Beckham

Turn on the television tonight and you’d be forgiven for thinking David Beckham had died. He probably doesn’t feel far off it, in footballing terms. Neatly edited packages of his high- and lowlights on and off the field are wall-to-wall on both sport and regular news broadcasts – it seems purely to bring a lump to the throats of those of us with a soft spot for the softly-spoken midfielder.

Appearing at the World Cup this summer would have been the perfect end to the improbably cinematic narrative that has been his football career. There would surely have emerged at least one more iconic image of the man who has defined the last decade of England’s national side, one moment when the fans and the pundits and the broadcasters could cling to remember this effortlessly photogenic player forever.

We all knew it wouldn’t have been Beckham lifting the trophy – unless maybe Ferdinand, Gerrard, Rooney and Barry all got injured in the final? No?! – but it would have been something. Last time out, for me at least, it was the then-captain in tears having limped to the bench in time to watch his team crash out of the 2006 World Cup. This time round it may have been as an anxious benchwarmer watching on and biting his nails with the rest of us. Maybe it would have been the old hand swinging in a cross or a free-kick during a snatched 15 minutes-or-so on the pitch – as that’s surely all his on-field contribution might have been. Maybe he would have done a Zidane on us and ended his career the way he ended his first World Cup; with an impulsive, senseless act of stupidity. I can almost see it now – the great national icon walking past the trophy he was never destined to win, despite the amount of effort and self-belief he devoted to obtaining it, proving himself to be human after all. Sniff.

In the event, as with so many things, Beckham’s England career has ended not with a bang, but a whimper. It’s truly a sad day – and it’s hard to imagine how heartbroken he must be, especially as someone who clearly feels incredibly passionate about what he does for a living. It’s easy to dismiss the sadness or disappointment of very successful people, particularly professional sportspeople, given their lavish lifestyles and huge salaries (a sarcastic ‘boo hoo’ or a quick turn on the worlds-smallest violin is usually included somewhere). But an unforeseeable, unavoidable injury such as this crucial Achilles injury will have really hurt – as every single thing Beckham has done since standing down as captain and being ceremoniously dropped from the squad by then-England boss Steve McLaren has been focussed on playing in this tournament – the World Cup that would always have been his last and would always be the final scene in the film of his professional life.

Moving to LA Galaxy ensured first-team football and a team built around him as the big star – something that was no longer going to happen at a big European club. It also allowed him time and space to recover from the disappointment of failing to live up to the promise of the much-vaunted ‘Golden Generation’ of English stars in the early part of the decade. His first loan spell at AC Milan ensured he was in the eye line of Fabio Capello and enabled him to demonstrate that he still had a part to play in an England squad hurt by McLaren’s failure to achieve qualification for Euro 2008. His second, which has now come crashing to a premature end, was embarked upon solely to prepare him for his final act as a top-level footballer. And while there is little doubt that he would have been at best a bit-part player in South Africa, his experience, popularity with fans and players alike, role as ambassador for England around the world and the fact that he still has no clear successor in the England setup meant that he was unlikely to be left at home. Indeed, given that the FIFA administrators traditionally choose World Cup tournaments to meet and discuss future host nations, it is likely he will travel to South Africa as part of the FA’s England 2018 bid team anyway.

For British football fans of my age, Beckham’s England highlight reel is truly ingrained into the collective memory – this is probably the first career we as a generation will have followed from beginning to end. I have a feeling that his halfway-line goal against Wimbledon in 1996 might have been the first time I even noticed football on TV.

Even as the events played out in chronological order on TV today, it was easy to recite from memory what was going to come next, even involuntarily reciting the worn-out commentary tracks. Kicking the back of Diego Simeone’s leg in 1998. Scoring the last-minute free-kick against Greece to take England to the 2002 World Cup. Getting there and completing his comeback by scoring a penalty against Argentina. Running at the camera, yanking his shirt and showing the number 7 to the world. Tearfully resigning the captaincy in his final press conference at Baden Baden in 2006.

There is no other player like him for English fans, for English youngsters to admire and emulate. Wayne Rooney, the current England star attraction, is indisputably more of a throwback to an older, more traditionally English style of footballer – in the words of none other than both players’ mentor Alex Ferguson. Beckham, for all the accusations of courting celebrity and shameless self-promoting outside of the game, is the archetypal modern footballer – attuned both to what is expected of him as ‘product’ and as an ambassador for the game, as well as being well-liked among his colleagues and peers and having overcome a fair bit of professional adversity. He is, in fact, much more like the world-class Continental players he has appeared alongside since leaving England than the scruffier, less elegant footballers he left behind. Perhaps this is what made him such a natural galactico at Real Madrid and helped him slide so easily in amongst AC Milan’s band of elder statesmen last year.

I’m aware that this, too, is beginning to sound like a eulogy. David Beckham’s film will not have the fairytale South African ending he has tried so valiantly to engineer – but the fact that he has so evidently given his heart, soul and now his body to the quest for that to be the case is enough to serve him well in football fans’ collective memory. He was never going to win the World Cup for England this year – but his absence will certainly make the tournament that little bit less thrilling.

So long, Dave.

The Football Basement

The blog is late this week because over the last seven days I’ve been part of an experimental new football podcast project. This makes it sound far less ramshackle than it actually is – but when, during a predictably over-excited round of group emailing in the hours leading up to the draw for the World Cup groups, the idea of committing our outlandish predictions to tape in a social setting came up, The Football Basement podcast was born.

The podcast has just gone up on iTunes, and interested readers can subscribe and download it by clicking here, or (hopefully) by searching the iTunes music store. It was recorded, fittingly, in a basement in Borough, South London, which is much less dingy than the image the title probably conjures up. Spacious, well-lit and comfortable, the suggested meeting-place had everything we would need: with even a little fridge to chill the inevitable first-record beers.

In the end there were seven of us who were up for the idea – none of whom had ever really done anything like it before but all equally enthused about the prospect of having, if not a record-breaking, chart-storming career-making podcast, then at least a record of our own World Cup hopes and predictions to look back on and laugh at. Chances are it would also be funny (at least to us) as this same group of people is well-used to gathering, bantering, bickering and generally taking the piss out of each other.

The football podcast is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time – particularly since stumbling across the excellent Football Ramble, which, as I’ve mentioned before, is well worth a listen and provides consistently funny and well-informed chunks of football banter every week. Incidentally, I was invited to the regular Socrates meeting of London football bloggers last week and managed to meet a couple of the Ramble boys who, although we had already recorded our chaotic effort, were able to offer some brilliant advice on getting started podcasting.

There was a lot to get advice on, as it happened – and much to take into account when recording. Seven is a lot of people to record with, especially when you possess the magical, zero-budget combination of a single, internal microphone attached to a Mac laptop and Garageband, nobody with any real recording or radio experience and lots and lots of beer. We all knew it would be noisy – and feared that it would be completely unlistenable. As it happened, the layout of the Basement helped us out in that everyone was able to be positioned more or less equidistant from the mic and that there was absolutely no noise from outside.

However, we hadn’t recorded for long before we realised that a free-form, slightly merry discussion just wasn’t really going to work. The urge to shout down whoever is making a point is hard to resist – and in football discussion, particularly in large groups, there is a counterargument to literally every argument. While this is what makes football banter so much fun, it can also be what makes it interminable – and potentially completely tedious to listen to. While we felt the podcast was primarily for our own amusement, it’s nice to think that there might be some other people out there (and at the very least our other friends) who could enjoy it too.

There needed to be order, and the appointed chairman (me) was required to step up and rule with an iron fist. Well, kind of. A system of raised hands and pointing out whose turn was next evolved, but the big fear in this situation is that such an officious approach can stifle organic conversation.

I don’t think we needed to worry – the podcast definitely improves in terms of listenability as it goes on – but if the organisation of the discussion was manageable, duration was definitely an issue. It’s crazy to think about, but fascinating in itself having given ourselves the remit of discussing the World Cup draw which had taken place only 48 hours before, that we not only had to consciously try not to talk too much about it in the pub before the record, but that we managed, almost without noticing, to talk for two and a half hours purely on the prospects of the members of each group – including a frankly inexplicable forty minutes on Group D – and continued to debate during every cigarette break we gave ourselves and finally, barely having broken sweat, continued back in the pub after we’d pressed Garageband’s stop button for the last time.

This, surely, cannot be healthy. Never mind the fact that I had meticulously prepared an agenda that went on from a “quick” discussion of the group stage to Capello’s team selection, World Cup memories and so on, I honestly think that we could have picked a single team and talked about them alone for just as long. And while this is somewhat shocking, in terms of editing the podcast later in the week, it verged on the maddening.

The finished article is a fairly tight 65 minutes, looking at each group in turn and allowing each of the seven of us to pick out our winners and runners-up from each group. Achieving this tight 65 minutes from 150-odd minutes of yelling, swearing, giggling and, occasionally, some really good, well-argued points from a group of silly but thoughtful football fans took six hours. Getting the 40-minute bellow-a-thon of Group D down to the eight minutes it is now took a long, long time (and about three quarters of a bottle of red wine – that was my Friday night sewn up). Clearly, if we’re planning to make this a regular thing (and we are, I think) then we’re going to have to organise. Set time limits and a deadline – and allow everyone to make their points. Have a detailed and realistic agenda on hand. And, crucially, focus.

But I think the finished podcast sounds great – and is a lot of fun to listen to – mainly because it’s chaotic, silly, noisy, funny, rambling and, at times, really interesting. In fact, I like it for the same reasons I like talking about football at all. I know that over time we’ll get slicker, more disciplined and we’ll do more research. It might not be the same people every time (seven people is also a tricky number to round up of a regular evening) and it might not always be good – but I’m proud that we have this first, shambolic cacophony of deranged, drunken punditry saved for posterity.

*****************

So here’s the plug bit, properly:

The Football Basement Episode One is now available on iTunes. If it’s not searchable yet, click the link at the top of this entry or try again later in the week. If you’re not an iTunes user, it can also be accessed through hosts Jellycast by clicking here.

If you’re on Twitter, follow what’s happening with the Basement at @tfbpodcast.

If you fancy getting in touch with The Football Basement, email thefootballbasement@googlemail.com.

The Draw

Tomorrow evening the draw for the group stage of the 2010 World Cup finals will take place in South Africa. Nelson Mandela will be there, as will Archbishop Desmond Tutu, current South African president and all-round dubious man Jacob Zuma, actress Charlize Theron and soccer enthusiast David Beckham – along with Sepp Blatter, Jack Warner and assorted dignitaries from the 32 football associations represented in the finals.

Viewers are to expect nothing less than a glamorous, star-studded firework show of a draw – and why not. While on the face of it a simple administrative procedure that could just as easily take place behind closed doors or be generated at random by computer (and still suffer no greater volume of accusations of FIFA conspiracy or group-rigging), the group stage draw is truly a hotly anticipated date in this season’s calendar in the run up to Christmas – forget El Clasico or the awarding of the Ballon D’Or, the fans are actually excited by the prospect of seeing a collection of ancient ex-pros cracking open plastic balls and unfolding pieces of paper, on a stage in Cape Town, probably interminably slowly.

One of the most amusing indicators of the hype and expectation surrounding tomorrow’s draw is the high-budget and admittedly rather impressive Budweiser advert showing a packed stadium of people turning over thousands of cards to make a bottle of Bud fill up a beer glass. The ad is fine on its own – but has for the last month or so been followed by the caption ‘FIFA World Cup draw – now only 4 weeks away’, and so on. Can people really be made to be this excited about a draw? It would seem so – as since the announcement of the FIFA seedings for the draw on Wednesday morning the internet has virtually collapsed under the weight of office-chair pundits and their speculation, prediction and ludicrous omen-citing. I haven’t exactly been immune to it, of course.

Funnily enough, while taking a look at the stats relating to North Korea’s performance at World Cup 1966 on Wikipedia (as you do, etc) it occurred to me to check what England’s group had been in that ever-so-slightly hallowed year. Having noticed that it is technically possible for England to draw the exact same teams again – Uruguay, Mexico and France – I mentioned this to some friends over email, one of whom in turn mentioned it to a contact at a national newspaper who in turn passed it on to their editorial team. By the late afternoon, this page had appeared on the newspaper’s website. It seems that in amongst a largely pointless conversation about how we would like or would dread England’s draw to turn out, I had inadvertently set the Mirror’s news agenda for the afternoon. I was, needless to say, fairly pleased with myself.

Various other insights came out of the conversation. There seemed to be a consensus on what would be bad for England – various ‘Group of Death’ permutations, most of which involved drawing one of the two big name play-off winners from Pot Four: Portugal or France. Such apocalyptic hypothetical draws also tended to include one of the major African sides – particularly Ghana or the Cote D’Ivoire; possibly because as regular Premier League viewers we are acutely aware of the skill and power in the possession of players like Michael Essien, Kolo Toure and the in-form Didier Drogba. The Pot 2 choice for a worst-case-scenario draw seems to be the USA – mainly, it would seem, because few other teams in their pot present much of an immediate threat (or because they are relative unknowns).

A favourable ‘Group of Life’ draw is easier to pick – and, worryingly, easier to be too casual about. Should England actually draw North Korea, Algeria and Switzerland, we risk complacency setting in months before the tournament even starts. At the very least this will be the view the press will be keen to hammer home. The FA will doubtless set up friendlies against teams similar in style and stature to England’s opponents, which can only mean a string of dull and deceivingly easy wins against negligible opposition (see England’s 6-0 battering of Jamaica in 2006 as preparation for the group game against Trinidad and Tobago). This in turn ensures all the more shock when England inevitably stumble into the last 16 and are summarily beaten by a much stronger opponent.

The other side of the argument, of course, is that playing weaker teams at the group stage will allow England to conserve energy for the knockout stages while another hapless seeded team scraps away in a tougher group, picking up injuries, fatigue and confidence-rattling results against stronger sides.

The players and coaches will usually trot out the same line about how if you want to win the World Cup then you have to be prepared the face the best in the world – and that it doesn’t matter at what stage of the competition you meet them. This, it would seem, is a bit of professional disingenuousness, as of course there are draws that would trouble even the most confident of players on paper. There is the risk that, handed a freak ‘Group of Death’ scenario, a possibly great team could be sent packing before they’d even had a chance to get into their stride.

England, I think, will want a mix of the two. Personally I’d like to see a couple of teams that Capello’s men should despatch without much fuss and at least one relatively scary name to give them a stern test early on. A good draw, I think, would be something like Australia, Nigeria and Serbia. This would still be a group you’d expect England to win – but one in which they wouldn’t perhaps be tempted to fall into the 2006 strategy of winning without getting out of first gear. They’d hit their peak just in time to beat Cameroon in the second round, Portugal in the quarters and…no, no. Must stop.

Either way, it seems foolish to speculate – at least today. From tomorrow the World Cup will really be happening and the countdown to the whole beautiful hysteria of the finals will have begun for real. And if Australia, Nigeria and Serbia come out then the Daily Mirror might just have to put me on the payroll.

How Much Longer, Sepp?

Oh, for goodness’ sake, FIFA. You too, UEFA. You saw what happened tonight – just like everyone else did. Do you really think there’s going to be a single newspaper, television show, football fan or impressionable young child out there who thinks that tonight’s result was a fair one? It’s not like they won’t be talking about it – this was no meaningless kick-about, nor even a group match or league game where one unfair decision that turns a win into a defeat can be moaned about and written about and debated over – but forgotten in a few short days’ time.

This was a knockout match – and not just any old knockout match. Extra time in the second leg of a play-off tie, the winner of which would be the final European nation to qualify for the World Cup. The World Cup, guys. As the BBC have said in their match report tonight (and doubtless most back pages will in the morning), it’s hard to imagine it being more heartbreaking – or coming at a more devastating moment.

Tonight France played Ireland at the Stade de France with a slender 1-0 lead from the first leg in Dublin. Ireland took the lead in the first half through Robbie Keane, levelling the score on aggregate and, an hour or so later, sending the tie to extra time. It was, by all accounts, certainly no more than Ireland deserved.

It could be argued that Ireland hung on and defended their slender advantage for most of the second half while France created more chances – but that excuses nothing of the circumstances of France’s victory.

The ball floated into the box from midfield from a free kick, falling just in front of the (probably offside) Thierry Henry, who clearly used his hand to stop the ball going out of play – knocking it into a position where he could pass across the face of goal to the arriving boot of William Gallas, who scored. It was a goal – but, clearly, it shouldn’t have been.

Naturally the Irish players and fans are devastated, as losing teams so often are; especially when the manner of the defeat is cruel and seemingly unfair. But I wonder if the stakes have ever been much higher? There aren’t many comparable situations. One act of flagrant cheating from a highly-regarded player (and while it is a shame to see Henry do it, it’s certainly not his first offence) here means the difference between Ireland going to the World Cup or not. The World Cup – the biggest, most significant global sporting event of them all, which comes round only once every four years; only the Olympic Games can dream of coming close, and even then I would argue that its level of cultural impact and ability to unite and simply matter to the sheer number of people the World Cup does is way, way off.

One only has to look at the way London’s Algerian population is celebrating their nation’s play-off victory over Egypt tonight to get a glimpse into what qualification means to people – especially those from small countries. Take a look at Trafalgar Square tonight and you’d think Algeria had won the whole competition. I’d imagine there are fair few pubs in Dublin whose inhabitants are wondering whether they’ll ever bother watching football again.

The impact failure to qualify for the second consecutive World Cup finals – and this time through no real fault of their own – will have on Irish football, particularly financially, should not be underestimated. In a country where football has to compete with rugby and hugely popular indigenous sports like Gaelic football and hurling, whose domestic league is of a relatively low standard and hence whose players almost all ply their trade in the UK (oh and how French coach Raymond Domenech’s decision to spitefully label the Republic’s first team as “England B” was almost made to look so stupid), missing out on qualification in such miserable fashion is a real blow.

It is said that the most lucrative single match in football is the English Football League Championship play-off final, the prize for the victor being a place in the Premier League – and hence a share of the money Sky and numerous international broadcasters pay to show matches around the world. This figure is hard to pin down, but it is usually quoted as being around £35 million. Clearly, this would make an enormous amount of difference to almost any club in the Football League (Notts County aside, maybe) – and so were this Wembley clash to be decided on an obvious handball offence? The calls for a replay, for lawsuits, for compensation, would be deafening. Particularly if Neil Warnock happened to be one of the coaches.

And yet this is even bigger. It matters to a whole country – and also to plenty of people in Britain and the global Irish diaspora – not just the fans of a single club. As someone with around 25% Irish heritage (the rest is Scottish), I was looking forward to having some blood connection to next year’s tournament.

So come on, FIFA, UEFA, chaps. You surely won’t get many more high-profile incidents than this as incentive: bring in the bloody technology.

It exists! It exists in lots and lots of other sports – I can only assume Blatter, Warner, Platini et al haven’t watched any tennis, motor racing or cricket in the last five to ten years, such is their apparent obliviousness to the likes of HawkEye. It doesn’t even have to be HawkEye – if anything football moves too fast to really benefit from the sort of detailed analysis the system offers. The only technology football needs is already there. You see all those cameras around the stadium, Sepp? They’re filming everything – from all the best angles and, nowadays, in super-hi-def, super-slo-mo replay-o-vision. Would referring to this handy multi-angle feed cause the game to slow down or stop for too long? Not at all – all that is needed is an official sat at the side of the pitch watching the exact same feed as everyone else. The referee needs only to glance over to him – he either nods or shakes his head: done. Tonight’s incident could have been decided in a quarter of a second, as indeed it was by everyone watching on TV. Goal disallowed – the French would barely have started celebrating.

It’s slightly annoying to be moaning about FIFA again this week, but it leaves me feeling incredulous when things like this keep happening, at the highest level, and those at the top remain recalcitrant. Ironically, even UEFA’s half-arsed ‘goal-line officials’ would have spotted Henry’s handball tonight.

I love the modern game, but remain most baffled that while the football authorities have embraced everything they can to make football as up-to-date and future-ready as is possible – selling broadcast rights, attracting huge tournament sponsorships, building glittering new stadiums, supporting grassroots projects and creating some dazzling youth training systems around the developing world – they’ve yet to embrace something as simple and as staggeringly obvious as video technology.

It’s got to come in soon, hasn’t it? Will it take a team winning the World Cup Final with an illegal goal or a blatant dive to win a penalty for them to finally realise? Maybe it’ll happen in 2010. A big part of me hopes it’s against France, too – and not just the Irish quarter.

Qualified Hysteria

It seems like a very long time since I’ve been excited about June in October – although it’s probably almost exactly four years. The qualifiers for World Cup 2010 are over, and while it’s sad that more of the home nations haven’t made it through, at least England will, this time, have a chance to enter its usual bonkers World Cup Fever mode.

England does seem to do World Cup Fever differently to most nations, however. Apart from perhaps the South Americans, there probably isn’t a national team, nation of fans or national media that manage to combine such outrageous, almost offensive optimism in terms of their team’s chances – i.e. ‘we have a golden generation of players, the best league, the best historical pedigree, who else could possibly win’ and so on – with such nail-biting, excruciating hopelessness and doom-laden prophecies of bad omens, injuries that haven’t happened yet and impassioned arguments for ‘all the teams that are clearly better than ours – Spain want it more, the climate will suit Germany’ et cetera.

Like a lot of what interests me the most about football, the real indicators of this strange, schizophrenic behaviour go on outside the game itself – and this is not purely about the press, though they undoubtedly play a huge part in it. The whims of the press (tabloid primarily, but not exclusively) have an enormous impact on the team’s fortunes; teams have been picked, players dropped and most disgracefully, in the case of the late Sir Bobby Robson, managers have been cruelly vilified and hounded out of their jobs – even out of the country in his case.

More recently, the posing, preening and general twattishness of the infamous WAG culture surrounding the 2006 England team in Baden Baden was a far bigger story for the newspapers than the (admittedly rather dour) displays on the pitch – which can’t have failed to have an effect on the player’s moods or their ability to concentrate on the job at hand throughout the tournament.

Outside of the fantasy world constructed by newspapers and TV pundits, however, even now the signs of a country starting to get twitchy for a major competition are in evidence. It’s tricky to walk into a pub without overhearing (or becoming involved in) the usual amusing post-qualification conversations: they usually begin with someone saying something along the lines of “We can’t get too excited” or “I hope this time there’s less hype and we just let the players get on with it” and then ends with one or two overexcited Englishmen trying to name the squad on not-quite-22 fingers and imagining fantasy World Cup Final scorelines.

I have one friend who, before the 2006 finals, liked to paint a (delightfully unlikely) picture of Gary Neville rocketing home a late winner against Germany (naturally), causing an ecstatic Sven to tear open his shirt, screaming with the sheer Anglo-Swedish passion of it all. This image was conjured again and again, usually ending with everyone attendant adding their own ideas before eventually calming down and, well, looking a bit sad. It seemed so ridiculous – as if we’d been discussing the plot of a fanciful science fiction movie. But still… it could have happened.

And it could happen this time. But it won’t. But it might do.

It’s too easy to get involved in it all – and it’ll be too heartbreaking when it all goes tits up again – but it will make the next eight months fly by, I’m sure of that. One thing is for sure, though, and that’s that the country will be mostly a fun place to be from June 11th onwards. Sure there’ll be the cringe-inducing St. George bunting all over the place, those stupid flags will stick out of people’s car windows and poor old women working in supermarkets will be forced to wear plastic hats and red-and-white tabards.

Sure, The Sun will have COME ON BOYS and ENGLAND EXPECTS (ugh) as front-page headlines at least five times and Gary Lineker will jinx the whole thing by saying, “so are England the team to beat in this group, Lawro?” and there’ll be a live feed from a pub in Aberdeen full of Scottish blokes wearing Argentina shirts and, Christ alive, Des Lynam might even read another Kipling poem out on some doomed digital channel somewhere – but still. England might win the World Cup – and that’s why we do all this, isn’t it?