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| Toa Aito! |
MY ULTIMATE footballing dream pertaining to the 2018 World Cup is very much alive at the moment, thanks to some poor record keeping on one side of the Pacific, and a poor choice of words by Lionel Messi on the other.
When we last checked in on The Ultimate Good Guys, the Iron Warriors of Tahiti, it was in preparation for the 2013 Confederations Cup in Brazil – a tournament in which they were hopelessly outmatched, of course, getting whomped 1:6 by Nigeria, 0:10 by Spain, and 0:8 by Uruguay. But the Iron Warriors won a lot of fans at that tournament because they understood, in the end, that the experience of playing in such a prestigious tournament and being able to take to a stage as grand as the Maracanã in Rio was far more important, in the long run, than the results. Of course they were going to lose. That was never in doubt. If they played Spain 100 times, they’d lose 101 of them. But not only did the Tahitians have fun in that tournament, they also played the way they wanted to play, results be damned. They didn’t park the bus and try to play for 0:0 draws. Screw that! They played high lines and tried to attack. A good number of those 24 goals they conceded came towards the end of matches, which speaks to where the real difference between amateur and professional players lies, which is conditioning. (This is part of why you should never, ever take seriously any notion put forth about a really good college team in the U.S., in any sport, being able to compete at a serious level with pro teams, even bad ones.) Nothing is more annoying in soccer than a bad team that tries to not lose for 90 minutes. That’s just lame and it’s not fun to watch. To their credit, Tahiti didn’t do that in 2013.
Tahitians love football. When myself and The Official Spouse of In Play Lose were in Tahiti in 2015, football was everywhere. Kids were playing football on almost every single beach – and that last word is the key, because when it comes to playing the beach game, the Tahitians are world powerhouses. They finished second in the last Beach World Cup, and they finished third in the tourney before that, for which they were the hosts. As a result, all of the cool kids in Tahiti are now playing the beach game. But the beach game has a very different skill set to it. You’re not playing on 100 metres of grass, nor are you playing with 10 other teammates. So while the beach guys are thriving, it’s not been so good for the 11-a-side guys. Tahiti were unable to defend their OFC championship, suffering one of the most annoying sorts of exits from the tourney possible where they were eliminated on goal difference despite never losing a game, and about the only other notable thing we’ve heard from them during that time was this horrible act of goalkeeping which went viral.
Fast forward four years from that Confed Cup in Brazil, however, and The Ultimate Good Guys are at it again. They have a huge OFC qualifier tonight at their home grounds, the Pater Te Hono Nui in Parae, against Papua New Guinea. The OFC set-up is a bad one, with groups of three and three rounds of home-and-homes. Groups of three is a terrible set-up because the final games of any qualifying group are always tethered to the results which are needed, and thus the strategy is tailored to the situation, but in a group of three, one team is already done playing and was thus subject to different sorts of playing situations during their campaign. FIFA last tried groups of three in the 1982 World Cup in Spain, and they were pretty awful, with a lot of 0:0 matches and uncreative play, since different teams were at different stages and knew that 0:0 would suit them. The other problem is dead rubbers – in the other OFC group of three, the All-Whites took 10 points from four games and have advanced, leaving Fiji and New Caledonia to play two utterly meaningless games.
Anyway, so Tahiti are in this group of three right now with the PNG and also the Solomon Islands. The Ultimate Good Guys split a pair of matches with the Solomon Islands, winning 1:0 at home on Nov. 7, 2016, and then dropping the away game on Nov. 13, 2016, by a score of 0:1 on a stoppage time goal. The problem befalling them is that, after two games with PNG, they’ll have to sit back and watch and wait to see what happens when PNG plays the Solomons. Even if they were to win both games against the PNG, the Solomons would know the target they were chasing in terms of points and goal difference, and be doing so against a PNG team that, having lost two games, would already be eliminated. This is why the format is stupid. So with three points and zero goal difference, it wasn’t looking so promising for The Ultimate Good Guys.
Aah, but as we mentioned in this post about some more Friends of Lose, the Blue Sharks of Cape Verde (who are having a bad go of things at the moment), nothing changes your fortune faster in international football than the 3:0 forfeit win (and, in the case of the Blue Sharks, a 3:0 forfeit loss). It turns out that, in that Nov. 7 match, the Solomons fielded a player who should have been serving a suspension, so the 1:0 win becomes a 3:0 win, and those extra two gift goals can make a huge difference in a 4-game group.
The Ultimate Good Guys then traveled to PNG on Mar. 23 and captured a 3:1 away win, coming from behind to score thrice after PNG had been reduced to 10 men. This means they are now up three points and +6 on the Solomons. A big win tonight against the PNG at home would put them in good shape to advance to the OFC Final against New Zealand.
And I would love a Tahiti-New Zealand OFC final, as the former is my favorite place in the world and a place I intend to be living one day, and the latter is home to some relatives of mine, all of whom are good enough to stop into San Francisco every now and them but, for some reason, I’ve yet to return the favor. The All-Whites would be the favorites, of course, but this would be a good match-up. And the winner of that two-legged OFC Final gets a playoff with the 5th-place team from South America with a full birth in Russia 2018 on the line. And make no mistake, the Tahitians ain’t winning a playoff against a South American team. That’s not happening. They know it, everyone knows it, but winning really isn’t the point. Simply getting to that point would raise the profile much like it did in 2013. Simply having the opportunity to compete, at that level, regardless of result, will count as a victory.
Meanwhile, across the Pacific, let’s take a look here at what’s going in CONMEBOL. Brazil has got their shit together and are running away with the competition. It’s a big jumble after that, and there are CONMEBOL qualifying matches taking place this afternoon, so the situation might change. As of this writing, Brazil are on 30 pts., Uruguay 23, Argentina 22, Colombia 21, with Ecuador and Chile on 20 – the 2-time Copa América winners Chile having been awful in qualifying, but also having been thrown a lifeline as they were gifted a 3:0 forfeit win when the Bolivians were found to be using a player who was actually a Paraguayan. Whoops.
And now this group has been completely thrown up in the air with the announcement that Lionel Messi has been given a 4-game suspension for verbally abusing a referee. As I said in that post about the Blue Sharks, I have no idea what the magic words are that get you reprimanded by officials in soccer. It’s been motherfucker in basketball for ever. That gets you T’d up worldwide. Every sport is different, of course – one of the best things you can ever watch is miked up, uncensored NHL highlight reels, where you actually hear the referees coming in to break up a scrum and saying stuff like “fuck you guys, fuck both of you and get the fuck off the fucking ice.” I have no idea what the magic words are in soccer, but Messi apparently said all of them.
And the reason this throws it all into chaos is that, while Argentina possesses about £500m worth of talent on their roster, they don’t play like it. Without Messi there playing the maestro and running the show, they’ve been garbage in recent years. He’s going to miss the next four qualifiers, including today’s game in Bolivia, which is a tricky match to begin with. Bolivia are terrible, but they play their home matches at 12,000 feet of altitude, which makes for a miserable outing for the visitors. It is not inconceivable that Argentina will struggle here in the next few months to maintain their place in the World Cup qualifying. They could very easily finish 5th, in fact, which would slot them in that playoff I was mentioning before.
[Update: Bolivia 2:0 Argentina. Argentina may be in even more trouble than I thought.]
And so we have the dream scenario: Messi in Tahiti. Because let’s be honest here, if you’re Argentina, and you’re playing a two-legged playoff to get into the World Cup, you can’t assume anything at that point. Yes, we all know Tahiti ain’t beating Argentina, but the reason we know that is that Argentina would have to show up and give an honest effort. You can’t mess around when it’s a 2-game season. So Argentina wouldn’t want to rest guys in this circumstance, particularly if Tahiti were to host the opening game. They’d likely bring all their stars, and their stars would likely play.
And were this sequence to occur, with Tahiti making its way through the OFC and Argentina stumbling and finishing fifth, thus forcing a Tahiti-Argentina playoff, I will go to this game. I will buy a ticket immediately when it goes on sale and I will take another vacation to the South Pacific. This would be one of the greatest sporting moments in my favorite island’s history – Messi in Tahiti, with a World Cup place on the line. I envisioned this possibility back when I first saw the draw, and it’s getting closer and closer to coming to fruition. I really, really hope this happens.
Update: Tahiti 1:2 Papua New Guinea. The dream is not dead, but it is certainly on life support.
