Winners of the European Championships two years earlier, we knew that the Spaniards, at their best, were capable of playing supremely pleasing and effective football, inspired by a central midfield of creative, intelligent, inventive ball-players: Xabi Alonso, Andres Iniesta, Xavi. There was no room even for the gifted and incisive Cesc Fabregas of Arsenal, though he would come on in the Final, to give Iniesta the impeccable through ball which enabled him to score the goal which won the World Cup. Just in time, or extra time, to avoid the horrors of a third penalty shoot-out deciding the game’s major competition.
Looking back on that travesty of a Final, it will remain a bone of contention whether Howard Webb, the referee from Yorkshire, should have sent off Holland’s Nigel de Jong for his shocking, studs up, flying foul on the hapless Xabi Alonso. The first half was still young, and though the foul, which left Alonso in persistent pain, afraid his ribs might be broken, was infinitely worthy of a red card, Webb, evidently deeming discretion the better part of valour, drew back from the prospect of unbalancing a World Cup Final—however unfairly—and merely showed yellow.
For this, he had his defenders, most notably perhaps Manchester United supremo Alex Ferguson, who felt that no World Cup Final should be jeopardised in this way. Raison d’état, you might say; expediency overruling morality. And later on, the ruthless Mark Van Bommel was as lucky as he had previously been in the match against Uruguay, escaping a red card despite two atrocious fouls. The irony was that for all their negative approach, the Dutch had arguably the two best chances of the game in normal time, each missed by a whisker by their infinitely best player, the left-footed right-flanker, Arjen Robben. But football, as we know, is a game of paradox and injustice.
No critic was more fierce about the Dutch than the most illustrious of all their players, Johan Cruyff, whose glorious Total Football national side—a reflection of his club team, Ajax—had swept its way into the 1974 World Cup Final in Munich, going ahead with a goal in the opening minute, only to end up losing 2–1 to the West Germans. Cruyff utterly damned the Dutch for their excesses, accusing them of a kind of anti-football. It was an attitude that wasn’t shared by Holland’s manager, Bert Van Marwijk, who joined his own players in a chorus of perverse resentment, a shameless cry of injustice.
Though Spain played so much attractive, enterprising football, their scoring rate, in fact, was surprisingly low. It would surely have been much greater had Fernando Torres, their elegant, outstanding centre-forward, been fully fit. As it was, it was plain from his first, laboured appearance that he was still very far from that, and the surprise was that his manager, Vicente del Bosque, generally a shrewd operator, as he had shown at Real Madrid before being scandalously sacked, indulged him so often, even to the point of inexplicably bringing him on as late as the second half of extra time in the Final, when he pulled a groin muscle and was reduced to limping painfully around. Another surprise was the very limited use Del Bosque made of David Silva, the gifted flanker who was transferred almost contemporaneously to Manchester City for a £23 million fee. In contrast, his Valencia team-mate, David Villa, Spain’s greatest hope of goals, was formidably effective and ever present, though he was very lucky not to be sent off against Honduras, after striking Emilio Izaguirre, the opposing centre-back.
As for the Dutch, those who expressed astonishment at their abrasive methods clearly had no notion of how they comported themselves in Buenos Aires, in the World Cup Finals of 1978. I remember the Italian manager, Enzo Bearzot, lamenting to me how ‘poor Zaccarelli’, his midfield player, had been cruelly fouled by Arie Haan. This was true enough, but Bearzot ignored the fact that immediately before his assault, Haan, moving with the ball up the left wing, had been seriously fouled by the incorrigible Romeo Benetti. And in the Final, in the same River Plate stadium, the Dutch, admittedly provoked by the gamesmanship of an Argentine team which delayed the kick-off by protesting against René Van de Kerkhof ’s light wrist bandage, committed a foul in the opening minute, and another fifty besides—though it should be recorded that their own player, Johan Neeskens, was knocked out by the elbow of the Argentine captain, Daniel Passarella.
It seemed clear enough that the general mediocrity of the 2010 tournament had much to do with its unwieldy size. It was the unlamented former FIFA President João Havelange who bloated the tournament from its traditional complement of sixteen countries—admittedly reduced to thirteen in 1930 and 1950—to an unwieldy twenty-four, a figure that was increased further by his much criticised but immovable successor, Sepp Blatter, to an excessive thirty-two.
Nor were matters helped when FIFA, almost on the eve of the finals, introduced a dubious new kind of ball known as the Jabulani. Developed for Adidas by British boffins, with its erratic flight it proved a nightmare for goalkeepers. Although it had in fact been in use in Germany for much of the previous season, for other countries it was a disturbing novelty. The old American saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ comes irresistibly to mind.
The two 2006 finalists, Italy and France, went out rapidly, Italy ponderously, France ignominiously. Marcello Lippi, who had guided Italy to World Cup victory four years previously, had returned to take over the team, after Roberto Donadoni had found success elusive. A year before the World Cup, Italy had looked unimpressive in the Confederations Cup, beaten by both Egypt and, emphatically, Brazil. Lippi had found it hard to see hope on the horizon. In truth, the passing of such fuoriclasse as Roberto Baggio, Francesco Totti and Alessandro Del Piero had robbed the azzurri of irreplaceable talents. Yet it has to be said that in such bleak circumstances, Lippi’s excessive caution doomed his team to mediocrity.
What they urgently needed were fantasisti—players, according to an old Italian football saying, ‘capable of inventing the game’. Two such players suggested themselves, but Lippi would not take the risk of choosing either of them. One was already an experienced international. Antonio Cassano had emerged from the slums of Bari, supremely talented, endlessly undisciplined, defiant of authority. At nineteen he went to Roma for a huge fee, thence to Real Madrid, where he was scarcely used, before heading back to Italy and joining Sampdoria. It was his boast that while at a national-team training camp at Roma’s Trigoria ground, he smuggled a girlfriend in and slept with her.
Meanwhile, the nineteen-year-old Inter attacker, Mario Balotelli, had yet to win a full cap, but his abilities were as plain as his intransigence. Born in Palermo to Ghanaian parents, a huge young man with a devastating right foot, great ball skills and infinite indiscipline, he was in Inter’s first team at seventeen. Rebellious and provocative, racist fans abused him even in his absence, with Juventus’s followers being particular offenders. Perhaps inevitably, he clashed with Inter coach Jose Mourinho and was excluded from the team which won the 2010 Champions League Final in Madrid. Yet, despite all his faults, he might have galvanised the azzurri in South Africa.
As for the French, they simply disgraced themselves. There were perhaps extenuating reasons. It seemed inexplicable that Raymond Domenech was still in charge of the team after its—and his—abject failure at the 2008 European Championships. Well before the World Cup Finals, which France were lucky to reach at all, he had plainly lost the confidence of his players. The wonder of it was that the President of the French Football Federation, Jean-Pierre Escalettes, should handle matters with such colossal ineptitude, first keeping Domenech in office when he was so clearly a busted flush and inimical to the squad. Then, after the disasters of the 2010 World Cup, and despite having resigned, Escalettes lingered in office to establish a superfluous inquiry into what had gone wrong, when it was already all too clear and Laurent Blanc had already been installed—arguably at least a year too late—as the new France manager. Blanc and the FFF went on to exclude all twenty-three World Cup players from the early-August match in Oslo versus Norway.
That France had qualified for South Africa at all was a scandal, Thierry Henry having handled not once but twice to set up a vital play-off g
oal for William Gallas against the Republic of Ireland in Paris. But when it came to the World Cup itself, Henry, up until then the captain, found himself humiliatingly marginalised, used only for the last thirty-five minutes of the ultimate match.
His own attitude, however, had been sullen and unco-operative to a degree, and he had offered no leadership or advice as mutiny and disunity surged silently, with the players refusing to train before the final match. As captain, before the World Cup, he had stubbornly refused to allow the young midfielder, Yoan Gourcuff, to take the free kicks which were his forte.
Gourcuff, sent off for a swing of the arm in the game against Uruguay, for some reason incurred the hostility of Franck Ribéry, a huge success four years earlier in Germany, though impressive only in France’s last game in South Africa. After the World Cup, back in France, Ribéry faced a police investigation into the alleged exploitation of under-age prostitutes.
Domenech had been at odds with Florent Malouda, fresh from an excellent season with Chelsea, before a World Cup ball had even been kicked. He therefore dropped him from the opening game against Uruguay, only to bring him on as a substitute. But the balloon well and truly went up at half time in the game subsequently lost to Mexico. When Domenech asked Nicolas Anelka to play more centrally in the second half, he was met with a torrent of abuse. In response, the French hierarchy decided to send Anelka home. Though Domenech generously gave him the chance to apologise, it wasn’t taken and Anelka departed. As a result, before the final game, which they lost to South Africa, the players went on strike, refusing to train.
Argentina had squeaked into the finals with a very late goal in their last eliminator win in Montevideo against Uruguay, which prompted an obscene outburst against the Argentine journalists by Diego Maradona. Controversially appointed by the grand panjandrum of Argentine football, Julio Grondona, and with minimal experience as a manager, Maradona proceeded to lead his team from disaster to disaster, culminating with the humiliation of a 6–1 defeat in the breathless heights of La Paz by modest Bolivia during the qualification rounds. Maradona had clearly failed to prepare his team physically, but Grondona, seemingly hypnotised by Maradona’s reputation as a player, kept him in office. When it came to the finals, it remained to be seen whether Maradona could get the best out of the dazzling Lionel Messi, a refulgent star with Barcelona, yet nowhere near his best under Maradona, with whom he seemed to be at odds. In the event, Messi played impressively in Argentina’s earlier World Cup games. The team, encouraged by a 1–0 friendly win away to Germany shortly before the tournament, played well enough, bright in attack, where talent was abundant, only to be taken apart when they met the Germans again in Cape Town in the quarter-finals.
Indulgent bookmakers gave England odds of 11–2 before the World Cup, although I believed that the quarter-finals were as far as they would go. When Fabio Capello was appointed manager in succession to the disastrous Steve McClaren, who would later rise from the ashes in Holland, I was initially very pleased. I’d come to know of him in 1973, when he had played and scored for Italy in their win against England in Turin, the first time in forty years that the azzurri achieved that particular feat. Besides having been an outstanding player, he seemed to me to be a shrewd analyst and a highly effective manager.
And, for a time, it did seem that he would transform a previously ineffectual England team. The peak of its—and his—success was surely the dashing 4–1 victory during the World Cup qualifiers against Croatia, the team which in the qualifying rounds of the 2008 European Championships had humiliatingly beaten England at home and away. In Zagreb, the young right-winger, Theo Walcott, ran riot in the second half, scoring a spectacular hat-trick.
Yet Walcott’s international career would be bizarrely star-crossed. After emerging as a future star at Southampton, he was transferred to Arsenal, but though he played one game for England, he didn’t make a single first-team appearance for the Gunners before being controversially picked for the England squad to contest the 2006 World Cup in Germany, where the team’s manager, Sven-Goran Eriksson, inexplicably didn’t give him a single game.
On his day, or night, with Arsenal he could do extraordinary things with his exceptional, sustained pace—notably at Anfield, in a European Cup tie, when he ended an amazing eighty-yard run with a goal. But injuries spoiled his season before the 2010 World Cup, his form fluctuated, and he was accused by Chris Waddle of not possessing ‘a football brain’—this from a player who, in his early days on the Newcastle United wing, had hardly been famed for his intelligence, however much he may have improved in later years. So it was that Walcott, who’d been picked and never played in Germany, wasn’t even picked by Capello for South Africa.
That David Beckham wasn’t picked either was surely thanks only to the fact that, while on loan to AC Milan from Los Angeles Galaxy, he had torn an Achilles tendon. Capello had succumbed to what might be called a severe case of Beckhamitis which exceeded even the propensity of Eriksson, in Germany, to pick him when whatever pace he’d had was gone and his usefulness was limited to his dead-ball skills.
Capello, for no evident reason, indulged Beckham with what could only be called a long series of cheap caps. The reductio ad absurdum was surely reached when it was announced that Beckham was about to be awarded his 109th cap, thereby overtaking the 108 won by Bobby Moore; the difference being that, while Moore won all his caps but one with ninety-minute appearances, the odd one out being the 120 minutes he played in the 1966 World Cup Final against West Germany, Beckham’s later caps were a matter, by and large, of minutes. Moreover, his perpetual presence stood in the way of a parade of quicker, better, younger right-wingers: not only Aaron Lennon, but also Aston Villa’s versatile James Milner, who had, in fact, made an excellent debut as a substitute on the left wing in a friendly against Holland and could function either on the right or in central midfield, Walcott himself and Shaun Wright-Phillips, fast and frequently capped.
Despite not being selected for South Africa, Beckham for no obvious reason was ubiquitous in England’s debatably isolated headquarters in Rustenburg, where the players were known to be complaining of boredom.
Broadly speaking, the English media gave Capello an easy ride, though it was surely plain enough that there were problems to solve. Above all, he totally failed to deal with the dualism in midfield of Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard. It had long been established that they could not play effectively there together, but the clumsy compromise of sticking the right-footed Gerrard out on the left flank, where he was never any kind of a winger, was misbegotten. He would inevitably wander into the middle, unbalancing the attack—even if he could sometimes strike strongly for goal—and potentially leaving space for counter-attacks by the opposing right-back.
It was hardly Capello’s fault, however, that Wayne Rooney, fervently expected to be the ace in the hole and one of the outstanding figures of the World Cup, should play so abjectly. Nor was it his fault that Rio Ferdinand, a crucially important centre-back, should be injured in a tackle with Emile Heskey during training and be ruled out of the tournament. Though why he preferred Matthew Upson, never wholly at ease at international level, and Ledley King, unquestionably gifted but threatened by his badly damaged knees, to King’s Tottenham colleague Michael Dawson, who only joined the squad as a late replacement and never got a game, was baffling.
Equally surprising was the insistence on Emile Heskey, who had had a frustrating season with Aston Villa, seldom selected by them, and who throughout his long international career had been so sparse a scorer. Yet he played in the opening game against the USA, admittedly fashioning a goal for Gerrard, but later missing a sitter, and he was almost irrationally brought on late in the débâcle against Germany, when a score was desperately needed.
Yet it is obvious, too, that Capello could hardly be blamed for the utter lack of any true playmaker, midfield general, schemer, call him what you will. The last to inspire England was Paul Gascoigne; before him came Glenn Hoddle; while fu
rther back we find the elegant and inventive Trevor Brooking, now filling a senior role at the Football Association and perhaps the England manager who might have been.
After the wretched exhibition against Algeria, England’s centre-back John Terry gave a defiant Press Conference, demanding changes to the team and tactics, a place for Joe Cole and insisting he would ‘have his say’ whether Capello liked it or not. ‘If it upsets him, then I’m on the verge of just saying, “So what, I’m here to win it for England.”’ He clearly believed he would lead a revolution, but instead he found himself isolated and forced to make a grovelling apology. There were those who believed that his loss of the captaincy might have played some part in his tirade. A married man, he had suffered the consequences of having an affair with the French former girlfriend of the second-choice left-back, Wayne Bridge, who as a result withdrew from the World Cup squad.
Capello extinguished Terry’s revolutionary attempt by announcing that he’d ‘made a big mistake’. But he had arguably made one himself, shortly before the team left for South Africa, having announced, before a large audience, that he was launching, in collaboration with a fellow Italian, an initiative known as the Capello Index, which would assess the performance of every player in the World Cup. The FA, which at first had distractedly allowed Capello to proceed, belatedly reacted with horror and forbade the scheme. But soon after the World Cup was over, the marks, such as they were, leaked out, including England’s.
Despite this, and, more importantly, despite England’s dismal World Cup, the FA found Capello had them over a barrel. This was because they had waived the contractual clause whereby either party could end their agreement, provided it were done within two weeks after the end of the World Cup. Apparently, the FA had feared that Capello might join Internazionale. To dismiss him would cost them two years’ salary: £12 million. It remained to be seen how the players would react to their marks, even though Capello insisted he’d had nothing to do with them.
The Story of the World Cup Page 54
