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18/07/06
We [the Portuguese] have lived in a democracy, with freedom of the press, for 32 years and I don't think I can ever remember witnessing such an impressive campaign of promotion, cult and devotion for someone as that
dedicated to the national team coach Luiz Felipe Scolari in the last month and a half.
I'm not talking about the flood of praise, quite legitimate, which, starting way before the World Cup, can still be read every day in our press. and not only in the sports press: there isn't a Tom Dick or Harry
writing in the newspapers who hasn't already signed the book of praise for Scolari, as if it was almost obligatory for those who write in the newspapers to profess their faith and obedience. Just like in the old
days, any official request or communication would finish: "For the good of the Nation, long live Salazar!"
Nor am I talking
about the total lack of critical spirit in this chorus of praise, which led, for example, to people avoiding even suggesting that the Selecção had played badly in a given game because that could be interpreted as treason, which made someone with a history of fighting for freedom, like Manuel Alegre, write that Scolari's critics were Portuguese people who didn't like Portugal, and that it was also against them that Portugal were
playing.
I'm talking of a thing which is much worse, more insidious, more profound and more dangerous, and which I've been feeling in the last month and a half, to the point of it taking me back to an
unpleasant sensation of asphyxia: the climate of intimidation, ostracism, which set in against those they called Scolari's "critics" — among whom I included myself, before they got a chance to. Constant, repetitive,
at times even fawning praise wasn't enough for those who adore Scolari: along with the legitimate praise, there was always, in their texts, an attack on the "critics", as if their very existence was illegitimate.
Well, on this point I'd like to note various things which before I thought were obvious:
— Any national coach, anywhere in the world, is always the object of appreciation or criticism. It's the most natural
thing of all, and in this World Cup, and just in terms of the ones that were more exposed to the media, I note that that's what happened to Domenech in France, Eriksson in England, Lippi in Italy, Klinsmann in
Germany, Parreira in Brazil and Peckerman in Argentina.
— Why should the army of critics, here as in any other area, be interpreted as having bad intentions and wanting the worst? Why not the other way around
— that he who criticises certain options from the coach maybe does it because he wants the best for the national team, even if he's wrong in his criticism?
— The fact of criticising a certain detail (for
example, the choice of Évora for the training camp) does not necessarily imply that the person making the criticism instantly becomes a permanent and institutional "critic".
— However good the results
obtained, I don't think that removes all the legitimacy and even correctness of the criticism voiced beforehand (it's always easier to keep your opinion for the end ...). For example: I recognise, no problem, that
Scolari is a great leader of men, and his option to form a Selecção in which only those he knows have a place means a closed and united group around the coach; this will often, as was the case in Germany, lead to positive results. But who has the right to prevent me for continuing to think that the correct option is not that but to put together a Selecção with the best players and try to make them into a homogenous group? Who can guarantee that we didn't need Ricardo Quaresma [not selected] in the games against England, France or Germany? Or that Nuno Gomes or João Tomás [not selected] wouldn't have done better than Pauleta?
— Finally, and most importantly, how can anyone be so morally superior as to think it normal to make, with all the flippancy in the world, the automatic and progressive association of: critic of some of the
coach's options = systematic critic = enemy of the Selecção = anti-patriotic?
Healthy nationalism, like we saw in Germany, represented by the colours of the flags, the anthem, the language, the habits
and culture of a nation, is a celebratory manifestation of the feeling of belonging to a community, the pacific and admirable exhibition of differences expressed by sporting competition. Something else entirely,
which has nothing to do with this healthy nationalism, is the deliberate confusion of football and patriotism, especially when you go as far as to exclude, marginalize or finger point those suspected of heterodoxy,
those who avoid the reigning unanimity, the single and obligatory way of thinking.
During the last month and a half, the pages of our press have been full of demonstrations of this kind of enthusiastic and
a-critical patriotism that, with no exaggeration, I confess reminds me of other times. I'll give you just one example: when Fonseca was chosen as Man of the Match in the Portugal v Mexico game, instead of a
Portuguese player, people wrote that the faceless men of FIFA, those football bureaucrats, were influenced by interests other than sporting ones. And patriotic indignation reached its peak when, after saving three
penalties in the shootout, Ricardo was passed over for Hargreaves [in the Portugal v England game]. No one, absolutely no one, stopped for a moment to explain two simple things: one, that the so-called bureaucrats
and faceless FIFA men were a committee of 14, all past stars of World Cups, including one Teófilo Cubillas, simply the best player I've ever seen in an FC Porto shirt and the scorer of the best goal I've ever seen
in a football stadium (at Tapadinha [home of Atlético]); the other, that Ricardo could not have been chosen Man of the Match for his penalty saves for the simple reason that the shoot-out is not actually part of the
match per se. As simple as that — and so difficult to say!
The World Cup being over, and weighing up everything that happened around it, I think it's time to meditate on the question of journalism and public opinion. And that's what I'm going to do now.
Personally, the fact of my being in a minority has never intimidated me. And here, on the pages of A BOLA [the sports daily in which Nortada appears], I've always been in the minority. But this time there was something different. That desire for unanimity, that subliminal will to intimidate and silence that I felt at each step of the way. This makes you think and change a lot: the will to write and the pleasure in it, the bases of the contract of implicit freedom between who writes, who publishes and who reads. If people prefer a single opinion, official truth, a choir of voices in unison, maybe it's better to give them that. Until, crushed by so much happiness, they start to miss freedom.
[courtesy Miguel Sousa Tavares]
11/07/06
Something happened to me that wasn't supposed to happen to someone who considers himself almost addicted to football: I fell asleep during the World Cup Final! I fell asleep around the 80-minute mark, when it was
clear that the teams were playing for extra-time, if not, and voluntarily, for penalties, and I woke up with the commentator shouting when Zidane did that head-butt at point-blank range, and Buffon showed why he was
considered the best goalkeeper at this World Cup. Unfortunately, then, I was awake when Zidane was incapable of waiting just ten minutes to pass from history to legend. What must Materazzi have said to justify that
attack of madness, if indeed he said anything and Zidane's demented gesture wasn't just the tribute that genius pays to madness?
And so it ended, without beauty and decided on penalties, as indeed probably the worst World cup of all time had to. Worse even than Korea-Japan, where the genes of the virus that seems to have lodged itself in the
greatest football competition in the world were already evident, for those who wanted to see. I don't know how many more World Cups like this one football can survive, but it would be good if those in the know could
understand that it won't survive for ever.
What makes football the most popular spectacle in the world is its simplicity of means, rules and objectives. Playing football, loving to watch football being played, is the most natural and instinctive
thing that exists in a human being: all you need is a ball and one player on each side and you can have football. But whether it's with two or 22, on a dirt pitch or on grass in front of 70,000 spectators, no player
and no spectator is happy with a type of game that limits itself to passing the ball from one to another, with no other objective than to play for time, wait for a mistake from the opponents or wait for penalties.
When he coached FC Porto, Bobby Robson defined a strategy that was as simple as it was extraordinary: you had to score a goal in the first ten minutes. It wasn't in the first 15 minutes; it was in the first ten.
With that attitude, his team entered the game determined to win from the very first minute, and the opponents entered the game intimidated from the very start.
And it didn't work out so badly: FC Porto were
champions, they had the best attack and, above all, it was exciting stuff. Now, at the highest level, the rule is the opposite and not what Gerardo Vandrei sang: "Vem, vamos embora, que esperar não é saber! Quem
sabe, faz a hora, não espera acontecer". ("Come on, let's go, waiting isn't knowing how to do things! Those who know, when the time comes, don't wait for things to happen".)
Football was invented for people
to have fun watching or playing it, not for them to fall asleep watching it on TV, or dying of boredom on the terraces or of impotence on the pitch. Without goals and freedom for the artists, there is no football,
only a scientific caricature of it, which they sell us as the result of a great deal of work, competence and modernity. What happened in Germany was the triumph of resultism, the brand image of this World
Cup.
Let's look at this: Did Italy deserve to win the World Cup? Neither yes nor no. They deserved to as much or as little as the other candidates.
All of them - Brazil, Argentina, Germany, England,
France – were expecting to win the World Cup through the very same formula fielded by the Italians: the minimum of risks, the minimum of wear, the minimum of the unexpected, the minimum of freedom given to the
artists, either their own or the opponents'. Italy won, of course, because they're still the best at that game.
Who was the best player at the World Cup? Best answer: no one. There wasn't a single player who
stood out clearly and regularly, no one who created a single play that we'll remember in a month's time. There wasn't a single game that really hit you in the eye, one that would be forever associated to the memory
of the World Cup. The best scorer got only five goals, and what was the most discussed thing throughout was the penalties that were and weren't given, the excess of cards, the simulations and the dives, ad the
capricious effects of the Teamgeist ball, eloquently invented to deceive the goalkeepers and mask the incapacity to score goals. And the image that will mark this World Cup (apart from the excellent organisation, which it's fair to remember) is Zidane's disgraceful head-butt on Materazzi.
Apparently concerned at what it saw and the comments it was hearing, FIFA has announced that it's going to hold a reflective seminar with the coaches of the 32 countries present to try to understand why we
saw so little quality football at this World Cup. It's like the police, concerned about bank robberies, calling the heads of the main gangs together to discuss measures to be taken.
Everyone knows that the poor quality of this football is directly the work of resultist coaches, the theorists of "wait and contain", of "defensive cohesion", of "circulation of the ball", of "reduction of spaces" and of "consistence", which has all teams playing the same bad, both the good and bad, both those that have great attacking players and those that don't – everyone playing within 40 metres of pitch, all defending behind the line of the ball, like in handball, all reduced to a single natural striker
That's why, and first of all, what FIFA should do is to get the 32 coaches together with some past heroes of the game, former coaches of teams that made history and representatives of the public, so that the
latter groups could explain to the coaches that if they continue like this, neither World Cups nor football itself have much of a future.
The second thing to do would be to limit this diarrhoea of football
that the World Cup has become. There are too many teams, too many games, too much time. What's the point of a competition with 64 games if only four or five of them are worth a light? What's the point of so many
games and so much time if what decided everything in the end is the tiredness of the teams? Look at the case of Concacaf, which includes the teams from north and Central America and that never usually has more than
one team that can justify their presence in a World cup. Well, this year, Concacaf had four teams in the World Cup (the USA, Mexico, Costa Rica and Trinidad & Tobago). As many as South America, which regularly
has five or six quality teams. Why? Because, according to an investigation by BBC's Panorama, there are a lot of votes and a lot of money circulating between Concacaf and it president and Joseph Blatter's FIFA. In
fact, the only reason for this abundance of teams and games are the financial and electoral interests of those in power within FIFA – an inheritance of the times of the highly esteemed Mr. Havelange. What if the
number of participants was reduced to 24, as it has been before? Divided into six groups of four, the top team would qualify along with the two best second teams, which would immediately make the group stage more
competitive. Then there would be one less round (the last 16), one game less for those who reached the Final, a total of 40 games instead of the current 64, and 22 days of competition instead of the current 31. More
rational, more competitive, more representative and less saturating for all - players, public, organisation.
It might also be possible to study the possibility of having the World Cup at a time other than
after the end of the European championships, so that the top stars of the World Cup, who play in Europe, wouldn't present themselves in the lamentable state of a Ronaldinho Gaúcho.
It would also be necessary
to look again at and standardise refereeing criteria, based on protection of the spectacle and the repression of anti-football, to avoid resorting to tricks like generous penalties and a ball that makes unexpected
swerves in the air to make up for the deficit of offensive football. But above all, what is urgent and necessary is to launch a public campaign on a global scale to defend and promote football as a spectacle against
football played for results. And it's not just up to FIFA to do that; it starts here, on the pages of the sports press.
[courtesy Miguel Sousa Tavares]
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