The World Cup is finally here! For England fans among us it has been a 4-year drought in international competitions as we missed out on Euro 2008 and have been dying to get back into the saddle and battle it out on the world’s stage ever since. We got rid of Sven, we got rid of Maclaren and his umbrella, and now we have Fabio Capello. Whatever Capello’s prowess in football management may be, his talents for learning languages at super-fast speed are nothing to be sniffed at; this man takes control and leads by example. No WAGs at the tournament, mealtimes together are sacrosanct and punctuality is paramount; he sounds just like my Mum, but then that is the sort of discipline a team like England needed.
Whenever a new tournament begins we tend to look back on the previous one and relive with horror the moment our team was booted out. As usual, England departed under a dramatic cloud which resonated throughout the rest of the tournament with Cristiano Ronaldo being booed in all subsequent matches. I’ll never forget it either because someone had the audacity to invite me to their wedding on the day that England faced Portugal in the quarter-finals! The marriage ceremony was at 4pm and kick-off was at 5pm but the reception was in Algeciras so I was forced to listen to the first half on the radio in the car. By the time I got inside the hotel and checked-in I had to waste precious minutes figuring out how to use a strange television and flick through all the channels to find the match. It was then that I remembered how dire Spanish TV is and that they tend to stop showing the World Cup as soon as their team crashes out of it; I eventually found the game on a German channel. At the moment when Rooney managed to miraculously fend off a succession of Portuguese defenders, those German commentators were eagerly saying “Vane Rooney, eine Pitbull!” but seconds later Carvalho was on the ground whimpering and Rooney was shown a red card by a ref who had been press-ganged by, among others, Ronaldo who then quite visibly cocked a cheeky wink at the Portuguese bench. Cristiano then went on to score the winning penalty in yet another disastrous shoot out for England. England packed their bags and got on the plane home, the WAGs stopped shopping in Baden-Baden and Ronaldo was known in the tabloid press as the ‘Portuguese Winker’ for the remainder of the summer.
For me the lasting memory of the 2006 World Cup was not Rooney seeing red, the Italian captain lifting the famous trophy or even Zinedine Zidane uncharacteristically head-butting Materazzi in the final. It was the German nation finally being able to turn a corner and fly their country’s colours with pride on the streets of Berlin en masse. Germans of a certain generation have never been comfortable with such showiness of national pride, it was taboo and not something to be relished or encouraged. As the tournament progressed and the German team against-all-odds reached the semis, the German supporters simply mirrored what everyone else was doing and rejoiced in cheering for their country out loud, singing their national anthem and enjoying collective camaraderie. When interviewed one could feel a sense of relief from the entire nation which was now able to come out of the closet and say ‘I am German and I am proud of it!”
Germany were excellent hosts prompting a chorus of approval from cynical English nationals who would never have graced German soil in a million years unless they had to and due to the 2006 World Cup many a German-hating Englishman was forced to make a family holiday of it and sample German hospitality. Surveys afterwards state that all those families who went to the 2006 World Cup would definitely choose Germany as a holiday from now on because “Germans were so nice, Germany was really clean, the food was excellent and the hotels much better value than any where else we’d ever been to; we’re coming back again!”
So for all you football-hating readers out there, clichéd as it is; football provides more than just the game. It can bring benefits to the host nation over-and-above the obvious financial ones; visitors discover new lands and in the case of Germany 2006 the host nation rediscovered itself. I am certain that South Africa 2010 will also dispel many a myth surrounding that country and bring fresh knowledge to all involved. I can’t wait for Friday to come when that Festival of Football begins. Come on England!!!
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