Preface of My Four World Cups
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Football is the world\’s most popular sport.
A World Cup is contested by the most talented national teams.
A World Cup team is an expression of national character.
A World Cup gives us something to talk about.
A World Cup gives us something to share and remember.
We see our first World Cups when we are young and remember them vividly.
A World Cup is a month of questions and answers, a month of team news and opinions.
As Brian Clough once said, “Opinion makes the world go round.†A World Cup is a massive media event.
A World Cup is a sporting tsunami that erupts every four years and floods across our television screens and newspapers and websites. Teams draw and win and lose until the Final is decided and then one captain is handed the trophy and he lifts it up proudly amid tumultuous applause. Thousands of photographs record that joyful moment and the winning captain becomes one of the sporting icons of his decade.
Each new World Cup is then edited and packaged with all the blips and wrinkles erased to make it an easily consumed entertainment.
In football, as in other sports, most of the history is written by the winners, so most of the things that nearly happened in the Group Stage and quarter-finals are quickly forgotten. All the expectations, doubts and fears before every match, all the underdogs who threatened to over-achieve, the injured absentees, the crucial missed chances, the match-changing fouls that were never seen or punished, all of that is airbrushed away to give the audience a simple story with a couple of heroes.
Every World Cup is tidied up and packaged.
Mostly, we remember the champions.
This ebook, which collects my World Cup blogs from 1998 to 2010, is offered as an alternative to the Authorised Versions that have been handed down to us by the mainstream media.
My Four World Cups is an experiment in unpackaging which revisits some of the possibilities that existed before the finished event was edited, themed and simplified.
That packaging process is misleading because it always tends to make the actual outcome seem more inevitable that it really was, so I wanted to see whether the match action could be allowed to live again in its moment, before the larger narrative unfolded, and before the mass media converted it all into a slick product that could be marketed and re-marketed for the next hundred years. Modern distribution and broadcasting are provided by powerful machinery which needs feeding regularly.
Having said all that, my ambitions with this ebook are modest, although, like any author, I\’d like to find some new readers. The blogs collected here are mainly intended as a refresher for football fans who have forgotten a lot of what they once knew about tournaments played sixteen years ago, twelve years ago, eight years ago and four years ago.
This ebook contains many things you remember, a wealth of details you no longer remember, and plenty of facts you never knew.
My aim in this experiment is not to rewrite history, but rather to turn the calendar back and ask you to you roll through these World Cups again, as they happened from game to game, without the wisdom of hindsight or the shiny packaging they were soon wrapped up in.
Football\’s commentariat is huge these days and it\’s getting bigger every season, so we now have every result explained to us before the players get back to their changing rooms.
Our expert TV pundits immediately explain how the winners beat the losers and the journalists do the same the following day. They all rationalise the outcome, so most of football\’s history is written to explain winners.
The World Cup gives us something to talk about every fourth summer.
Most of us exchange our opinions and jokes about the heroes, villains and victims. However, we need to remember that the views we now hold about certain players and coaches are not the views we have always held. It is human nature to forget what we used to believe. Our opinions tend to evolve as the years flash past, and the evolution of my views on Sven-Goran Eriksson, documented here, are a good example of that.
How did I start blogging? By accident. Or, to be more precise, because of an odd coincidence.
The 1998 World Cup just happened to come along at the moment that I went online for the first time, so France 98 was the first football I ever blogged.
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From The Preface of My Four World Cups, an edited selection of pieces about France, Korea/Japan 2002, Germany 2006 and South Africa 2010.
I’ve only been a Smashwords author since Monday June 9th, so I’m still bemused by the distribution protocol.
However, Smashwords also sell ebooks direct and allow you to sample 20% for free.
And you can gift the book as well from this page.
11th June 2014