The Story of the World Cup

by Brian Glanville

  Brazil, perhaps inevitably, were among the favourites for the 2010 tournament, though Dunga, once a commanding captain, was never wholly persona grata as manager with the media. They found his tactics too cautious, which was somewhat unfair when one considers that past managers such as Claudio Coutinho and Carlos Alberto Parreira were essentially physical conditioners rather than ‘real’ football men.

  Brazil had a solid defence, with Lucio, hardly likely to repeat the blunder which let Michael Owen in to score for England in Japan eight years previously, and Juan. Much would depend, however, on the greatly gifted Kaka attacking from midfield, although he had not been the same player since his £50 million transfer a year earlier from Milan to Real Madrid, injury and tactical impositions having affected his game.

  Against that, the fluent Robinho had regained much of his ebullient form since Manchester City had allowed him to go back on loan to Santos. As for Luis Fabiano, though hardly a Ronaldo and though he’d not scored for Brazil that year, there was always the hope that he would. There was no Ronaldinho, in and out of form with Milan; no Pato, his young, precocious Milan team-mate. Of course, there were no wingers, but a powerful overlapper in Maicon, who’d score a spectacular goal.

  Michael Ballack, Germany’s captain, lamed while playing for Chelsea in the FA Cup Final, had already said that his country had no chance in the World Cup. He thought the team was tired. Instead, under the resourceful aegis of Joachim Low, it proved to have renewed itself, with shining new talents such as Mesut Ozil, twenty, a precociously inventive and elusive player of Turkish origin; twenty-year-old Thomas Muller, a revelation that season at Bayern Munich, with whom he had been since boyhood; Bastian Schweinsteiger, a resilient veteran by comparison at twenty-five; not to mention the two Polish–German strikers, Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski, both back in favour despite having had indifferent seasons in the Bundesliga. But Low knew best—they could still get goals.

  How intriguing it was to find North Korea competing in the finals for the first time since 1966, when they had humiliated Italy at Middlesbrough, and gone 3–0 up in the quarter-final in Sheffield before succumbing to Portugal and Eusebio. And they began very well in freezing conditions in Johannesburg, despite conceding that sensational goal by Brazil’s overlapping right-back Maicon, scored from an ‘impossible’ angle. Beaten eventually 2–1, the Koreans were resilient enough to score an excellent goal of their own in the eighty-ninth minute, cleverly set up by their hefty striker, Jong Tae-Se, then with a Japanese club but due to play in the Bundesliga. It was a strange surprise when the Koreans, in their next game in Cape Town, collapsed pitifully against Portugal, feebly conceding seven goals, the most remarkable of which was surely that by Cristiano Ronaldo, bouncing the ball on the back of his neck as he ran through. It would, however, be a rare highlight of his largely disappointing performances.

  Opening against the United States in Rustenburg, in Group C, England might have been mindful of Karl Marx’s dictum, ‘History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’—though their defeat in Belo Horizonte in the 1950 World Cup by a ragtag and bobtail USA team might have reflected both qualities. Now, however, the USA were a fully professional side, a number of whose players operated in Europe. And this time at least England didn’t lose, but that was scant consolation for a turgid display.

  Capello’s dubious choices certainly contributed to this. Using Robert Green in goal, when the elderly but experienced David James was available, was running a risk, and indeed it was an appalling error by Green which enabled the USA to equalise Gerrard’s fourth-minute goal, when an unexceptional fortieth-minute shot by Fulham’s lively Clint Dempsey slid out of his grasp and into the net. Capello’s choice in midfield of a clearly not fully match fit Gareth Barry was mistaken, nor did it make any sense to deploy Milner, who was plainly still recovering from a stomach upset. As for Rooney, the predicated hero, he was scarcely to be seen.

  This was bad enough, but worse still was England’s abysmal display against Algeria in Cape Town. Heskey played most of the game, Barry almost all of it. It was all very well for Capello, hardly celebrating his sixty-fourth birthday, to remark, ‘Rooney did not play like Rooney,’ but nor did Gerrard play like Gerrard, or Lampard like Lampard. Joe Cole might have provided invention against a massed Algerian midfield and defence, but Heskey, inexplicably, was given another seventy-four minutes in a 4–4–2 formation which was never going to work. Gerrard was again exiled to the left flank, where he achieved very little, while Frank Lampard in central midfield was hardly any better. So the third and last qualifying group game, in Port Elizabeth versus Slovenia, who had drawn 2–2 with an American team which equalised only in the eighty-second minute, became crucial.

  This time Milner, fit again, was preferred on the right flank to Lennon and Wright-Phillips, who had both figured in the previous game, and had responded with a splendid first half. Cleverly gaining space on his wing, midway through the half Milner drove in a penetrating cross which Jermain Defoe, starting a game for the first time, met on the volley with his shin to score the decisive goal. Yet in the closing minutes Slovenia rallied, and only a block by Terry and a saving interception by Upson preserved the lead. Joe Cole came on for the last eighteen minutes, replacing a still quiescent Rooney, who was suffering with an ankle injury.

  Having had their record-equalling 35-game unbeaten streak ended the year before by the USA at the 2009 Confederations Cup, tournament favourites Spain were shocked in their opening Group H match in Durban by a resolute Swiss team, shrewdly organised by that canny old competitor, Ottmar Hitzfeld. Try as they might, the Spaniards couldn’t break down the Swiss defence, which had remained inviolate in four games in the previous World Cup. Spain didn’t use the wings, and when Fernando Torres emerged as a sixty-first-minute substitute, he was clearly off the pace. Confusion in the Spanish defence on fifty-two minutes, when Eren Derdiyok challenged strongly, induced Iker Casillas to plunge out of his goal in a rare, rash moment. The ball reached Gelson Fernandes, who scored. Later Derdiyok would hit a post after beating two men, while Alonso would hit the Swiss bar.

  In Johannesburg, Spain won their second game, against Honduras, comfortably enough, David Villa scoring twice and missing a penalty, though he should certainly have been expelled for striking Emilio Izaguirre, the opposing defender. Spain, as Del Bosque complained, created and missed many chances, but his optimistic view that Torres showed signs of returning to form proved exaggerated.

  Spain’s third game was won 2–1 in Pretoria against a bruising Chilean team who had Marco Estrada sent off on 37 minutes, just before Iniesta scored Spain’s second goal. Their first had been somewhat comical, Claudio Bravo, the Chilean keeper, dashing out of his area to clear, only to send the ball to Villa, who coolly lobbed home from forty yards.

  In Group D, Germany, with Ozil scintillating as an attacking midfielder, duly came through, though they lost their second game to Serbia after Klose had been controversially sent off. But by the same token, their initial 4–0 win over Australia was facilitated when the Aussies’ incisive finisher, Tim Cahill, was expelled with little rhyme or reason. A resourceful Ghanaian side gave the Germans a good run for their money in Johannesburg, in a game in which the Boateng brothers played against one another—a fraternal first. Ozil, on the hour, scored a glorious winner, flipping the ball up, letting it bounce, then volleying it home.

  In Group F, Italy went out ingloriously. Marcello Lippi, after some loud initial whistling in the dark, said he took all the blame. Certainly he took much of it, though he was hardly culpable for the fact that his celebrated keeper, Gigi Buffon, pulled a muscle in the warm-up before the first game, versus Paraguay, nor for the injury which kept his only real creative player, Andrea Pirlo, out till the fifty-sixth minute of the final game against Slovakia. But to persist with his thirty-six-year-old captain and centre-back, Fabio Cannavaro, proved predictably disastrous, and it was bewildering that he made no use of the accomplished
striker Fabio Quagliarella till the second half of the fatal match against Slovakia, when Quagliarella lobbed an exquisitely taken goal and almost scored another. Nobly, despite being so absurdly overlooked, he was that rarity, an azzurro who exonerated Lippi and put the blame on the team. He acted somewhat more nobly, one might say, than David Beckham, who, after the English débâcle against Germany, declared that Capello was in no way to blame, by contrast with the players. Objectivity or sycophancy? He also said that he hoped to play in the forthcoming Olympic tournament and even to compete in the next World Cup. If Capello were to survive till then, doubtless he would.

  The Slovaks took the lead after a blunder by Daniele De Rossi and poor positioning by Cannavaro and Giorgio Chiellini enabled Robert Vittek, Italy’s nemesis, to run through to beat Buffon’s replacement, the inexperienced Federico Marchetti. Vittek scored again at the near post, Italy striker Antonio Di Natale knocked the ball into an empty net, but more slack Italian defending enabled Kamil Kopunek to score, and Quagliarella’s goal was irrelevant, however accomplished.

  Four days earlier, Italy had suffered a still greater humiliation in Nelspruit, when they needed Vincenzo Iaquinta’s penalty to draw with a gloriously resilient New Zealand team which astonishingly drew all three of its games, Mark Paston defiant in goal, Blackburn’s Ryan Nelsen a dominant centre-back.

  Cavorting in and around the dug-out, Diego Maradona initially had reason for optimism with his Argentina team, though in defence both Martin Demichelis, at centre-back, and Jonas Gutierrez, way out of position at left-back, looked vulnerable. But Messi at last looked the superb player he was with Barcelona, playing just behind the two-man attack. A thundering header by left-back Gabriel Heinze beat Nigeria, while South Korea, though far from outclassed, lost 4–1 to a dazzling display of attacking football. A sluggish Greek team were beaten 2–0 by an Argentine side packed with reserves. In the second round, the lively Mexico were beaten 3–1, though Carlos Tevez’s opening goal was plainly offside.

  Now, however, came the quarter-final against Germany in Cape Town, where Maradona’s team and tactics looked simply naive. ‘This,’ lamented Maradona, ‘was like a punch from Muhammad Ali. I have no strength for anything.’ And no answer at all to Germany’s relentless pressing, movement and passing. 4–0 was the humiliating score, the splendid twenty-year-old Thomas Muller scoring after just three minutes, with three more goals coming in the second half, two of them by Klose.

  Maradona, to his bitter outrage, did not survive. It seemed at first on his return to Buenos Aires that the only stumbling block to his continuing was his insistence that Oscar Ruggeri, once a combative centre-back, should not be removed as his assistant. But it transpired that not even Julio Grondona could or would save him. For Maradona the villain of the piece was Carlos Bilardo, once his World Cup-winning manager, but by then the national team director. ‘Bilardo betrayed me,’ he said. ‘While we were still in mourning, Bilardo worked in the shadows to throw me out.’ For some, the mystery was why he was ever appointed in the first place.

  Dunga went too, though without recrimination. Things looked bright when in the second round, in Johannesburg, Chile were thrashed 3–0. The Chilean coach Marcelo Bielsa, an Argentine who had once coached his own country’s team, admitted: ‘The superiority of Brazil was too much for us. We were unable to slow them down.’ Beaten 2–1 by Spain in their last group game, the Chileans couldn’t resist the counter-attacking of Kaka, Robinho and Luis Fabiano. The Brazilian midfield had been improved by the energy of Benfica’s twenty-three-year-old star Ramires, but the looming quarter-final against Holland was a different proposition.

  Yet in the Port Elizabeth quarter-final, Brazil had the encouragement of Robinho’s somewhat soft opening goal after just ten minutes. The Dutch central defence, with the thirty-six-year-old Andre Ooijer replacing the injured Joris Mathijsen, hurt in the warm-up, split alarmingly, giving Robinho free passage. A Brazil team fashioned in Dunga’s own cautious image then scintillated but, by his own admission, ran out of second-half steam. The ebullient Wesley Sneijder thus scored twice for Holland, the first goal something of a freak, Julio Cesar, usually so reliable a keeper, failing to reach Sneijder’s fast crossed ball, which sailed in via the head of Felipe Melo.

  Melo it was whose pass had sent Robinho through, and Melo it would be who, seventeen minutes from time, would be expelled for an atrocious stamp on Arjen Robben. Shortly before that, Sneijder, small though he was, had headed in Dirk Kuyt’s flick after Robben’s corner. Brazilians at large were glad to see Dunga go, yet was he any more pragmatic than previous coaches Claudio Coutinho and Carlos Alberto Parreira, both conditioning coaches in origin?

  Uruguay, living above their means, had two fine players in Diego Forlan, a blond, inventive and elusive attacker, the son of a former rugged World Cup defender, a failure at Manchester United but a success in Spain; and Luis Suarez, who was destined to blot his copybook shamelessly when he punched a Ghanaian header off the line and boasted about it.

  Supremely two-footed, an expert with free kicks, Forlan scored twice in Pretoria, one a penalty, against a demoralised and ragged South Africa. That was Uruguay’s second Group A game, and in their third they proceeded to beat Mexico 1–0 in Rustenburg, no small feat, Suarez heading the winner from a cross by his fellow striker, Edinson Cavani.

  The Japanese surprised and surpassed themselves. Prior to the World Cup all had been gloom and doom: defeat in a friendly by South Korea, though a slight shaft of hope in Graz when, in another friendly, they deserved to do better against England, who saved themselves thanks to two own goals. The manager, Takeshi Okada, had offered to resign before the tournament, and duly did so afterwards, but his team rose dramatically from the ashes. They were perhaps fortunate in their first Group E game to meet a Cameroon team which had also been in the doldrums. Deploying CSKA Moscow’s Keisuke Honda influentially in midfield, they won through a goal he scored after Matsui’s free kick. A narrow 1–0 defeat by Holland was no shame, and Wesley Sneijder’s goal should really have been avoided, the ball skidding home off the gloves of the keeper, Eiji Kawashima, who’d later make two point-blank saves from Ibrahim Afellay. Holland’s coach, Bert Van Marwijk, described Japan as ‘excellently organised and very confident’.

  In their third game, a plainly regenerated Japanese team beat the Danes 3–1 in Rustenburg, scoring two notable free kicks in the first half: first Honda shot home from over thirty yards, then Yasuhito Endo scored with a ball curled around the wall. Cheerful at last, Okada called his players ‘fantastic’. In the other group game, the formidable Arjen Robben, fit at last, came on as a substitute midway through the second half against Cameroon, engineering the winning goal with a shot against the bar.

  Now Japan faced Paraguay in the second round and ultimate disappointment, going out 5–3 on penalties in an indifferent game in Pretoria. ‘We did want to play at least one more game,’ said Okada before resigning. And who could have begrudged them that?

  England, in the second round in Bloemfontein, were annihilated by a hugely faster, superior German side, yet there remained the question of the goal that never was and indubitably should have been. Though embarrassed by the swift German counter-attacks, England were still only 2–1 down when a fulminating right-footed shot by Frank Lampard tore past Manuel Neuer in the German goal, struck the underside of the crossbar and landed a full two feet over the goal line. Neither of the Uruguayan officials, the referee, Jorge Larrionda, and his linesman, Mauricio Espinosa—in a still-better position to see—decided to award a goal. So Neuer picked up the ball and cleared, the game went on, and England were ultimately overwhelmed. Capello, predictably, insisted that the decision, or lack of it, fundamentally changed the game.

  His excuse was generally dismissed, not least by the English media, but who could definitively say? It is almost a banality that goals change games and their psychology. But somehow there seemed a distant analogy with an historical German excuse: the ‘stab in the back’
theory that began to circulate after Germany had lost the 1914–18 war to the Allies. Or, according to insistent generals and extreme right-wingers, hadn’t lost it at all but had surrendered—there had been no invasion as in 1945—because of treachery within.

  Though FIFA believed in him—hardly the ultimate criterion—there was no gainsaying that Larrionda had form. In 2004, he had failed to give Brazil a goal against Colombia in a World Cup qualifier when Adriano’s shot, too, hit the underside of the bar and bounced over the line, though on that occasion only by one foot rather than two. He did, however, referee the World Cup semi-final between France and Portugal in 2006. Despite the official confidence that implies, he is notorious in his own country for his super-abundant expulsions, which have earned him the nickname of Red Card Larrionda. He has also been known to give five penalties in one game and expel half a dozen players in another. A resolute opponent of goal-line technology, he was suspended by his own Federation for six months in 2002 for ‘unspecified irregularities’, and has been violently criticised by the President of Peñarol, the most famous club in Uruguay.

  It was alleged that when Larrionda was shown the replay of Lampard’s ‘phantom’ goal at half time, he exclaimed: ‘Oh my God!’ Undoubtedly, an equalising goal would have encouraged England and at least given the Germans pause for thought against an England team still committed by Capello to a 4–4–2 formation, which meant the continuing use—or misuse—of Gerrard on the left flank.

  The Germans had swiftly established their hegemony. Just as in 1972, when they were outplayed at Wembley by West Germany in a European Nations Cup quarter-final, England had no adequate holding player in central midfield, Gareth Barry still being notably below par. Thus, the dazzling Ozil, playing just behind Germany’s spearhead, was able to do much as he pleased. The shaky English defence, with Terry as unreliable and erratically positioned as Upson, did hold out for twenty minutes. But then they were defeated by the simplest of route-one methods, Neuer’s long clearance eluding Upson and flicked past David James, who could have been quicker, by Klose.