Green with envy as reality bites
I’m talking about the World Cup-shaped hole in all our lives. Distracted by seismic activity on the football front at home, we’ve managed to look the other way for quite a while but, after yesterday’s draw, reality bites hard. The World Cup finals are taking place next summer in Brazil and poor old Ireland won’t be there.
This time two years ago, in Kiev for the Euro 2102 draw, Giovanni Trapattoni approached the Irish press corps with with a big smile on his face and the cheerfully inclusive greeting: “Here we all are!”. Happy days. (Remember them?). We were on the inside looking out then, and relishing every moment of it, even managing to look on the bright side when the draw put Ireland in with Spain and Italy. “If we’re at the finals we might as well play against the best,” we nodded sagely. Although the best line undoubtedly went to the chap who tweeted: “Well, that’ll settle the Glenn Whelan/Xavi debate once and for all.”
As, indeed, it did.
It was on a sad and bleak night in Vienna in September that Ireland’s last hope of qualification for World Cup 2014 disappeared, but with Trap being hurriedly moved on barely 12 hours later, there was little time for mourning. Instead, we were immediately plunged into the managerial succession stakes, a process which wound up giving us one of the most sensational stories of this or any other sporting year, as Martin O’ Neill and Roy Keane were unveiled as the dream team.
That was enough for the country to be able to hold its head up even on those nights when the European play-offs were deciding which nations would actually make it to Rio, the movement of Irish football’s tectonic plates allowing us to briefly kid ourselves into thinking that the road to France 2016 really and truly began with a brace of friendlies at home to Latvia and away to Poland.
But not any more. It will be September before anything really meaningful happens on that front and, before then, in early summer, Ireland’s role in the greatest show on earth will be restricted to, at best, that of warm-up, as we provide final tests for a couple of countries who, in just a matter of days, will be heading for the spiritual home of the beautiful game.
Of course, no self-respecting build-up to any World Cup is complete without the mandatory predictions of certain doom. To that extent, Brazil is only a couple of shots over par for the course. Concerns about stadia completion? Check. Accommodation too expensive? Check. Infrastructure lacking? Check. Distances too great? Check. Climate a problem? Check. And that’s without getting into the social unrest already sparked, at least in part, by taxpayers taking a massive hit on an event which will swell FIFA’s coffers.
Yesterday’s draw served only to bring some related issues into even sharper focus. As if England didn’t have enough to contend with in the form of Italy and Uruguay, negative attention was immediately focused on the fact that, as the Beeb sniffily reported, they will have to “open their campaign in the tropical heat of Manaus, which is in the heart of the Amazon jungle, 1,777 miles from their chosen base in Rio.”
Given that kind of billing, it’s almost impossible not to conjure a picture of Wayne and the lads en route to their opening match, paddling furiously upriver in hollowed out bark canoes, as poisoned darts whiz over their heads and piranhas nibble at any stray toe hanging over the edge.
Unwisely, Roy Hodgson had gotten his excuses in first, saying before the draw that Manaus “is the place ideally to avoid.” After the draw, however, he was inclined to take solace from the fact England and Italy – who meet in there on June 15 — will “both be in the same boat”, suggesting an even bigger tree than average will be required.
Of course, South America, as World Cup history shows, is always a little bit harder for European footballers, north, south, east or west, but in the final analysis the challenges posed by travel, temperature and even cuisine have always ending up playing a distant second fiddle to the dominant and inescapable fact that the footballers of Brazil and Argentina have tended to be a good bit better at, y’know, playing football.
Much the same scenario can be expected this summer, with Brazil the deserved favourites not because they’re playing on home soil but because – as their hugely impressive displays in the Confederations Cup showed – they appear well on their way to mastering a winning combination of style and steel under our old friend Big Phil Scolari.
While England will doubtless find yet another novel way to shoot themselves in the foot, Europe’s biggest contenders ought to be Germany and Spain, with Belgium not too far behind, a fairly safe prediction admittedly but one not remotely threatened by yesterday’s draw.
As well as England’s games, the matches in the opening phase set to command the biggest audiences in this Eurocentric neck of the woods will be those between Spain and Holland, Germany and Portugal and Belgium and Russia, games which may even be of added significance for Martin O’ Neill by that time, on the back of February’s Euro 2016 qualifying draw.
But, for me, Group F will be one to watch very closely because it’s when Argentina take on Bosnia, Iran and Nigeria that we should get the first clear signals of whether or not planet earth’s current greatest footballer, Lionel Messi – who, for all his brilliance, has yet to deliver at this highest of altitudes — can finally take a World Cup by the scruff of the neck as Maradona did in Mexico in 1986.
If we weren’t already feeling sorry for ourselves, that prospect alone should be enough to leave those of left behind green with envy.
