GOL?

By Azmi Sharom

Most football fans will have “their” World Cup. The first time in their lives when this greatest of sporting events took a vice-like grip of them and for one entire month obsessed them. Mine was Spain 1982.

That was the time when my friends and I would stay up all night and take to the field in the day to live out our fantasies. We played like little oiks but in our minds we were our World Cup heroes. And there were many to choose from; Maradona was there of course but there was also the tank like Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, the chain smoking Socrates and many others. But my favourite was the man who very nearly did not make the World Cup at all, that most sublime of poachers Paolo Rossi.

One’s first World Cup, in a way, was a boy’s step from childhood’s simple pleasure of simply kicking a ball around to the grown up insanity of knowing names, facts and figures which will have no real practical purpose except to reflect one’s insanity.

It is proper then that now after nearly 30 years, I should help guide my second boy into this world. My eldest probably had his “first” World Cup in France 1998, but I have been lacking in my fatherly duties and now he prefers things like books and what not. But I have a chance to redeem myself with number two.

It is fitting that this step from boy to man takes place at this moment as the little chap had just been circumcised. The cutting of the foreskin and the development of football madness go hand in hand. I can’t figure out how it does, but I am sure it does.

So last night we settled to an evening of World Cup family togetherness, and I must say, it went rather well. He asked all sorts of technical questions like, “Bah, what happens when all those people stand together in a row and then the man who kicks the balls hits one of them in the nuts?” “That’s OK son, as long as it does not hit his hand, the game continues, even if he is writhing in agony”. Obviously the little man’s mind is still on a certain sore point.

And his little six-year-old sister too was into the flow of things. When I explained that the yellow man took out his red card because one player kicked the other she sagely nodded and said “oh, he thought he was a football”. But she was not into it all that much and was soon playing with her brother’s Gameboy.

That’s alright though for her time will come and I spent the night explaining to my eleven-year-old the finer points of the game like the fact that the Germans play like a machine with the same amount of Terminator-like focus from the start to the full-time whistle. And how proud I was that he understood the off-side rule so well; something I was unable to do till my twenties (this explains why no one has ever wanted me on their team).

I hope that I have done my job well and soon he and I will be having long conversations about things that happen thousands of miles away from us and will have no bearing whatsoever on our lives except to bring unexplainable joys and sorrows.

It was a little late for them to stay up for the England match though and perhaps it is just as well. We have always taught our children that swearing is bad and it would simply have been not on for them to see me in action during one of the most pathetic displays I have ever seen.

There is no two ways about it; England was rubbish. Utterly and completely. I thought that the game would be a romp and the most I expected from the Algerians was that they would give the English lads a bit of a kicking and maybe get Rooney into a blind rage which will see him sent off. I mean their last game against Egypt in their road to qualification was akin to a Muay Thai match in Lumphini Stadium.

Instead they played really rather well, showing smooth teamwork and a certain pointless deadliness. Pointless because in the last third of the pitch, they could do no right. Unlike the English who could do no right anywhere on the pitch.

They looked lost and disorganised; there was no flow to their game; their passing and first touch were awful and if they do make it to the knockout stages, they will prove to be absolutely no danger at all to the bigger teams. Actually, right now they look to be of no danger to any team at all.

England; after all the usual hype…what plonkers.

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