Colin Sheridan: No courtship in this arranged marriage of a World Cup
A banner reads "boycott Qatar 2022" on the tribune during the German Bundesliga soccer match between FC Schalke 04 and Bayern Munich in Gelsenkirchen on Saturday. Picture: AP Photo/Martin Meissner
The World Cup starts in six days — and, putting aside the abject moral dereliction of the entire conceit for a moment — there are other casualties, more existential in their guise, but no less fatal to the legacy of a tournament that was forever flawed in its makeup, but imperfectly beautiful nonetheless.
Six days! Fulham are only kicking off against Manchester United in the Premier League as I type. You couldn’t even drive from Craven Cottage to Qatar in less than a week, never mind prepare a team to win a tournament. The ridiculously quick turnaround must be migraine-inducing for managers and medical staff, but what of us, the fans and sportswriters, for whom the pre-tournament build up was often as enjoyable and entertaining as the football itself?
With no pre-World Cup training camps in hilariously ill-considered locations to obsess over, we will be deprived of the most classic of World Cup tropes - BBC sports correspondents sweating profusely through white linen shirts live on TV, providing vague updates on Ashley Cole's ankle, and, far more importantly, Cheryl Cole’s budding partnership with Abbey Clancey.
There will be no awkward press conferences with peripheral squad members. No Roy Keane/Maurice Setters moments. No footage of players riding golf carts in flip-flops and tank tops, jokily flipping journalists the bird as they go. No crazy golf. No morale-boosting sing-songs in hotel bars. No press/player barbeques. And - whisper it - no Saipan…
Before this Dolly-the-Sheep abomination of a World Cup, the month or so of preamble that walked us from end of season to opening ceremony was like the honeymoon period when you first fall in love. You got to know the teams through sticker albums and Sunday supplements, each one listing classic matches, golden goals, and most importantly ONES TO WATCH.
Those players would stay in your head by osmosis until, late one Friday afternoon during the final round of group games you’d find yourself watching Ecuador v New Zealand on autopilot, and the commentator would mention Agustin Delgado, and you’d immediately remember his nickname El Lobo, maybe even his star sign or his dream date, all from a profile you read a month before.
The four-week preamble was a necessary courtship, a courtesy you, the fan, owed the players and the reputation of the tournament. You'd proudly promenade with the teams as if they were debutantes in Bridgerton. The ritual was behaviour becoming of the esteem this grand old tournament demanded. Players fled wars to play in World Cups down through the years. Alan McLoughlin cut his holidays short to go Italia 90 for God's sake. Gary Waddock had his heart cruelly broken, his dreams smashed like a pinata by Jack Charlton in a hotel lobby in front of the press pack, hours before the team boarded a plane to Sicily (and immortality). Bobby Moore was arrested for shoplifting during England’s acclimatisation camp for Mexico ‘70 in Columbia. Bobby Moore!
Jermaine Defoe was so bored during the build-up to South Africa 2010, he stayed up all night watching a DVD of Wayne Rooney's wedding with his roommate, Wayne Rooney.
It took El Salvador three days to reach Spain for the 1982 World Cup. They left behind them a brutal civil war that deeply impacted their preparations. They arrived with a shortage of tracksuits and no pennant to swap and had to borrow footballs from their first opponents, Hungary, who obliged them with a loan of a couple before hammering them 10-1 in their tournament opener. Keen to boost morale, the Salvadorans played the waiters from their team hotel in a friendly before their next match against Belgium. The South Americans won, but one waiter lost his job, fired for angrily confronting one of the players. Appalled, the squad threatened to go on hunger strike until the waiter was reinstated.
None of this will happen in Qatar, of course. Not just because the six-day lead-in is barely long enough for the team physician to learn off all the players' names, but because the hotel waiters in Qatar will have been coached not to make eye contact with any visiting player, let alone challenge them to a game of football.
There is no time for a WaGs debacle, no room for a training ground bust-up, no possibility of a team bonding exercise ending in a prison cell. This World Cup has deprived many people of many things, almost all of them far more important than the integrity of our romantic relationship with it. Even so, the absence of the getting-to-know-you-first stage of this World Cup is a sad concession to all that is wrong with football in the modern age. This is an arranged marriage, destined to end before we ever really had a chance to fall in love.
Scenes at Dean Court! Aside from Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, probably the man most excited by the World Cup beginning this weekend was Everton boss Frank Lampard. Watching your side lose 3-0 to Bournemouth is bad enough, but witnessing your manager - as always dressed for a night on the town - placate your traveling fans with a series of “it's not you, it's me, innit” hand gestures may have been one humiliation too many for Everton to suffer.
In an age-old act of self sabotage, Lampard may have been baiting the Toffees into breaking up with him, thereby allowing him to go to Qatar in a comfortable co-commentary capacity for the next five weeks. It's a risky strategy. Failure - not getting sacked (yet) - will see him thrust into a consolidation period with the club, fruitlessly searching for a striker, two midfielders and six defenders ahead of a January transfer window he is ultimately unlikely to survive through. Not to mention the online interrogation into his abilities as a manager.
Everton are 17th in the table heading into the World Cup break, one place worse than where Lampard found them when he took over. One place worse off than the position they ended last season in. There have been a couple of false dawns in the 11 months since his appointment, but the least stressful spells have been those when no games have been played. Therein lies the conflict of the next month for Lampard. The drama that followed the Bournemouth loss - angry fans confronting confused players and a contrite Lampard - will have earned him points only for “fronting up”. The optics of a Londoner attempting to “calm down” an angry mob of Scousers will do little to prolong his stay on Merseyside, but it might be too little, too late by way of him being relieved in the short-term. Lampard might reflect that his sacking - inevitable really in January - might’ve been better now, allowing him time to sun his buns in Qatar.
Last week, the IRFU informed those outside the Pale it believed could read that GAA folk are less bothered about having a pint at a game because we “are mainly rural who are driving”. Perhaps aware that those comments sounded a tad elitist, the blazers pulled a masterstroke by appointing self-confessed ruralite and actual farmer Tadhg Furlong as captain for their match against Fiji.
Furlong, clearly a down-to-earth, affable chap, played a blinder, informing the media during his press duties that all he dreams of is “Spuds. Gravy. Mother's Sunday roast”. His candour was devoured by a press who ran many stories under the banner of Tadgh Furlong Loves his Spuds! This was reminiscent of the US running PSYOPs in Vietnam and Iraq, trying to win hearts and minds. How Furlong's family - who live in rural Wexford - got home after the game is anybody's guess.
Timing is everything in sport, and Galway senior football champions Moycullen seemed to have timed their pursuit of top form to perfection on the evidence of their emphatic dismantling of Westport in the Connacht senior club championship yesterday.
Staring down the barrel of defeat last weeekend against a John O’Mahony-led Salthill, they did the thing good teams do - win, at the death, playing within themsleves. Led by the always impressive Sean Kelly, the Connemara side showed form that could see them go deep into a club championship season that is living up to its reputation as the GAA’s purest competition. What odds Kelly and co have to face down his Galway teammate Shane Walsh in the final four?
