FOOTBALL WORLD CUP
IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC:
Twilight of the European football
The most striking fact of the current World Cup is the
shattering defeat of numerous European national teams. Both teams
consisting of immigrants and their descendants (France) and purely
national teams (Italy) suffered this fate. Which path would the football Russia
choose?
This morbid refereeing...
Football World Cup, which takes place every four years, is the most
important event in both sports and entertainment fields for many people;
more important than Olympics, in fact. Thus, one shouldn’t
be surprised with the fact that many World-Cup-related incidents tend
to be politicized.
Scandals caused with bad referee mistakes are neither uncommon nor new here.
Not a single football world cup can go without them. And yet, what
happened at the current one seems to be unique. Among tens
of thousands of people present at the Bloemfontein stadium,
it were just two of them who failed to see that the ball, being
kicked by Frank Lampard (English halfback), flew into the goal
of German national team. These two, however, happened
to be Uruguay-born Jorge Larrionda (the main umpire of the
match) and Mauricio Espinosa (lineman and fellow countryman of his).
The whole thing, however, is not about nullifying the goal, but rather
about the fact that FIFA functionaries still deny the necessity to impose
any guarantees (implying to the video-repeats) for the cases
of referees’ blunders.
Perhaps, it was no accident that such it occurred with the Brits
and, all the more, during such a match on a point
of principle — the one against Germans. If it happened with
the national team of, let’s say, Serbia playing against Aussies or,
say, DPRK versus Brazilians, hardly anyone in the world would start the
hype. But we’re talking about England here, you see...
We may be sure, though: Brits themselves will make a bit
of noise at first and then would calm down. They wouldn’t make this
case the starting point for reviewing the rules of the football
refereeing. Why? It’s quite simple. Current imperfect refereeing allows
football functionaries to easily filter the "undesirable" — from the
"entertaining profits" point of view — teams, i. e. the ones
having no respective brand name, at the same time letting the
"desirable" teams to compete. This is applied not only to the
World Cup and the European Championship, but also to the club tournaments.
Englishmen are perfectly aware of the fact that they tend
to be the "desirable" ones most of the time. Today they’ve just
befell the victims of an accident — unlucky for them, but
nevertheless random. They’re not going to break down the whole system
because of that.
What happened to England — are actually the costs of the system
that they’ve architected themselves. True football fans, however, feel offended
as long as it distorts the picture of actual balance
of powers in their favorite sports.
Well, sport events of that level have been arranged not to reveal the
strongest one for a long time now. They’ve rather been organized
in order to make some big, actually very big, simply tremendous
money. The game itself is no more than just the means to achieve
the business-goal.
Still there’s a risk of losing the interest of audience due
to too frequent and crying violations of the declared rules
of the game. Well, if it’s really so, then we may hope that
the video-repeats, laser fixation of the ball crossing the goal line etc.
would appear sooner or — this case is more probable — later.
At first this would be tested at the level of certain
national and continental federations and only after that FIFA would make
it a general rule. We may only be sure that someday this
moment will come. For the sake of saving their hyper-profits football
functionaries would take this chance.
Therefore, in the foreseeable future, football would remain
to be the most popular sports spectacle on the planet, even
despite of all its current scandals. So let’s move from the eternal
aspects of unfair refereeing to the new trends of the game that
have made a bright display of themselves during this World Cup.
However hard may Europeans try, they do not fit the leader’s yellow
jersey anymore
The most striking fact of the current World Cup is the shattering
defeat of numerous European national teams. Although the championship
isn’t over yet, all the results for such resume are present. Referees’ errors
benefitting Europeans that are to take place before the end of the
tournament can only emphasize this fact. Only six out of thirteen European
national teams were among the 16 best teams. And as long as they
are soon about to play against each other (it just happened this
way!), only three European national teams would make up the eight
strongest teams. That never happened at any World Championship!
On the World Cup eve numerous sports observers used to say that only
13 teams from Europe is far too little (not so long ago,
in 1998 and 2002 there were 15). According to them, this didn’t
display the real balance of football powers. Today, though, we may
be sure that by the next World Cup (that is to take place
in Brazil in 2014) FIFA is to cut down the European
"delegation" even more than that.
Decline of the football Europe has started quite long ago — today
it seemingly turned into the thick and dark twilight. This has lesser
effect on the club football, as long as rich European clubs
gather various players from all over the world under their banners. But even
that doesn’t give them any advantages over the South American clubs — the
latter defeat Europeans at the inter-continental club tournaments more and
more often. Regarding the national teams that may include only the natural-born
citizens of the respective countries, Europe is no longer
a Europe in this sense, but that seemingly doesn’t improve the
situation any bit.
It is quite indicative that it were two leading European teams
with completely opposite principles of manning that suffered the utmost
failure at the current World Cup. Since the middle of the 90s French
national team (Vice Champion of 2006) used to consist mostly
of the players of African origin. Italian team (Champion’2006),
on the contrary, is staffed only with the "home-bred" football
players. The results of both turned out to be quite
deplorable — neither France, nor Italy have made out of the group
tournament.
Failure of the Europeans may become yet more obvious, if one would
look at the statistics of the games against the teams from hte other
continents at the current championship. Only African national teams would
have the positive balance with Europe. Africa, with the only exception, has
also failed at the first "domestic" World Championship, but it’s not
African problems we’re talking about now.
Is there a chance to see Russia at the
World Cup?
This is the second World Cup in a row that the Russian
national team doesn’t participate in. Since the collapse of the
Soviet Union, Russian managed to make it through the elimination
games just two times out of five. The USSR team, on the contrary,
reached the final stage of the World Championship seven times out
of nine.
Anyone, who’s watching the Championship games probably paid attention
to the fact that numerous national teams feature the football players, who
either play at the Russian clubs or have already been "purchased"
by them (or used to play there, at least). So the
players of Russian Premier-League are present at the current World
Cup, but still there’s no Russian national team there.
Commercialized Russian football is every bit subjected to the same
negative trends the European one does. The fact that Russian football has never
been among the world leaders (though it secured a solid place
at the, say, B-list) doesn’t make its today’s decline any less deeper than
the decline of the European football.
The more "star-feverish" our football "stars" become — the less they want
to spent their time playing at the national team (Arshavin’s example
is the first one that comes to mind!) Whatever they’d say
to justify themselves — this is the objective fact (the one
quite understandable at that). It takes a little to feel
yourself "master of the world" when you’re 20, given the background
of the poor country. And then you may just rest on your
laurels...
Every year European football national teams feature less and less natives
of the respective countries. Even in the German team, native Germans
are outnumbered. Native Europeans, at the same time, do not urge
to play for the sake of the sports glory of their Motherland.
The same process goes on in Russia.
Few years ago some football functionaries started to talk about the
naturalization of certain African and Brazilian legionaries that used
to play well at the Russian clubs. It seems that today this
subject is to hit the surface again. If it goes like this,
soon it will be the team of football players born not far from
the equator that would listen to Sergey Mihalkov’s anthem. But hey,
so what? Who knows, probably it can glorify football Russia just the
same way that similar team used to bring the world fame upon France
in 1998? Today it still sounds like a joke, but as the
saying goes, "there is many a true word spoken in jest"...
By Yaroslav Butakov
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