Moreover, it could be said that Brazil’s long-term neglect of wingers in favour of overlapping full backs was at last seriously found out. Julinho, Garrincha and Jairzinho belonged to a glorious past. As we know, however fast and adventurous a full back with his forays, he will almost never get to the goal line like a true winger and pull the ball back with that devastating pass into the box.
In defence of their defence, the Brazilians might argue that against Germany they missed—and badly—their captain and key centre-back, Thiago Silva, for whom Bayern Munich’s Dante was no real substitute. Missing too, alas, was their outstanding player, Neymar, victim of a disgraceful knee in the back by the Colombian Juan Zúñiga which broke a vertebra and could have crippled him for life. Not that the Brazilians were anything less than ruthless in their match against the Colombians, with one player after another taking it in turn to foul the dazzling, precocious James Rodríguez, who was arguably the revelation of the tournament. But perhaps the real culprit for Zúñiga’s dreadful foul was the overly permissive Spanish referee Carlos Velasco Carballo, who gave not a single yellow card for the best—or worst—part of an hour.
Then there was the matter of Brazil’s centre-forwards, or the lack of them. Unlike the negative decision to do without wingers, in this case it seemed there was no adequate centre-forward to be found. This in a country which once boasted the marvellous Leônidas, with his famous bicycle kick, who would probably have helped his team knock Italy out of the 1938 World Cup semi-final had the Brazilians not insanely rested him; 1950’s prolific, elusive Ademir; Vavá, so incisive in the 1958 and 1962 tournaments; the irrepressible Romario in 1994; and Ronaldo (so shamefully forced to play after a seizure in the 1998 Final) in 2002. ‘Can there be none better than the plodding Fred?’ one wondered, watching a Brazilian team with such a blunt spearhead. The poor fellow was destined to be booed by his own supporters when he was eventually substituted in the semi-final, with the big screens showing him sitting forlornly on the bench. His understudy, Jô, a failure at both Manchester City and Everton, was no better.
Neymar did what he could to breathe intelligent life into this otherwise prosaic attack, though even he deserved to be sent off in Brazil’s opening game against a rightly resentful Croatia, who were hampered by an errant referee who give the Brazilians and Neymar a highly controversial penalty, and a good deal else besides.
Then there was the toxic case of Uruguay’s Luis Suárez, who blatantly bit Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini and was promptly and properly sent off. Nonetheless, he angrily proclaimed his innocence, receiving support not only from most of Uruguay’s 3.3 million inhabitants, but also the country’s vitriolic and abusive president. Only when he knew he would be sold by Liverpool to Barcelona would Suárez recant, admit his sin and belatedly apologise to Chiellini. Has the Uruguayan president apologised, one wonders?
In the ensuing outrage, both after the offence and with the subsequent cynical apology, it seemed to me that the central point of the whole horrid affair had been missed: namely, that what Suárez did to Chiellini, however monstrous, was also flagrantly self-defeating. For the assault took place before the eyes of literally millions of television viewers; there was never a hope in hell that Suárez would get away with it. To say that he must have known that at the instant of biting is useless: rationality had gone out of the window. Just as it surely had on his two previous recorded episodes of biting: once when playing for Ajax in Holland; and again when playing for Liverpool against Chelsea at Anfield, the victim on that occasion being the defender Branislav Ivanovic´.
On each of those occasions, Suárez was duly punished, but it seemed clear that each time, he, a chronic recidivist, would do it again. He is arguably beyond help. His behaviour is essentially that of a psychotic, and as Freud insisted, where a neurotic might be cured by psychotherapy, a psychotic can’t be because he is convinced he doesn’t need it. Barcelona may have reckoned that by the time Suárez does it again, they will have had sufficient service from him.
For whatever his offences—and one remembers all too clearly how his fist on the line robbed Ghana of victory in the previous World Cup, and how he showed his delight when the consequent penalty was missed, exulting on the touchline—he remains a supremely talented player, a glorious opportunist, technically remarkable, a dazzling and original scorer. In the 2014 tournament, England could do nothing with him.
Before a ball was kicked in Brazil there had been much drama, not to say scandal. The egregious Ricardo Teixeira, former son-in-law and protégé of the equally serpentine Joäo Havelange, had shamefully been made head of the Brazilian World Cup organising body. This after a long and devious career in which, as David Yallop’s devastating book How They Stole the Game narrates, huge quantities of tax had been evaded. ‘The little fat man’, as Yallop calls him, was owner merely of a failing farm when Havelange made him rich on television ownership. But both men had now been found guilty of pocketing huge sums of money to further the commercial cause of the now defunct company ISL. Teixeira was forced to resign his position, while Havelange, by now well into his nineties, was meaninglessly deprived of his title of Honorary President of FIFA.
On top of that, on 4 June the Sunday Times blew the whistle on the appalling corruption which had enabled the tiny desert country of Qatar to be awarded the 2022 World Cup, this despite a climate which in summer could see temperatures rise to 50 degrees centigrade, and despite the state having not the remotest standing in world football.
It now transpired that Mohamed bin Hammam, up until quite recently the vice president of FIFA and former chief executive of Qatari football, had spent over $5 million on bribing members of the FIFA committee which allotted the World Cup. It was hardly surprising to learn that huge sums had been paid to the deplorable Trinidad fixer and despot Jack Warner, who in 2010 had virtually been given the run of 10 Downing Street by a deluded David Cameron as he sought Warner’s vote in England’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup. In the event, England got just two votes, one of them being their own. They had simply not been prepared to pay out bribes. The huge expenditure had been futile from the off.
It also subsequently emerged that a security expert had awarded Qatar one of the worst possible ratings for World Cup safety, given its exiguous size and the certainty that any terrorist atrocity could wipe out its various stadia, close to one another as they would be. These were being erected, it transpired, by a cruelly exploited workforce of Nepalese workers who were dying in droves, and who were unable to escape since their passports had been confiscated. By contrast, even the belated and somewhat chaotic Brazilian construction programme had cost just two lives, tragic though that was.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter, needless to say, tried ineptly to deflect the cataclysmic revelations by bleating to a large captive audience of FIFA beneficiaries about ‘racism’, only to be properly and scornfully rebuked by the chairman of the Football Association, Greg Dyke. Yet who could be relied on? Who could be believed? We already knew that Michel Platini, as disastrous an administrator as he had been splendid a footballer and now president of UEFA, had not only supported Qatar’s bid but had actually, despite his European role, supported Qatar’s offer to stage the World Cup during the winter, thus throwing the programme of Europe’s clubs into utter confusion.
And then out of the woodwork came none other than Franz Beckenbauer, as great a playing talent as Platini, a World Cup winner as both Germany’s captain and its manager. The Sunday Times disclosed that he had accepted hospitality from bin Hammam in both Qatar and Europe. Michael Garcia, the American lawyer charged with investigating the World Cup scandals, summoned the German to be questioned. Beckenbauer initially refused, but then changed his mind. But since Garcia had allowed himself to be persuaded by FIFA to conclude his inquiry before the 2014 World Cup took place, thus ignoring the devastating evidence published that June by the Sunday Times, his investigation seemed hopelessly truncated.
None of this, blessedly, had any effect o
n the enormous attraction and the infinite drama of the World Cup once the games began, though Cameroon would be accused by a notorious fixer, quoted in a German paper, of manipulating the game in which Croatia thrashed them 4–0, with one of Cameroon’s players, Barcelona’s Alex Song, getting himself sent off for what seemed an utterly unmotivated assault on an opponent.
There was an early shock when Spain, the holders, were annihilated 5–1 by the Dutch in their opening Group B game in Salvador, a reprise, you might say, of their last World Cup meeting, the 2010 Final, when Spain had prevailed. This time they would be routed by a Dutch team whose manager, Louis van Gaal, shortly to join Manchester United, had expressed no great hopes of success. Two key midfielders, Kevin Strootman and Rafael van der Vaart, were absent, injured. Arjen Robben, however, who twice came so close to scoring in the 2010 Final, was as insidious as ever, gloriously unorthodox, left-footed on the right wing, cutting in at pace past stranded defenders, irrepressible—even if he did, by his own admission, still tend to dive. His was the fifth Dutch goal, dashing from his own half on to Wesley Sneijder’s through ball to round a sadly erratic Iker Casillas in the Spanish goal and score, having earlier got the second goal from young Daley Blind’s pass. But the most spectacular goal was Robin Van Persie’s looping header to open the Dutch account. In vain had the Spaniards gone ahead from Xabi Alonso’s penalty. What now of tiki-taka football? The heroes were tired and the opportunist decision to co-opt the Brazilian international Diego Costa had backfired badly. An era was coming to an end.
Under the tutelage of Roy Hodgson, England, in Group D, sputtered and expired, failing for the first time to win a game since 1958 in Sweden, where at least they’d achieved three draws. In 1994, Hodgson had taken Switzerland to the finals, having surpassed themselves with two fine results against Italy in the qualifiers. That, I still believe, would have been the ideal moment to make him manager of England. When it did happen so much later, he would find himself with limited talent available, a situation that was exacerbated by injuries to the rapid right-winger Theo Walcott and the versatile young attacker Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, who was hurt en route to Brazil during a friendly played in Miami.
In retrospect, Hodgson was probably wrong to rely on a fading Steven Gerrard, who was at fault for both the goals Luis Suárez scored for Uruguay, and too cautious about using the exuberant young Ross Barkley as a starter rather than a substitute. Wayne Rooney, on whom so much depended, was no more than moderately effective in attack, while the country which had given football the ‘third-back game’ had no centre-half to dominate and organise now that John Terry, his captaincy removed from him by an over-precipitate FA chairman David Bernstein before he had even been tried—and acquitted—in a magistrates’ court of charges of racism, had shown no desire to return.
It was a mediocre performance by England, yet nothing compared to that 1–0 defeat by the USA in 1950, nor as catastrophic as Brazil’s 7–1 defeat by Germany or Spain’s 5–1 crushing by Holland in this tournament. Italy’s manager Cesare Prandelli actually praised the England team generously, and even if the game was something of a dead rubber, at least they didn’t lose to Costa Rica, who would punch so splendidly above their weight throughout the tournament.
Germany, as they themselves pointed out, had radically and successfully revised their youth training and coaching programmes, but, as the Romans had it, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guards? Who coaches the coaches? Heaven forbid that the Football Association’s coaching programme, steadily ossified over the years, then perversely simplified under the dire regime of Charlie ‘long ball cut out the midfield’ Hughes, could turn again into a new orthodoxy.
It was somewhat surprising that Hodgson, such a keen and sophisticated student of the game, should elect to fly home with the rest of his squad and its populous entourage—eighty strong in all—rather than stay to see the rest of the tournament; surprising too when he said, ‘All we can do is hope that when the players are reaching their best years at the age of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, the work shows some dividends.’ So much for the likes of the effervescent twenty-two-year-old Colombian James Rodríguez, not to mention the various young stars in the German team. That FA chairman Greg Dyke, an inveterate blowhard, should choose to fly back too was hardly surprising. During the previous season, he had missed two England games at Wembley thanks to his manifold commitments, while his gesture of drawing a finger across his throat when, at the World Cup draw, he heard whom England would play was crass to a degree, even if events may have corroborated rather than justified it.
For Brazil, the irony was that though there had been doubts about their defence, in fact they conceded a mere four goals before the rout by Germany. Not that the team’s overall form had been greatly impressive before that fatal semi-final. The opening group victory, 3–1 in Säo Paulo against Croatia, was precipitated by a complaisant Japanese referee in Yuichi Nishimura. He gave a dubious penalty to Brazil after they had gone behind thanks to a Marcelo own goal on eleven minutes, Fred falling unconvincingly in the box after backing into Southampton’s Dejan Lovren. Neymar, the shining hope, duly scored from the spot. That was on seventy-one minutes, his first goal having come in the twenty-ninth, just two minutes after he should arguably have been sent off for a flagrant forearm blow to Luka Modric´. A yellow card seemed quite insufficient, though it would have been a brave referee indeed to have expelled the people’s darling. Nemesis awaited Neymar.
Brazil, playing 4–3–2–l, also survived what looked a decent goal by Ivan Perišic´ on 83 minutes, before going on to meet and not score at all against Mexico in Fortaleza. The defiant goalkeeping of Guillermo Ochoa for a revived Mexican team—they’d qualified with extreme difficulty—kept them at bay, though Mexico made good chances of their own. ‘I can’t remember a goalkeeper performing like that in a World Cup,’ said Mexico’s tubby, histrionic manager, Miguel Herrera. The veteran skipper and centre-back Rafael Márquez, playing in his fourth World Cup, was resilient. It was sad that his tournament should end in anticlimax when, against Holland, Arjen Robben lured him into the foul which produced the winning penalty. But against the hosts in Fortaleza, 0–0 was the score. Márquez even headed a goal in the 3–1 conquest of Croatia.
In Brazil’s third group game in Brasilia, a capital without a club, their 4–1 conquest of Cameroon was far less easy than the margin suggests. Neymar was the catalyst, this time scoring twice before being substituted on 72 minutes.
So to the first knockout round, where, against Chile in Belo Horizonte, it took the inspired goalkeeping of Júlio César, discarded by modest Queens Park Rangers in the English season, to keep Brazil in the tournament, thanks to a spectacular save in the first half and two penalty saves in the shoot-out. David Luiz had put Brazil ahead, but the supremely versatile and ubiquitous Alexis Sánchez equalised from Eduardo Vargas’s pass after Brazilian confusion at a throw-in. But the hosts survived.
Next to the bruising quarter-final in Fortaleza against a Colombian team inspired by the brilliance of Rodríguez. It was Neymar who would suffer most, thanks to Zúñiga’s brutal foul. Having lost their prolific centre- forward Radamel Falcao to injury, Colombia, going farther in the tournament than ever before, had found a new hero in Rodríguez. The goal he scored against Uruguay at the Maracanã in the first knockout round was arguably the finest of the competition. Controlling the ball on his chest, he spun round to strike a superb left-footed volley. Well might he say afterwards, ‘We are making history.’ Later in the game he scored again, against a Uruguay side deprived of the banned Suárez. He would eventually get half a dozen goals and many felt that he, rather than Lionel Messi (who was supremely uninterested in the award), should have been voted top player of the tournament.
He was a baby when his family moved from Cúcuta, near the Venezuelan border, to Ibagué. His father, Wilson, played for Independiente Medellín, but he deserted the family when James was still a child and James, in the words of a female Colombian f
ootball writer, ‘had to be the father in his home’. Precocious to a degree, he was only five when he joined the Tolima football school, with its emphasis on skills. They resented the way he was taken from them by Envigado, a club in Medellín, after they were impressed by his display in the 2004 Pony Futbol championship.
In Medellín, such was his dedication that he paid for private coaching with the respected Omar Suárez, who was much impressed. Then it was a life of travel. First to Buenos Aires, aged sixteen, to play for Banfield, which was, the player said, ‘hard’. Porto then took him to Portugal, where he scored freely. After three years there Monaco paid £40 million for him, with Real Madrid paying more than double that after the 2014 World Cup and enabling him to fulfil his dream. The Golden Ball should surely have been his.
Lionel Messi, who did win it, bitterly lamenting the fact that Argentina had missed three good chances to score in the Final, had his glittering moments earlier in the competition. Against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the opening Group F game, Alejandro Sabella’s tactics had him playing too deep, but Messi’s desired tactical change saw him moved upfield in the second half, when he scored a typically glorious solo goal in a 2–1 win.
After another superbly taken goal by Messi, after the ninety-minute mark, had given Argentina a desperately hard-earned victory against an Iran side that was dour in defence yet occasionally dangerous in attack, Sabella said, ‘Of course we have a genius. He’s Argentinian. He’s in our team. Everyone would like to have one.’ This time Messi, typically, had glided left across the penalty box, then curled his shot home.
The Story of the World Cup Page 57