A Time to Make Friends

So it's goodbye to the World Cup, and frankly good riddance. What was billed pre-tournament as the gallery where the finest players would display their art, turned out for the most part to be an overhyped disappointment.

If there is one lasting image of this World Cup, it will inevitably be the sight of Zidane blotting his impressive copybook with a moment of utter madness that may have lost his country the World Cup, such is his ability from the penalty spot.

Reading some of the pre-match blurb, you'd have been forgiven for thinking Zidane could single-handedly end wars, cure hunger and find a cure for AIDS if only he didn't have a final to play that evening. If Wayne Rooney utlimately paid the price for the relentless promotion of his abilities, then surely Zidane did too. After all, it's not for nothing that footballers are described as having their brains in their feet.

Italy won the World Cup, and deservedly so but they're not a team you'd go out of your way to watch. There isn't much point trying to play with an expressive cavalier style when your key striker is the lumbering Luca Toni, and of course great defence is a key part of the game, but surely the World Cup is about flair and panache, not a month of stoic rearguard action.

Argentina had briefly looked like potential winners (and clearly offered the single outstanding highlight of the tournament) but they succumbed to brutal German efficiency, leaving four semi-finalists that were never likely to set the world alight.

Critics of this World Cup don't have to look very far to find some depressing statistics; just 2.25 goals per game, and ridiculously nearly five yellow cards per game, testament to a combination of erratic refereeing and the shameful antics of players who in many cases were good enough to have behaved with more class (Henry, Ronaldo etc..).

Where were the classic games that define a World Cup for years to come? Germany/Italy perhaps; Holland/Portugal if only for the technicolour display from the referee's top pocket; possibly Argentina/Mexico; and erm, that's about it. Not a single group game will live long in the memory, and there wasn't a gallant underdog that the neutral (and not-so-neutral) could get behind, though to be fair Trinidad &Tobago came close.

The African nations again flattered to deceive and now look to hosting the 2010 World Cup wondering if they will ever become a force on the global stage. The two pre-tournament favourites meanwhile (Brazil and England) were so disappointing, it almost beggars belief. The great underperformers, Spain and Holland, did what they always do ie. underperform, despite some flashes of brilliance.

Many passionate fans of club football, myself clearly included, try hard to get as involved emotionally in international football but again I've failed in this endeavour and I genuinely can't blame it upon being based in such a anti-football country. I just feel unfortunately that the World Cup has almost become too big an event for its own good - the national passions it arouses mean there is too much at stake to let football be the true winner. When German commentators talk about the tournament giving an entire country a feeling to be proud again fully 61 years after the end of the War, you sometimes have to remind yourself it's really only a game.