England vs. U.S.A- English keeping woes continue

One of the most anticipated games of South Africa 2010 was this morning's Group C opener between England and USA. I had a feeling that USA might get up for it and repeat the heroics of their only other game against England in a World Cup.

When English Captain Stevie Gerrard waltzed through the US defence to score after only four minutes I was glad I hadn't taken a punt on USA to pull off an upset. However at 40 minutes a relatively harmless Clint Dempsey shot was fumbled into the net by the hapless English keeper Robert Green.

It used to be that English keepers were the touchstone for international keepers. Calm, strong and unflappable. As 'safe as the Banks of England' they would say, referring to 1966 stopper Gordon Banks. He was followed by a lineage of great English custodians such as Ray Clemence and Peter Shilton. (I'll conveniently forget Bonetti, anyway that names sounds more continental than Cotswalds.)

The number one English Number 1 of the 1990s and early noughties, David Seaman, was known as 'Safe Hands.' But it was Seaman's poor positioning against Brazil in the 2002 World Cup Quarter final allowed Ronaldhino to lob him from over 40 yards:
Maybe that blunder by Seaman started the current malaise between the sticks for England. Seaman's immediate replacement was Paul Robinson, who was well known for his errors, and failed spectacuarly against Croatia in a Euro 2008 qualifier, a tournament England failed to reach:


As for Green, there can be no excuse for his lame save which gifted a vital point to the USA, and lost England all three tournament points. The ball did not dip or swerve in flight, it was a tame daisy cutter which he saw early. English coach Fabio Capello (also not from the Cotswalds) must be worried. Green, who has been guilty of letting in soft goals before, is deputised by the tournament's oldest player, David 'Calamity' James. While James has a penchant for the spectacular he is also known for a tendency for the bizarre, and has been cuplable for some very soft goals over his career. Worse, he likes to wander far from his line, fancying himself as a bit of an outfield player. This has been a rich vein for comedy over the years.

Its not really a joke for England however, how did their keeping stocks drop so rapidly? If they want to win the World Cup again they'll need to shore up their stop banks to avert the flood of soft goals.

Here is Robert Green's howler from this morning; Judge for yourself.

2006 & All That

A Personal History of the World Cup: Part Eight

So we lurch to the end of my reminscence. I have reviewed all eight of the World Cups which have taken place whilst I have been drawing breath. I finished a mere five hours before the ninth installment kicks off. Life for a football tragic is measured in four year cycles. When I look back over how much has changed, even since Germany 2006, I am astounded.

Germany 2006 was made even more poignant in Wellington by the fantastic work that the Goethe Insitute did in using the World Cup to bring German culture to the forefront. The Wellington Director,Christoph Mucher was a football fan and he worked tirelessly to add value to the Wellingtonian's World Cup exeprience. Among the many initiatives they ran was a Football film festival. I had the privilege of seeing the mesmerising German George Best film, Football Like Never Before, a meditiative study of red on green. The Institute also built a Torwand, a goal wall, which they drove around Wellington, setting up at festivals, parties and parks.

The Goethe Institute's enthusiasm was contagious, and for the first time ever I felt I could follow Germany in a World Cup, such was their positivity, such was their optimism. I felt Deutschland's collective sigh of relief and joy when Phillip Lahm collected the ball on the left hand side in the first game against Costa Rica and fired home a goal that deserved to be the first in a World Cup:


Argentina were another revelation. Their fluid passing, and 'total football' was exemplified by the team goal to end all team goals, a series of 26 passes to bamboozle Serbia.

They also produced my favourite goal of the tournament, a Maxi Rodriguez cracker to knock Mexico out of the cup in the second round:


My favourite game was the third place play-off. As in the 2002 finals this so called dead rubber involved the hosts, and was a competitive and exciting match. Unlike in 2002 the hosts got up to win, Germany beating Portugal 3-2 to take the Bronze.

The final will be remembered for an act of insanity which will unfortunately outlast the result for many people. Yes, Italy won the trophy, beating France on penalties after a 1-1 draw. But the 2006 World Cup final will be remembered as the Headbutt Final:

Zidane was sent off in disgrace. He had already scored from the penalty spot during the game, and no doubt would have stepped up again in the shootout, so you could argue that his brain explosion cost France the Coup De Monde.

There you have it; The World Cup from my own very subjective perspective.

Penalties, tears, broken bones, cracking goals and outrageous tantrums- bring on South Africa 2010!

2002 & All That

A Personal History of the World Cup: Part Seven

Between 1998 and 2002 I fell headlong into the role of a bona fide football tragic. I had travelled to the UK and played park football in Regents Park, London and the Meadows, Edinburgh. I had worked behind the scenes at Ashton Gate, Bristol and Stamford Bridge, Chelsea. I had played Sunday League for the infamous Easton Cowboys. My partner and I had also backpacked around Spain and Portugal during Euro 2000. Eating bocadillas and drinking La Rioja in heaving bodegas, watching the boyish Nuno Gomes charm his way into Portuguese hearts, and Trezeguet snatch the Euro and World Cup double for France with a golden goal against Italy. When I returned to Wellington I rejoined the park football at Nairn Park and it was there that I recruited into a social team; Wellington United Salmon.

So when Korea-Japan 02 finally hoved into view I was ready for my next fix of World Cup fever.

I can't remember anticipating an opening game of a tournament quite as much as this. France, the European and World Champs, up against their colonial subjects Senegal. France were expected to dial it in and pick up the three points. Senegal had other ideas. A man with the implausible name of Papa Bouba Diop scrambled the ball over the line to give Senegal a famous victory, and then he danced a merry jig at the corner flag, one of my favourite goal celebrations of all time. France went on to be eliminated from the Cup without scoring a goal- the worst title defense ever.

This was the World Cup of the underdog- which was great for a neutral from an underdog footballing nation. Senegal, USA, South Korea, Turkey,& Japan all defied the odds and escaped their groups. Amazingly South Korea and Turkey were one game away from the World Cup final- a scenario most punters would scarcely have dreamed of.

But it was Senegal which produced the move of the tournament. An amazingly fluid counter attack against Denmark. To me this is the most perfect team goal. (It begins at 20secs on this video):

For me the final was bit of a let down- yes there was the story of redemption for the buck toothed Ronaldo, who played so poorly in the 1998 final, and yet scored a brace to beat Germany in the 2002 final and crown Brazil Penta Campeao. But to me the Brazilians were unworthy winners, their reputation as upholders of all that is golden about the game was tarnished by the worst piece of gamesmanship in the very first game:

After that disgraceful act I couldn't cheer for Brazil in the final, nor could I cheer for Germany after years of supporting England.

The Third place play-off between Turkey and South Korea defined the tournament. It was a great game, played in front of a roaring South Korean crowd. Hakan Sukur, the Turkish striker who was expected to fire in this tournament but didn't. (Imagine what Turkey could have achieved with him scoring?) Sukur scored the fastest goal in World Cup history, his only one of the tournament:

1998 & All That

A Personal History of the World Cup: Part Six


By 1998 I had started to take an interest in football again. While I didn't play in any organised form I had joined the waifs and strays of park football at Wellington's Nairn Street Park.

Actually I think it was Euro 96 that had got me back into the swing of watching football again. I sat in a downtown bar at 7am, the only customer on a Friday morning and drank Cape Cods hoping that the Czech Republic would see off Germany. Instead I saw the first Golden Goal to decide a major tournament and left the pub at 9am in a red haze.

So when France 98 rolled around I associated watching football with party time. Thankfully I lived in a student flat where the residents enjoyed a bit of novelty. We all stayed up late watching game after game. I remember being at a party when the game between Argentina and England came on. I had to hush the party goers and silence the stereo as Beckham lashed out at Simeone in pure spoiled kid petulance. My friends thought that was the epitome of the soccer hollywood, a tap on the ankles and he's over. But in a World Cup knock out match why wouldn't you dive if someone kicks out at you? So once again a bit of gamesmanship from a Diego sunk England. Actually thats not quite right, since it was England's poor form from the penalty spot which really sent them back across the Channel early.

I also remember the stunning goal from Begrkamp which sent Argentina crashing out of the Cup. The calm finish and delicate touch was divine, to see it live on TV was a special World Cup moment:


I watched the first half of the final at home and then skateboarded down hill into town. The French Embassy in their prescience had booked out the Town Hall and erected ahuge screen. Here I watched Emmanuel Petit (He's blond, he's quick, his name's a porno flick, Emmanuel! Emmanuel! as the Arsenal fans would chant) power through the Brazilian defence to score France's third goal and send the Town Hall into ecstasy.

Afterwards I played football for hours in the adjoining Civic Square with joyous French people who weren't going to bother with work and then headed up to Nairn Park for a kickabout. I was well and truly hooked again.

Here are all three of France's goals in the final:

1994 & All That

A Personal History of the World Cup: Part Five

In 1994 I was 18 years old and football was no longer my raison d'etre. The Rotorua football pathway was not robust enough to sustain kids like me who were not good enough or strong enough for the men's first teams and there wasn't really a league structure in place for youth teams. I still played occasionally for the 1st XI, but we were playing 15th fiddle to the Rugby team and had scant resource or support.

I don't remember much of USA 94, but I suppose I must have kept an eye on it. I remember watching the final between Brazil and Italy, played in the blistering heat of the Pasadena Rose Bowl.

The match finished scoreless and Roberto Baggio, 'The Divine Ponytail,' skied his penalty over the bar to hand Brazil the match:


As one wag has mentioned the 1994 World Cup began and ended with a missed penalty, since Diana Ross fluffed her lines with this kick in the opening ceremony one month earlier:


The irony is that should this happen now the referee could order a retake since Diana's 'Paradinha' stop before the kick has been outlawed for South Africa 2010.

When I think of how the average American would have taken all this hype I am reminded of ths clip from The Simpsons, lampooning a World Cup final where Mexico and Portugal "battle it out to determine [who] the greatest nation on the planet is."

I can just see the US sports fan choking on his corn dog as the two 'superpowers' grind out a 0-0 draw:

1990 & All That

A Personal History of the World Cup: Part Four
Italia 1990 was a huge milestone in my footballing development, and the first World Cup which I actively followed. Between 1986 and 1990 I began playing Football, first for my School, then a club and then as a Junior Representative for Rotorua City. My debut was in 1989, playing in goal against Thames Valley-proudly wearing the Orange and Black of Rotorua.

When Italia 90 rolled around I was a young football obsessive, and by the end of Italia 90, I was even more obsessed. Which is ironic since Italia 90 is widely believed to be the most boring World Cup tournament of all time with a record low of 2.21 goals per match. Objectively I would concur, subjectively I still love it. Any football tragic will tell you that goals are not the only measure of a game's greatness- blood, sweat and tears count for so much as well, and Italia 90 had plenty of these fluids.

The great names present at Italia 90 was like a roll call in Valhalla; Warriors who were legends once but had since slipped through the veil: Maradonna, Shilton, Lineker, Schillaci, Klinsmann, Hagi; even the oxymoron of a veteran debutant in Roger Milla the Camerounian sensation, who at 38 set the tournament alight with 4 goals and a hot stepping goal celebration.
For so many legends this tournament was their last hurrah.

Strangely the name I remember most is the Argentine keeper Goycochea. He replaced the first choice keeper Nery Pumpido when Pumpido broke his leg against USSR. Goycochea's acrobatics impressed me, but his skills weren't enough to stop West Germany in the final.

I studied the keepers more intently than all other positions, applauding saves over goals everytime. My hero for so many years was the English veteran Shilton, the iron giant who was 'pickpocketed' by the street urchin Diego in 1986. In fact by 1990 I was an England fan through and through, years of collecting Shoot! magazine saw to that. I could name every English Player, but probably couldn't name one current All White, apart from maybe Winton Rufer.

So in effect the tournament ended for me when West Germany knocked England out on penalties. Gazza cried for me as well, lamenting the end of my footballing innocence-the era of mullets and pass backs, of strikers rolling end over end when brushed by the fullback with no sanction from the ref, of a time before girlfriends and watching Saturday morning soccer without a hangover.

I still watched the final, but my 14 year old hormones couldn't hack the 6am wake up call so I asked my parents to videotape it for me. I then had to suffer the groans of indignation coming from the family living room as they watched it live; the 1-0 score line just confirming what my Rugby League loving father already suspected- this soccer lark was as dull as dishwater.

Not for me though, I watched that final over and over again.

Anyway four years later in USA 94 a solitary goal in the final would look positively decadent. And four years later Shilton and England were nowhere to be seen.

Keep on crying Gazza: I'm right behind you:

1986 & All That

A Personal History of the World Cup: Part Three
Mexico 1986 was the third World Cup which took place with me on the planet, but it was still another four years until this event fully registered in my mind. But this was the first World cup which I knew was on.

I was still very much an oval ball 10 year old- I played Rugby for Kahukura RFC on Saturdays and League for Central RLFC on Sundays. This was unusual since you tended to play one or the other, even more unusual given that I was a lanky white kid with no special talent for either code. I played full back, not for my running skills, more that the ball never really made it that far, and thats where I'd do the least damage!

It was the very fact that I played so much rugby/league that I would always go in goal whenever Soccer did break out in the playground, and in 1986 it started breaking out more than ever, like the first scarlet blossom of acne on the untainted chin of youth; looking back I blame the Mexico World Cup.

It was in one such game that I pulled off a scorpio-kick save, 9 years before Rene Higuita. I kid you not, this manoeuvre was the talk of my school- a shot was fired over my head and I reacted too late to save with my hands, instead I managed to curl my legs over my head like a whale arcing its flukes as it dives, the ball struck the back of my legs and bounced into my hands as I hit the ground. A fluke yes, but it was my fluke.

But I digress, Mexico 1986 was still a mere blip on my football radar, except for one thing. Whenever anyone cheated or pushed the laws of the game they'd earn a nickname that echoed the racist sentiment of the argie bargie of the Falklands 'war'.

The name Maradona became a mysteriously charged synomoym for mercury and guile. For me its proximity to the equally charged word Madonna, she of the similarly quixotic gyrations, meant it was as erotic as it was exotic- an 'other' word, an alien puzzle to beguile a pre-adolescent.

Plus the addition of those two letters 'Ra' in the already imprinted moniker Madonna meant that the unintentional invocation of the Egyptian, and Maori, Sun Gods (both known as Ra) was a fitting tribute to the image of the man hinself, tiwsting and turning, in the Azteca stadium against England, as the Aztec Sun god himself shone a brilliant shadow on the pitch. Magical.

1982 & All That

A Personal History of the World Cup: Part Two

Yes, this was the one. The World Cup that New Zealand finally got a crack at. But Spain 82, just like Argentina 78, washed right over me. Well, almost, right over me.

1982 has beome such an iconic phrase in New Zealand football that it is hard to write objectively about it, harder still becuase I was only 6 years old and living in a Rugby world, playing for Papatoetoe RFC, and mad keen on the Blue and White Stripes of Auckland, and the Red, Black and White Stripes of Counties-Manukau- the All-Whites meant nada to me, nor did their Spanish Odyssey. Yet it still managed to permeate just enough to have significant reverberations for me later on.

In my Manurewa schoolyard we played Softball, Rugby (Tackle Rugby, touch was not yet an option), the A-Team and Star Wars. I played Short stop, Full Back, 'Howling Mad' Murdoch and a Stormtooper respectively.

Then one day a large round ball was introduced at the interval. All hell broke loose as us kids tried to play this foreign game, never having seen it. Soccer was such an alien invader-with positions such as Striker and Defender, it really suited the Atari zeitgeist of the early 80's.

So even though the 1982 World Cup did not really register with me, like a low-flying enemy saucer it was at least starting to buzz on my radar.

Two years or so after 1982 I found a cut-up copy of a magazine about the All Whites' exploits, produced by the tobacco company Rothmans (the sponsorship seemed fairly innocuous then, it seems frankly outrageous now.) Reading that magazine I got a sense of that epic road to the finals, which was a great achievement in itself. I also started to understand the true international flavour of Football- that a lad from Manurewa could play in exotic realms like Saudi Arabia or Sevilla, that the whole world would be watching a kid from Miramar.

All the imagery and nouns of 1982 held, and still hold, such a mystique for me; Chinese-Taipai, Kuwait, Van Hattum, Rufer - the utter Magnum PI brashness of Steve Sumner's droopy moustache and his casual aggression in the tackle, the Singaporean keeper's timeless style of a green top and red Adidas trackpants:


The casual, hirsute glamour of this uniquely Kiwi entry point into a forbidden world of handballs and offsides was appealing for a sport curious 8 year old- but it was to be another two years before the first World Cup which registered with me personally was to take place. Still 1982 will always be special to every Kiwi football fan, whether experienced first hand or through the adulterated medium of a second hand Smoker's programme. Whatever way you look at it those were glory days for NZ Football, hopefully to be bettered this coming June.

As an aside I have a tenuous personal connection with the 1982 World Cup in the fact that the artist Joan Miro was commisioned to create a poster for the 1982 World Cup:Now although my son Miro was not named after the artist, rather the synonomous New Zealand native tree, it is a rather nice synchronicity-one which Miro's mum thinks is just a little too coincidental to be a true accident.

1978 & All That

A Personal History of the World Cup: Part One

As we countdown to South Africa 2010 this blog will reminisce about the eight World Cups that have taken place since my birth in 1976.

It will be a patchy, potted history since I was hardly aware of the event until Italia '90- and even then it was more about how that tournament fitted with my own burgeoning experience of football. So please don't read this expecting a definitive guide- Brian Glanville's excellent History of the World Cup will serve you better. But if you are a football tragic like me, and you measure time in four year cycles then this may be of some interest, being as it is the awakening of my awareness that there exists a clock with hands quick enough to clasp a quadrennial flash of splendour.

As a two year old growing up in Rugby and Rugby League mad South Auckland, Argentina 1978 tango'd by me without a murmur. But the fact that a few years later I watched Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa plying their trade for Tottenham Hotspur in the hallowed English Division One, on Saturday Morning's Big League Soccer, is testament to the impact that the Argentine Cup winnning squad had on World Football.

But this is adult hindsight. Looking back with the eyes of a two year old, (my son is almost two now so I know what amuses him), I can see that the most obvious thing that would have piqued my interest would have been the amazing shower of confetti raining down from on high in the Estadio Monumental, Buenos Aires as Mario Kempes scored his second for the hosts, condeming the brave Dutch to their second straight World Cup Final defeat.

Screeds and screeds of pretty blue & white confetti, captured by the flash of a thousand light bulbs, littering the field of play:

No comparison

I feel I have to comment on the Thierry Henry incident further, since it is all over the sports headlines, has been tabled in the Irish Parliament, and I even overheard a greengrocer on Cuba St. expounding the relative moralism of Platini's 1980's French side versus this less deistic incarnation of Les Bleus.

What gets me is that Henry's handball is being compared to the infamous 1986 "Hand of God" Maradona handball. To me there is simply no comparison.

Henry's foul was an ugly, blatant double handle. He even had the Gaul to admit as much afterwards:



Maybe I am a little naive, but in comparison Maradona's foul was a piece of artistry. As someone described (maybe Diesgo himself?) he 'pickpocketed' the English with his sleight of hand:



It was a great leap by a little man against the giant Shilton. The deception continued at the press conference when he was asked if he handled the ball. That was when coined the phrase saying "if there was a hand, it was god's hand." and besides he sealed the deal a few minutes later by doing this:



Maradona's goal was clever. Henry's was a disgrace. No comparison.

The statute of limitations has run out on the England-Argentina World Cup Quarter-Final. It has entered folklore and will never be replayed (although I'd love to see a geriatric Shilton versus a coked-up Diego). But FIFA should follow precedent and replay the France-Ireland World Cup Qualifier.