Sunday, July 6, 2.00am
Argentina 1 Belgium 0
Dear Mr Tyler, proselytising does not suit you, especially at 2:15 in the morning our time or whenever it was you decided to have a go at I think it was Javier Mascherano who was having a go at the ref, bullying him from early on, and I had meant to pick you up on this issue from an earlier game, but who has the time and who can remember anyway? But Mr Tyler you almost wailed about the impact that this would have on potential soccer audiences where soccer is not the chief sport, as if that one moment of harassment would undo the great action or supersede every other heinous act already committed at this World Cup, or perhaps even in the entire history of football. More unnerving was the fact that you took up the missionary position (snigger) in the first place; you, the highly regarded king of football commentary, a man of subtlety and sophistication, who became momentarily flustered about the fact that football has yet to duly and completely take over the heathens of the USA and Australia and proclaim veni vidi vici, and if you don’t know what that means go and read some Asterix or ask Christopher Pyne, but don’t count on sending your sprog to an elite Catholic private school where they already study Latin, because as I found out last week someone else’s sprog who is taking Latin at such a school didn’t even know his own school’s heart related Latin motto let alone old Uncle Gaius’ famous words. Anyway, Mr Tyler, you later undermined your own indignation by pointing out that winning is the most important thing, and isn’t that what Mascherano was trying to do? Isn’t that what Maradona did in 1986, a situation which you, Mr Tyler, seemingly can’t help but bring up every time you call an Argentinean World Cup match? As it turned out, a mediocre Argentina were better at winning than The Curriculum’s current poster boys the Belgians, who really offered very little of goalscoring worth, but at least provided much mirth for those who hold cynical views of Australian attempts to mimic overseas trends and produce production line players, as the men in red chucked a whole bunch of really tall players on late and started bombing the ball to them. It didn’t work, and Argentina went through thanks to a poacher’s instinctive strike from the edge of the box.
Sunday, July 6, 6.00am
Netherlands 0 Costa Rica 0 – Netherlands win on penalties
If Cristiano Ronaldo is a villain due to his own self-regard and the unavoidable fact of his simply not being that nice young man Lionel Messi, and Luis Suarez is a villain for being an unreformable street urchin, and Brazil are villains due to their apparently unbecoming and increasingly extreme and unpunished (unless you count Neymar’s injury) football cynicism, then the Dutch are the game’s cartoon villains; outlaws so absurdly sinister, and so in tune with their own rated G for a general audience brand of dastardly behaviour, that it’s actually OK and appropriate for them to be simultaneously called out on it and for them to not shy away from the fact that this is who they are now – and yes, while they can still play some very good football, they would rather now win a championship with a mix of good and evil and not just being purely good; being purely good with nothing to show for it having become a tiresome business over the journey, so why not add a dash of evil to the mix to get them over the line at long last? Of course once you cross that line there’s no going back, so the evil takes over now, and even good deeds and good football are tarnished by your evil thoughts and acts, as the unselfish and pure motives of wanting to win but only if done the right way give way (so to speak) to the notion of how far should we go, not realising of course that having crossed the threshold there’s no going back. And if the Dutch have taken upon themselves with a sort of pragmatic glee the role of the media’s current favourite two dimensional crooks and scoundrels, then Arjen Robben at least is attempting to put some thought into that artifice, even going about using artifice as one of his weapons, becoming closer to cat stroking, secret volcanic Caribbean island lurking Bond villain; not just evil but smart, too, and plotting deeds so fiendish they make people write angry reams of prose on the internet or spew forth barely controlled hatred on talkback radio, and in one instance even have me receive a call after this match from a slightly distressed fellow traveller (from many walks of life) to try to get me to explain what it is that Robben is trying to do, when the answer to me seems fairly simple. Robben, in his diving and drawing out of free kicks, is merely exploiting a glitch in the game like any avid video game player has learned to do, because the game itself is so weighted against the player, even the talented ones – and there’s little acknowledgement of that amid the argle bargle – that to neglect it would be like boxing with an arm tied behind your back, or playing chess without your queen. The glitch here – and there are two of them, so it really should be glitches – is the refusal or inability of referees to hand out punishments for diving, and perhaps more importantly the fact that opposition defenders are too stupid to combat Robben’s knack of knocking the ball away from himself and drawing the foul from a carelessly left on the front doorstep stray leg. And it’s here where Robben crosses over from Bond villain to pro-wrestling heel, with his exaggerated facial expressions, arm movements and flailing, combined with his disregard for the moral consequences – winning being the thing of most importance – only adding fuel to the fire of the increasingly hostile crowds both in the stadium and in front of the television. Robben has thus truly turned sport into theatre; where other players of his echelon are content to be seen as not much more than circus sideshows with pretty tricks, Robben is building a narrative for himself, aware that if he were a less skillful player we would not care so much, perhaps even be more likely to forgive. All of this, and a mountain of possession can’t get the Dutch over the line in the ninety minutes, or even the 120 minutes, but the karma that so many fans are hoping for never eventuates, as a substitute goalkeeper brought on especially for penalties – and the only time I can remember that happening and working was Yanru Zhang coming on for Wenxia Han when China beat the Matildas in the 2006 Asian Cup women’s final at Hindmarsh – and his adoption of some sort of hackneyed bullying psychology of the opposition penalty taker seemingly taken straight from the classic 1998 film BASEketball, conspire to keep the Dutch pantomime going for another few days.
Wednesday, July 9, 6.00am
Brazil 1 Germany 7
It’s only on a Saturday morning, now three or four days after the event that I can make sense of the whole affair, my refusal or inability to write, or perhaps another bout of writers block, or the fear even that I will not do this justice, or worse that I have run out of things to say, so after trying to start from the beginning and failing to make traction I decide to start from the end, because doesn’t pretty much everyone do this retrospectively anyway? On Wednesday at about 1:00pm, the bloke behind the counter in the hotel lobby asks me if I’ve watched the game, and I say yes, so we discuss the game. He feels bad for Brazil and I want to argue with him, but he seems like a nice guy just doing his job, so it stays polite, and we agree that Germany deserved their win. Before that as I walk through the infuriatingly irregular maze of Sydney’s streets, every TV in a bar with a state of origin poster I pass has SBS’s World Cup coverage on, and some of the cafés, too, and I wonder is this a stop gap, just something akin to muzak, is it there for the tourists, or does it represent something more meaningful? Before that, on the plane, no one is talking about the game, at least not in any language I can understand, being more interested in reading their in-flight magazines and drinking their coffees, and sir, do you realise that you have a $5 Jetstar voucher, so why not have a muffin as well. Before that at Tullamarine, there’s the occasional overheard idle chatter about the result, but it’s fleeting. On the drive up to the airport, because my brother is in the car with me the radio is planted on the car’s neutral station, Gold 104.3, which mentions the result during its news break but then gets back to the business of playing classic hits from indeterminate eras, and how come they’re playing Ugly Kid Joe’s version of Cats in the Cradle and not the original? Before that I’m wondering what I could possibly write about this game, because sometimes words are insufficient, and today is one of those days, when even Martin Tyler can’t help but watch in awe, just like my dad and me sitting on the couch watching the Brazilian defence crumble just like I always hoped it would, not out of malice though there is some of that there, too, but because it should have done so several times already this tournament and had not done so, but at least it was to a team playing the right way, crisp passing, synchronised team movement, right attitude, right thought, right action.
Thursday, July 10, 6.00am
Netherlands 0 Argentina 0 – Argentina win on penalties
I wake up and go back to sleep countless times in my hotel room on Pitt Street, unfamiliar noises, climate, bed all conspiring to keep me awake, but perhaps also in the back of my mind there are other thoughts, too – like how I would really like to wake up in time and watch this game in full; and also how in a few hours I’m due to present a paper at an Australian literature conference, on sport and specifically soccer in Australian literature and why it shouldn’t be ignored by literature scholars, and how I’m really not happy with how this paper I’m due to present looks, and should I just go ahead with it as it is anyway, should I perhaps wing it, or should I just chop and change material in and out now while I’m here? That’s what I decide to do, even as I dread the reaction of telling literary types that sport is important, that they should take it into consideration especially as it relates to soccer, and I always have a sinking feeling about these things – it’s like telling my soccer mates to read novels, it just doesn’t work, and I always end up alone or near enough to it to feel both superior and distraught. But can you talk about Newcastle coalminers without talking about their sporting interests? Well, of course you can. Can you write about girls and women without mentioning their athletic pursuits or lack of them? Our culture often says they’re not even there. Can you write about Melbourne Greeks without talking about their relationship to social institutions of their own creation which have been around for 40, 50, 60 years and spread across suburbia like a feudal system without a king? Tsiolkas does. And then there are the ethical considerations – sport treats its workers like crap, its supporters as cash cows, even as it siphons attention away from the really important things. Nevertheless I decide to plough on and try to reshape, rewrite and remodel, with the game on the TV behind me, Martin Tyler letting me know when something of interest could maybe possibly happen in this match, but almost nothing of note happens. As extra time approaches I’m begging for a goal, any goal, good, bad, ugly, illegitimate, because I really want to get out of here and pay due respects to the scholar giving the keynote address at this conference I’m at, it’s why I’m here after all, but the game insists on going on and on and on. After nearly three hours of this dross the Dutch bottle the penalty shoot out. The Argentineans aren’t very good, but the Dutch have stretched credulity with their attitude, and eventually this has dragged on so long that a $2 vending machine Wagon Wheel is my breakfast.
Sunday, July 13, 6.00am
Brazil 0 Netherlands 3
I wake up at 3:00am in a foreign city in a foreign country – you’d perhaps call it Sydney, New South Wales – and make preparations to leave, knowing that if I stay here in my hotel room to watch the 3rd vs 4th place game, the most pointless of any and all matches in world football, I could end up missing my flight, and wouldn’t that be tragic. Thanks to the airport rail link, the one thing that Sydney has that I would take with me back to Melbourne if I could, I get to the airport super early, and eventually realise that to actually get to a screen I have to go through security first, which is a pain in the arse since it’s too early for me to check my luggage in. Once that’s sorted, I have to decide which of the two thrilling options with televisions to choose from, a place I can’t even remember now and a place purporting to be a brasserie. I order a mediocre cherry Danish and a hot chocolate from the brasserie, and plant myself in front of one of their screens, and I think I’m the only one watching at this point in time, but there are others who will flit in and out, though clearly I’m the one paying the most attention. Despite being a decent size Panasonic with some OK looking speakers next to the screen, the sound is muted on all three available televisions, so we have to deal with live text commentaries and with this match being done by John Helm, I have to imagine his voice in my head, which I can cope with. But this approach gets me into perilous territory when the SBS crew come in for their half-time analysis and I’ve got Zeljko Kalac’s voice in my head and I feel stupider for the experience, but also more sympathetic because after all, I have to deal with this only once every four years or on the odd occasion I bother watching the Champions League, whereas he has to deal with it all the time. I also realise that if this was the old analogue age, the TV could have been an old boxy white ex-hospital rental set like one of my old TVs from the 1990s and we would have been richer for the experience, not worrying about non-existent sound, just being glad to be able to see the game at all through the static that SBS seemed to be best at suffering from and with the screen going on a vertical stroll while someone searched for the vertical-hold dial. A couple of, I think, Arab boys – I could go all Tsiolkas and say they were definitely Arabs, but this is the real world and I can’t make them into what I want them to be, and therefore don’t assume to know how they identify themselves – turn up for a little while, and one of them mentions to his mate that he’s got a fiver I think it is on there being more than 3.5 goals in the game, and I tell him that’s not a bad bet considering the way these games usually end up, and he tells me that gambling is a bad habit and that I shouldn’t get into, it, but here we are, eh? Since that period in the mid 1990s when I lost all the money that I won on poker at the blackjack table on Casino Games on the Sega Master System II – and who said video games had no educational merit? – I’ve never gambled, except for the odd raffle ticket at a state league game, and even there I’m wary of the winning ticket just coincidentally almost always being a different colour from what was being sold around the ground. Still, with the Dutch off to an early two goal start, he seems to be on to a good thing. Every now and again there’s a paint thinner kind of smell which wafts through which is exactly the kind of odour you want to experience in a food court, especially at this place which has so many ‘French’ things on the menu, including Gruyere, croissants, pain au chocolat and croque monsieurs and madames, but I have very little time to think about what the French speaking family behind me think of all this – and I won’t call them French, in case they identify as being Swiss French, Walloons, Bretons or Quebecois – because I’m still trying to figure out what artisan butter is and how it differs from regular industrial butter, my penchant for over analysing restaurant menus coming to the fore again, and I try to justify it by thinking that some of these menus have literary pretensions, at least in terms of the creative ways they try to avoid calling something a toasted ham and cheese sandwich even if that’s exactly what it is. But back to the live text commentary, which is littered with mistakes and subsequent corrections too many to mention, but here are two of the pick of the bunch – ‘thread has been dropped’ and ‘eye axe’ – which send me into the kind of sedate mirth not seen since the 1990s Media Watch heyday of ‘look dear, their spelling is slightly off and their headline doesn’t mean what they intended it to’ levels of drollness. But back to the game, which the Dutch finish off well after the Brazilians had spent forty odd minutes pissfarting about, and I’m still perplexed by the Dutch fans in the crowd with their orange El Presidente/M.Bison suits – are they ironically celebrating Latin America’s dictatorial atrocities? I’ll leave that to the cultural theorists to sort out I suppose, while I ponder the significance of the one yellow card for diving in this World Cup being handed out in this game. It’s probably nothing.
Monday, July 14, 5.00am
Germany 1 Argentina 0
I go to bed at 9:00pm in the hope that I’ll be able to get up for the earlier 5:00am start, but it’s not until 5:38am that I’m shaken, not stirred from sleep, and once again I’ve missed a huge chunk of the World Cup final, though I still haven’t beaten my personal best from 2002 where I missed just about the entire game due to some sort of fever, where remaining conscious was an elusive and futile business. I have a Monte Carlo biscuit during the last five minutes of the first half, hoping misanthropically that the game has been appalling and that I’ve missed nothing of note, but that turns out not be true, all while I’ve got Silver Springs going through my head. The second half is good at first but then deteriorates, with the Twitterverse torn about whether the game is dull or whether it’s merely ‘cagey’, the single most overused word at this World Cup. Meanwhile I’m wading through testimonials honouring Les Murray, one of which I take offence to for the sake of accuracy and pettiness and because I can never let go of a grudge and the awful feeling that if necessary I should be the one person that says ‘well, but here’s the thing…’. So instead of being focused on this game and the potential legacy of this largely outstanding World Cup, even as the result is yet to be finalised, I’m obsessed by more immediate things such as mortality’s gaze, and yes Carl Sagan was right that we are small, so small, but where he saw it as endless possibility and wondrous complexity I’m seeing it as the incredible weight of oblivion approaching my once relevant club, and not for the first time. These are phases I go through, where doubt and forlornness take over, especially now as the World Cup final drags on and there is space and time to think while we head towards the seemingly inevitable penalty shoot out, where even Martin Tyler’s intonations have altered to show that he thinks it will end up there, too. But then a moment arrives worthy of this World Cup, as Mario Götze finishes off a regulation piece of build up play with sublime skill, shaking us out of our cynical assumptions, and now we realise again that there is colour in this game, there is blood on Bastian Schweinsteiger and the disturbing voyeurism of cameras fixed upon crying children, and while this is not Kevin Carter and starvation and vultures, it makes me feel uneasy even if it’s only football and even if I don’t even like children, a social position not helped by having some kid kick me in the back of the seat for half my flight home yesterday. The game over, the cameras are on the winners and their joy, but the voyeurism is still there, this time switched over to Lionel Messi, a great player but largely ineffective in the knockout stages; they are following him everywhere as he attempts to remain stoic.
