mastery.  Uruguay!  Argentina!  Germany (who didn’t wait)!  … Greece?  The first rack of games taught us, basically, that every team in the tournament can play defence.  Yeah, the Aussies got shred-ripped, but the Germans were exceptional against a side that generally takes better-than-decent care of its own fishnet.  No surprise, really.  Goals-against kill you dead in World Cup qualifying, and every team except the hosts qualified.  The telling moment, for me, came when Brazil were held off the board for an eternity by the game and enigmatic North Koreans.  They couldn’t find any space to run stunts, and were basically caught standing around, waiting flat-footed for the ball, for the entire first half.  But then Brazil’s Maicon ripped home the first marker – from down the goal line, beside the goal!  I think this entire World Cup is going to come down to open runs, brilliant passes, and odd-angle bomb jobs.  The team that can be most creative in attack – Brazil?  Germany?  Argentina?  … Chile? – could easily be the one that wins it all.  I truly hope so – because good, grim defence is everywhere, and the human spirit is always better served by brilliance. 

- The opening match: Not the best match of the tournament by any stretch, but South Africa and Mexico served up a game both gritty and soaring, perfectly in keeping with the elated, hype-soaked atmosphere.  Could South African goalie Itumeleng Khune be the second coming of Fabian Barthez?  Like the famously eccentric French legend, there seems no way to tell which body part the lightfooted Khune will deploy to knock down the next shot.  And then, in the second game, he gets red-carded on a letter-of-the-law but dreadfully soft professional foul.  The entire Barthez bag of tricks, and I’m enjoying him tremendously (or I was, because he’s unlikely to be back).  Despite being an eternally grim Canada fan, I found myself very impressed with both the patience and craft of the Mexicans.  And then they turned it loose on Fraudulent France (see below).  A joyous start, which the remainder of the opening 16 games really didn’t much live up to.

- Kontrasting Koreas: The South Koreans roared into the fray with joy, heart and hustle, and buried Greece in their opener.  The North Koreans were stern, tough and tireless, and just about bagged what would have been a superbly earned result against Brazil.  Unfortunately for the southerners, they made the mistake of taking the field for their match against Argentina.  In a game where they absolutely had to control and run the ball, they didn’t.  4-1 loss.  The North still has Portugal and Cote D’Ivoire to survive.  If they can hold their initial intent better than their peninsula-mates, they may yet have a chance.  At this point, it looks bad at both ends.  But both Koreas have certainly created some moments here.

(I’m interested to note, by the by, that my adopted bandwagon lads – Cote D’Ivoire – didn’t make my love list.  I found it pretty easy to break my chronic habit of decades by not cheering for England this time around.  But the team I’ve adopted for the month – Didier Drogba’s fleet-footed African Elephants – just aren’t yet grabbing my heart.  I think I know exactly why (not their fault at all), and I’ll write it up sometime next week.)

UNLOVES:

- What Switzerland did to Spain: Yeah, it was a ringing upset, they worked their arses off all day and I have at least one Swiss friend who is over-the-moon ecstatic about offing the Euro ’08 champions.  But I’m still miffed at Los Switzers for their spirit-crunching negativity in Germany four years ago, and that crease-crunching kamikaze clobber run they scored on yesterday must – I deeply, pleadingly hope – remain the ugliest goal of the entire tournament.  Also, the Swiss win hugely cranks up the likelihood that pre-tourney favourites Spain and Brazil will actually have to face each other in the round of 16 (but that’s not Switzerland’s fault).  It was an ecstatic day of cheese and cuckoo clocks, but more fault Spain for not putting at least a half dozen more of their open shots actually on goal.

- France: “Do you ever feel like you’ve been cheated?” a demoralized Johnny Rotten famously asked a jeering, hostile audience at one of the Sex Pistols’ final gigs in the United States.  They should have played that clip through the loudspeakers for every minute of Les Bleus’ first two matches in South Africa.  No, I’m not especially talking about Thierry Henry’s awful handball that beat Ireland in the final hurdle of qualifying.  Truth is, that shameful moment only robbed the Irish of a fifty-fifty penalty-kick-shootout chance of making the dance.  But given that the French got here under a cloud, could they not, at least, brew up any tiny semblance of positive football once the bell rang?  The Uruguay game was the worst since the Swiss-Ukraine snore-off in ’06.  And the Mexican game wasn’t any better – until the Mexicans started scoring.  The only good that can come from this – aside from the public tar-and-feather firing of French manager Raymond Domenech in the Place Concorde at dawn a week tomorrow – is if the French continue their dreadful play, and let the host South Africans earn a historic triumph on both teams’ way out the door.  Failing that, France has been an utter waste of everybody’s time and good intentions.

- The damn plastic horns: I know, I know – easy target.  Way back in the early days of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball club, there was a brief flirtation with plastic horns in the north grandstand of Exhibition Stadium.  I freely admit I was taking myself far too seriously as a baseball fan back then, but I continue to believe my considerable level of annoyance was entirely justified.  I’m feeling it again, now – but for a very different reason.  Back then, I wanted some reverential quiet for a rather thoughtful sport.  Now, I want to hear the real noise.  The fans – from all over the world.  Their songs, their chants – heck, just their voices since I wouldn’t even be able to understand most of their languages.  Okay, the horns are colourful and trendy, and we all knew this was going to happen this time.  But it is pollution.  Not BP vs Louisiana pollution, but all-pervasive and damaging nonetheless.  I did actually hear Mexican fans chanting near the end of the France game.  It sounded wonderful!

I’m spending the weekend out of town, at a wedding in my new and suddenly extended family.  Back Monday!

Onward!