Brazil’s World Cup hinted at a return to past glories but fell short

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/dec/30/brazil-world-cup-fell-short-barney-ronay

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Like so many allegedly great things – great books, great men, Great Britain – it is tempting to conclude that Great World Cups are notions that belong exclusively to the past. According to most scholarly opinion the one thing the contenders for the canon all have in common is that, in all probability, you never got to see them happen. The 1938 World Cup in France was, they say, a fraught and gripping affair. The postwar years 1950-1958 brought a thrilling sense of new frontiers, a sport still in a state of furious expansion. Mexico 1970 has been enshrined in perpetuity as a kind of footballing Woodstock, a free-form, love-beaded triumph of the sporting imagination.

Since when the World Cup has given us great moments: Brazil’s indolent charm in 1982; the brilliance of Diego Maradona; fine teams from Holland, France and Spain; and beyond this a kind of high-grade uniformity, a hammering out of those exhilarating extremes into the single, homogenised substance that is now elite level international football.

In this context Brazil 2014 looks increasingly like a shared opportunity missed. This was it: our shot at greatness! Bolstered by the presence of some wonderful players, staged in one of football’s most evocatively authentic heartlands, here was a chance for 21st-century football to snap back at the stuffed and mounted heads on the wall. And while it might seem perverse six months on to describe such a vivid and memorable tournament as a disappointment, the fact remains that Brazil 2014 was in many ways a case of almost-but-not-quite, of potential unexplored, chances missed.

Indeed by the final knockings a tournament that started so brightly had begun to project a degree of familiar entropy – not just the gathering suspicion that the basic idea of a great World Cup is a receding chimera as the world game is skewed by the unstoppable rise of European club football but that the World Cup itself, as we have come to know it, may be in the process of slipping beneath the waters.

First, though, the good bits. Oh, Brazil 2014. We will always have those first 10 days. This was a World Cup that split neatly down the middle, divvied up between the familiar high-intensity slog of the knockout rounds and the cloudless brilliance of the opening matches. What a time it was, a moment when football seemed, briefly, to forget itself, when fear and pragmatism fell away and international football became a kind of glory game again.

The group stages brought an average of 2.83 goals per game, the most since Sweden in 1958, en route to a final total of 177, which is still a joint record tally despite the slowdown in the last two weeks. These were hard-fought goals too, with a succession of unusually even contests and seven group matches decided in the last five minutes of play.

As ever, though, the figures tell only part of the story. The early stages were above all a peculiarly sensual experience, a combination of the light, the moist winter heat and the sheer diffuse, terribly hackneyed poetry of Brazil and World Cups that seemed to bring about a shared exhilaration of the senses. There was naturally a tactical element, too, to this. The greatest interest often lies at the edge of things, that point at which one well-worn system begins to crumble at the advance of another, and there was at times an almost audible wrenching of the gears as one established method of play – patient, possession-based football – found itself overrun by the rise of fast-paced, pre-planned counterattack.

For a while there seemed to be a collective sense of release, the dominant early images of Brazil 2014 those bands of furious little muscular attacking playmakers – the Chilean Blitzkriegers, the Costa Rican flyers – shuttling out across the halfway line with thrillingly murderous intent.

Simultaneously Brazil 2014 looked, briefly, like turning into the tournament of the 10s, a reawakening of inventive, attacking football at this level via a small coterie of talented playmakers. Presented here in the full glare of the vogue for heavily marketed (and indeed heavily hair-gelled) individual club superstars, for a week or two it was possible to envisage a tournament pegged out around the competing celebrity-genius schtick of Lionel Messi, Neymar, James Rodríguez and, very briefly, Cristiano Ronaldo. Messi was the masterful Barça-Messi at times in the early group stages. Rodríguez was inventive in his floating role. Arjen Robben looked at times – indeed right to the end – the single most penetrative player on show, a miracle of stamina, drive and quick-footed menace.

Which just goes to show how wrong one can be. Steadily the blizzard of attacking play became a drizzle and then a grudging drip as football, with a flush, remembered where it was. Here was the first of many chances missed as the knockout stage reverted to the club football template of well-tempered caution. Costa Rica and Greece drew 1-1, painfully; Germany edged out France 1-0 in one of the real tournament disappointments; and Holland-Costa Rica produced 120 minutes of goalless stasis as Brazil 2014 unspooled into a series of familiar high-tension arm-wrestles, tribute to the discipline and deep background preparation of teams at this level but also to the mechanical advances – players press, harry and chase as energetically in the last minute as in the first – that have eradicated any real changes in the narrative texture of a World cup knockout match over 120 minutes.

As a result a tournament that might have been great became a tournament of impressive medium-range quality. There were some wonderful moments: Rodríguez’s goal for the ages against Uruguay at the Maracanã, Michael Bradley’s awe-inspiring energy against Belgium in Salvador, David Luiz’s freakish side-footed 35-yard free-kick against Colombia in Fortaleza. But there were no real sustained peaks, precious few all-time scruff-of-the-neck performances. At the final whistle in Rio de Janeiro on 13 July Messi was, bafflingly, announced as player of the tournament, an award he almost immediately disowned.

In Argentina and Messi the sense of chances missed is most clearly captured. Argentina should have won this World Cup, just as their fans dominated the streets of Rio, their Bad Moon Rising anthem the signature tune to the final two weeks. With a little distance it seems ever more frustrating that Alejandro Sabella allowed his team to creep through the tournament, juddering against the handbrake, a group with players of the calibre of Sergio Agüero and Ángel Di María reduced to a constrained and mannered guard of honour for the team’s central genius.

In the end the most talented squad at the finals, featuring a 27-year-old all-time great, never once played with anything approaching abandon. In all Argentina trailed their opponents for seven minutes at Brazil 2014: the last seven minutes, enough for Sabella’s team of swaddled talents to exit a tournament they might just as easily have illuminated.

Brazil itself should be congratulated, warily and with all due caveats, for staging a tournament that worked after looking for quite a long time as though it might not work at all. There is a separate discussion to be had about the morality of Brazil’s lopsided World Cup development programme, the excess millions poured into stadiums while much-needed development was simply abandoned.

The contrast between new-build splendour and neighbouring poverty was often uncomfortable. The Arena Fonte Nova in Salvador is a magnificent, swooping cantilevered thing: throughout its seven tournament matches the rows of jerry-built temporary housing surrounding it peered in above its manicured edges like a spectre at the feast.

Football was never going to solve Brazil’s social problems, which date back at least as far as the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in retreat from Napoleon Bonaparte and with 60,000 time-serving noblemen in tow, imposing at a stroke the time-serving monied overclass that endures to this day. But more could have been done.

Brazil 2014 cost $11bn to build and stage but still left a sense of promises dodged and corners cut – again a chance missed. Similarly this was in many ways the tournament where corruption came home. It was in part Brazilians within Fifa who expanded and embraced and successfully monetised the carpet-bagging corporate practices that had also driven the Brazilian national team during the Nike years (Ricardo Teixeira, the father of the tournament, spent Brazil 2014 in plea-bargaining exile in Boca Raton, Florida).

In the years following the second world war Brazil gave international football its sense of unfenced adventure. More recently Brazil’s gift has been a peculiar kind of murkiness, a jeitinho culture of favours and deals and financial opacity. To expect anything pure or identifiably untainted – some kind of football-powered purging of the old order – to emerge from this meshing of interests was always a little hopeful. The world wanted a Brazilian World Cup. Well, we got one, warts and all.

Where does this leave us now? Six months on most of the leading teams look a little drained. The world champions’ period of post-tournament dignity has been bound up in rebuilding after some key retirements. Holland have lost four of their six matches since the third-place play-off. Only Brazil, so supine while being mercilessly euthanised out of their own tournament by Germany in Belo Horizonte, have looked stronger, winning six facile friendlies while conceding only a single goal, a team still furiously building for a moment that has already gone.

And then there was England. This was probably not the most disappointing tournament-stagger England have produced in recent years (that honour surely belongs to 2010, where a more obviously toxic presence was stretched out into the second stage).

But it was the most eerily frictionless, a sequence of two defeats against competent opposition over five days of competitive football that felt even more alarming than the ragged, operatic failures of the past. England were perhaps unlucky. They lost to Italy and Uruguay on details: a slight but telling slackness in defence; a failure to keep the ball in midfield; possession without incision in attack.

But really these were the kind of details that creep back from the foot, up the leg and back into a 60-year history of managed decline and a profiteering, scorched-earth club game that has left England for so long underachievers and now simply an irrelevance to the powerhouse nations of world football.

Beyond this Brazil 2014 confirmed what we already know, that the real power and influence – and indeed interest – is located now in the club game. European teams have now won the last three tournaments and provided five of the last six finalists. Beyond this the Champions League influence is everywhere.

Even Costa Rica, the first Concacaf team to make it to the official last 16, played like a brilliantly prepared, expertly staged imitation of a European team, all hustle and discipline and well-drilled counterattack.

And really these are interesting times for the World Cup generally. No one can predict with any certainty what the next two tournaments might look and feel like. Or indeed how many more Fifa World Cups, in the form we currently recognise, we can really expect to follow Russia 2018 and Qatar – it still sounds odd – 2022.

One of the more outré possibilities currently being floated around is the emergence of a competing Uefa World Cup before we even reach Qatar, a more transparent, openly euro-centred alternative to the cowboy-ish corporate culture of Fifa.

Brazil 2014 may not have been the World Cup to end World Cups. But it might just end up looking like a last real shot at something that had already vanished in any case.