In the end, I won't remember much. All that will last will be the grace and brilliance—and superb chest headbutt—of the genius Zidane, and the comic failure of the charlatan Eriksson and his perennially over-hyped English football team. Most lasting of all, though, will be the preconception proved true: like all the rest, it was condemned to live forever in the shadows of May 25, 2005—the day football died.
It didn't help being in Asia. I didn't watch much of the tournament, because of the crazy start times of most of the games if you happen to live here. I've become the eight-hours-sleep-at-all-costs stick-in-the-mud I used to laugh at in my twenties. The early game, which kicked off at 10pm or 11pm, was the only one within my feeble reach, and I don't remember many good games at that time. Japan and Australia was the one that meant most to me, but it was no feast of football. The Spanish turned it on early—before reverting to type. The much-fancied Argentineans gave a couple of masterful displays of total football—before falling foul to the kindergarden conservatism of their manager. The English coughed and spluttered like fat men running up a hill. The Brazilians loped, uninterested. And Zico's Japan just flopped.
It didn't help either that the refereeing was as comical as Mr. Eriksson. Graham Poll, for one, ruined his career and entered the record books at the same time for his post-modern rule interpretations. Three yellow cards. I'd feel sorry for Mr. Poll, but my memory is long. Poll's gaffes were just the most prominent of the kind of farcical refereeing we've come to expect from these tournaments.
It didn't help that the emerging footballing nations rolled over, for the most part, and never put up a fight. One obvious exception, I hear, is Australia, but their games were on too late for me.
It didn't help that diving marred the tournament yet again. Kurt, "flopping cheats" isn't the term you want. I think you'll find it's "diving bastards". In Christiano Ronaldo, we have the embodiment of all that is ugly about the modern game.
It didn't help that I had to listen to the Gulliver's Travels approach to football commentary adopted here in Japan. Every time a tall player gets the ball, the frenzied Japanese commentator screams out his height. Pi-taa Ku-rau-chi, shinchou 201 cen-chi. Over and over again. The Japanese football commentators weren't in the commentary box. They were at the top of the beanstalk.
But there were some good moments. Team England, for one, provided entertainment value beyond their means. And in the sending off of Rooney, they had their traditional big tournament defining cockup—and another name for the list of national scapegoats, alongside Pearce, Neville, Beckham and Seaman. That the sending off was an indirect consequence of the squad Eriksson initially picked—the squad that included an untried 16 year-old as a forward he never intended to use, at a time when his two main strikers were crocked anyway—is beyond reasonable doubt. This was another England sideshow—this time inspired by their manager. Its seems that a national tabloid media get the football—and the manager—they deserve.
Moving from the ridiculous to the sublime, Zidane decided from the Spain game on to show the world why he is still its best footballer, even at 34. This man has a gift for football beyond anything I've ever seen—and in that I include Maradona. The magnetic close-control, the instinctive knowledge of which way to turn, and a vision to pick out passes that makes Jan Molby look like Razor Ruddock. This man is Denis Bergkamp on cocaine.
But even after the joys of Zidane's performance of the tournament against a surprisingly subdued Brazil, I couldn't make myself stay up to watch the final. And it wasn't just the time difference. I had my mind made up about this World Cup from the start. Truth be told, I'm still living in the shadows of eight minutes of football in Istanbul on May 25, 2005. The greatest game of football I will ever watch. There's a sadness in that. A game that came when football was already on its death bed—beset by the illnesses of Abramovich, ridiculous player wages, and cynicism pervading all aspects of the game. The greatest game of our lives was one final death throe foretelling football's inevitable end.
And after highs like that, the rest would always mean nothing. World Cup 2006 was but a symptom—of a game whose final whistle had already been blown.