Pride of a continent

European football wins

BLISS is it in this dawn to be alive, and tomorrow for the football loving fans of Amsterdam or Barcelona, once the fuzzy haze of the hangover has gone and the waking disbelief has dispersed, it will be very heaven. The World Cup came alive once the sudden death competition began. That first fortnight felt like we were entering an eternal purgatory and only a Roman Abramovich sized sum spent on indulgences could save us. Crying didn’t help us, praying didn’t do us any good. What had we all done to deserve this? Those hollow cries for excitement, for something to move the mind as it swelled the soul fell on deaf ears. Teams just didn’t seem to want to win with style and grace of ease; the World Cup owed our pleasure a great debt, but it didn’t look like it would be settled any time. Had it continued in its turgid, unedifying vanity, we would all have got over it, probably tuned in to every abject minute, but like the Ghanaians, we would have felt profoundly cheated. But, it got better and passionate football broke out to save the day.

“All credit to the keeper take nothing away, it’s a World Cup of two halves, son, at the end of the day.”

South America’s challenge, save that of Uruguayans, withered and died in the heat and altitude of South Africa’s endless nights. Africa’s tilt at the trophy ended not by the new hand of an old Uruguayan God, but by a succession of missed penalties and opportunities. Africa put on a fantastic festival of football that the old powers never believed it could, never wanted it to, and Ghana deserved to represent their continent in the semi-finals. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…

The central precept of cognitive theory is that you can think your way out of trouble; a concept clearly embraced by the finalists of Spain and Holland, but one clearly lost on Team England and a creed that still distraught fans around the world would do well to embrace. Time has allowed reality and perspective to creep in at a mouse hole and mean that now the dust has found its traditional place, the fingernails have grown back, and the tear ducts are back to their unemotional home, with clear eyes England fans might now accept that they didn’t have a hope. All those supporters who yearned, quietly (noisily mostly) for some sense of delayed gratification that never came can cast their eyes towards the gilded horizons of their collective futures…or more likely to more of the same in two, four, eight years time. At least Howard Webb made it to the final.

Spain and Holland deserve to be in the final, they have played major parts in the growing renaissance of football at the World Cup; we have all found something to believe in. Like the halcyon days of the seventies, they have been at the heart of the resurgence of flair (if not flares and Watney’s Red Barrel, even though style gurus tell us that a third summer of love is but a loon pant away). The idea that defence is the best form of defence feels as outmoded as economic decline and coalition government…erm. Holland those past purveyors of total football, beaten by the home sides in the finals of 1974 and 1978, and Spain, who have seen successive golden generations fail to fulfil their promise (sound familiar?) have the chance to write their own historical futures and to right the wrongs of World Cups past. Whoever triumphs tonight at Johannesburg’s Soccer City Stadium, we have seen the burgeoning self-belief of two nations, who have serially underachieved, but now have the chance to boost a continent’s chest-swelling pride.

“All credit to the keeper take nothing away, football’s the winner at the end of the day.”