Everyone Sucks

THE LOSE has been doing studious research in the run-up to the World Cup semifinals, some of which may or may not involve the use of some fine products from The Official Distillery of In Play Lose, but after going through a number of foreign press services scouring for bits of information, I’ve come to the conclusion that you shouldn’t watch tomorrow’s semifinal between Brazil and Germany, nor should you watch Argentina and the Netherlands on Wednesday, and don’t even bother with the final on Sunday because everyone involved sucks. The Brazilians have abandoned the beautiful game, the Dutch are unattractive, the Argentines consist of Messi and 10 stiffs lacking any sort of expression, and the Germans are back to being nothing more than ruthless, unimaginative automatons. And this is the ‘best’ the game has to offer, which speaks to a sorry state of affairs. Clearly, it’s the worst of all possible worlds, seeing the sport reduced to this sort of rubbish.

It’s amusing to read this sort of stuff, especially when you consider the pedigree on display over the next few days. The four teams remaining in the World Cup have 10 championships and 19 finals appearances between them. They are among the greatest footballing nations on earth. Yet when it comes to the mythology of the game, no one taking the pitch in the next couple of days can ever quite match up.

Even if that mythology is, quite frankly, a crock of shit.

Let’s get it out of the way here and kill some idols right off the bat. Argentina has never won a World Cup where it didn’t cheat – either on the pitch or off of it. The Dutch ideal of Total Football apparently involved three minutes of brilliance followed by 87 minutes of patting yourselves on the back about how great you are, and not bothering to, oh, you know, win the World Cup final. (Today is the 40th anniversary of the single-most written about soccer match in history. This Guardian article from 2008 is probably a bit more deconstructivist than need be, but you get the point.) The great Brazilian teams of yore occasionally did stuff like this on their way to greatness (hint: everyone does). The supposedly great German side had become so cynical and downright loathsome by the 1980s that it was a sure sign of the need to reform the game when, in 1990, the Germans found themselves to be the most likable team in the tournament. (Albeit one lead by a certain striker who tended to act like he was shot whenever someone breathed upon him.)

A bit hyperbolical of me? Well, sure, but so are all the myths of grandeur which came before. It should always be remembered that the French word histoire can mean both ‘history’ and ‘story,’ not differentiating between that which is real and that which is fabricated. The truth is that winning is an ugly business a lot of the time. Winners write history – and also periodically go back and rewrite it, overlooking a few blemishes and inconvenient truths here and there.

(And it should be pointed out that losers write and rewrite history as well. In sport, no one rewrites history quite like the English, of course. A particularly grumpy curmudgeon of an Englishman said on ESPN FC the other day, soon after the 3 Lions exit from Brazil, that back in his day, England could have fielded two sides among the 10 best in the world. Given that England have failed to qualify more often than they’ve reached the semifinals in the last 48 years, I’m not sure exactly which era he’s talking about.)

The three great sporting pastimes on earth – soccer, baseball, and cricket – are all sports whose continuing to thrive, in some ways, is dependent upon the mythology of the past. All three also happen to be sports in which, in fact, not a whole lot actually happens in way of action. Because let’s be honest here, not much really does happen. A soccer game ends 0:0 or 1:0, while baseball and cricket feature bursts of action a few seconds in length followed by quite a few moments of everyone standing around. And yet there has probably been more literature written about those three sports than the rest of the pastimes on earth put together. When such small moments and small details prove to make a difference, those moments are magnified often beyond the point of comprehension. Just imagine the ramifications in Argentina in 1978, a tournament a military junta was attempting to use as a stamp of legitimacy, had the Dutch shot in the dying minutes not hit the post but tucked inside of it and given the Netherlands a shocking 2:1 victory in the final? It was a random moment in a game – and yet one which explodes metaphorically. When the whistle blows and the match is over, games invariably become the domain of commentators, writers, artisans and philosophers. (Indeed, the full quote from Sartre serving as this blog’s epigram reads, “In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposing team.”)

Listen to a baseball game sometime, actually listen to the game and tell me what it is that you hear. Is it the sport, or is it a narrative of the sport as revealed by a storyteller? I have no problems whatsoever stating that it is the latter, and that I grew up believing in the fiction of baseball. I grew up listening to Dave Niehaus, who was a phenomenal broadcaster and who could make any sort of game situation sound compelling. He could make even 100-loss Mariner teams worth following. It didn’t matter what the situation – once you tuned in, you didn’t want to turn the radio off. He had a mix of populism and eloquence about the game which was spellbinding. You could only imagine how someone which such command of the language and the ability to captivate an audience could’ve scared the hell out of you had he been telling ghost stories around a campfire. In the abstract, of course, the idea of listening to the Mariners was a completely hopeless and futile endeavour, and yet the story of every game, laid out for you like that, made you want to come back for more – and also made you foolishly think that somehow, some way, the team was going to actually improve. The Mariners were god awful most of the time, and going to the games in this empty concrete mushroom of a stadium was shocking in just how silent it was. At least listening to the broadcast gave you the same sort of enjoyment of having a good book to read, even if you didn’t like the ending.

And when you broadcast baseball, of course, you just fill in the gaps with stories of games gone by. In true absurdist Mariner fashion, those stories were usually hysterical – Niehaus had also been the broadcaster for some truly horrid California Angels teams, so all of his stories tended to lean towards the absurd. Listening to a Giants game here in San Francisco, meanwhile, is rife with stories of players who actually knew what they were doing, guys like Mays and McCovey and Marichal. Listening to cricket is baseball to the extreme, in that it would seem the entirety of the game is the stories of the past. I tried really hard to get into cricket when I lived in England, and I was just amazed listening to a broadcast of a 5-day test match in the West Indies where England were getting mercilessly thrashed in that the entirety of the broadcast basically consisted of telling old stories. There wasn’t anything new to report on the pitch – the West Indian opening partnership batted for about two days and scored something like 398 runs – so it was just one story after another about some heroic England bowler getting the Aussies all-out in 19(fill in the blank), or batting for a century vs. India in 19(fill in the blank), with the occasional “there’s a shot for four,” thrown in to keep you on your toes. I wondered sometimes if the script had been penned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the whole endeavour simply a serialized radio show on the BBC. At times, it didn’t even seem like there was a game going on.

Soccer isn’t quite to that extreme, although if you ever read the commentary in a newspaper after a match, it sure makes it seem like even the dullest match was worth watching. To borrow my favourite XPFC from a previous post on this blog:

It’s hard to say which was greyer, the skies over the pitch in Aberystwyth or the action upon it, as XPFC were held goalless by 10-man Liverpool, the Merseysiders reduced by one when Suárez was giving his marching orders after 10 minutes, responding to being denied by the keeper Morgan’s ample reach by lashing out and biting him on the boot. Bassett-Bouchard produced some joy down the right flank for the home side early on, but his questions went unanswered, as XPFC’s lumbering forward Day was unable to make the most of early chances. Gerrard wrong footed Frentz in XPFC’s central defense but shot wide at the quarter hour mark. The stout defending which ensued permitted both goalkeepers ample time to learn Spanish and eat cheese sandwiches in lieu of any steady work. MacNeil’s clattering tackle in central defense just before the stroke of halftime perhaps should’ve earned the visitors a spot kick, but appeals went unheeded and play continued. The two sides lacked both ideas and the initiative to go forward after the interval, apart from the Venezuelan substitute del Solar attempting to rally the home side, providing some brightness with some dashing darts through the center of the pitch, only to see his final ball continue to go awry. The introduction of Pianowski up front provided a strong target for the Welsh XI, but the service in the final third was little more than crosses drooping like wilted lettuce, and Day’s final touch let him down a stroke from the death, missing a sitter as he shot wide from 5 yards. Disappointment for the home side, but truth be told any result other than a point taken for either side would have been an unjust one.

All that for a 0:0 draw. Imagine if anything good had actually happened. Open up a weekend edition of a British newspaper and you’ll get 10 stories just like that – all very evocative, rather clever, and probably more than a little bit embellished.

The stupidity ultimately comes when people start to believe in their own myths. For some reason, the Dutch seem far more interested in being critically acclaimed than actually winning. History seems to have stopped at 1970 in Brazil (or perhaps 1982) and around 1986 in Argentina (minus a few pesky details along the way). A lot of the greatest critics of the modern game are former players, of course, which I find completely amusing. Yes, there is no doubt they were great in their time, but the game has evolved. Players are bigger, stronger, faster, and tactics have changed. No sport stays the same over time. You have to enjoy it for what it is, in the here and the now, not for what it was in the past. If anything, I think the game of soccer has gotten better in recent years, with the advent of all sorts of new formations and new strategies. 

But never mind me. Everyone sucks. The game sucks and the semifinals will all be about tactics and nothing about imagination – which, in truth, it probably always was, but there is no longer much of an element of surprise. A large part of the mystique of the South American side of yore came from the fact that players tended to stay in South America, and thus were somewhat unknown quantities. That just doesn’t happen in a globalized world where everyone plays on the same club teams, coaching ideas cross borders and training routines become standardized across the globe. If anything, winning a World Cup is now harder than ever, given that everyone starts on much more equal footing.

And 50 years from now, whomever wins this coming Sunday will be hailed as great champions, of course, because they always are, and whomever will be wearing the shirt of that country will likely be considered to be terrible and unimaginative and not up to the standard of the nation set a half-century earlier. They will all suck, just as much as the guys playing tomorrow will suck, when the Brazilians will score more goals than the Germans because they will suck slightly less, and the Dutch will suck slightly less on Wednesday than Argentina. But that’s not a prediction, and I’m not really interested in watching such drek, anyway. And neither should you, because these guys are all terrible.