Band of Brothers

The look on the faces of the Azzurri, dejected and defeated, with tear-streaked cheeks told us that they had dared to think that they might win this game and yet the match finished with them comprehensively beaten and the world of punditry hailing the Spaniards as the greatest international team of all time, better even than the 1970 Brazilians! 

How sweet it was to watch Fernando Torres take the electrically-charged air, with his bemused little ones, once the evening’s business was complete; to see the serene self-confidence returning to his frame at the end of his seesawing season.  How had the mighty fallen, from idol at Liverpool who walked on water to a bit-part player at Chelsea on whom Abramovich had wasted fifty million pounds; and now, just a few weeks later, the proud owner of Champions’ League and Uefa 2012 winners’ medals.  But it would be unfair to single out any one player or any single reason why we are all (save those who dared hope for an Italian win) tonight celebrating Spain’s victory with such a feeling of joyousness, of having watched something especially wonderful.

It’s true they have an exceptional squad of players but no matter how talented they may be it takes a rare sense of togetherness to coalesce accomplished individuals into a coherent entity, and that unity, that sense of being a band of brothers comes from charismatic leadership.  We must doff our hats to Vicente Del Bosque whose sotto voce command of the situation is perhaps informed, not only by his long and varied career as both player and manager, but also by having been a member of the Spanish National team when they flattered to deceive and failed to deliver.

I reiterate my belief that it is far more than chance that these great players are in Kiev, today, together.  They are the product of a system that first nurtures and celebrates the creativity of players before it concerns itself with the detail of winning games.  Do we really care whether ten year olds win or lose?  I suspect not.  But how proud are we when good players come together, become a great team and win a great victory!

How clever William Shakespeare was, when he composed Henry-the-Fifth’s St Crispin’s Day speech, putting into the mouth of the King those immortal words…. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.  For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.  I am sure every member of that Spanish squad can relate to such sentiments this night even though it be 1^st July and not 25^th October. 

England of course have The Bard but, in footballing terms, not much else when compared with Spain.  It is to be hoped that we don’t console ourselves with last November’s 1-0 win at Wembley.  We, it is generally accepted, were bested by the team that, tonight, was thrashed 4-0 by the Spaniards.  That is where we are!

Whether I got the line-up of the two semi-finals wrong or not, my assessment of their outcome was equally as wide of the mark.  Spain, at best, scraped through into the final and, whilst they are pure magic when on song, it seems that they are, just now, a little off-key. 

Italy continue to jinx Germany in major competitions.  It is reassuring for an Englishman to know that, just as we usually seem to suffer adversely under the Teutonic cosh, so too do they have a problem with the Italians.  It seems crazy to me that, despite the key to Italy’s success being broadcast to the Germans before the match they still failed to find a way of snuffing out Pirlo’s creative influence during the game.  Perhaps he wasn’t, as he was against England, allowed to roam in total freedom like a wild prancing stallion (no accident that Ferrari is Italian too) and given free rein over acres and acres (or perhaps hectares) of grassland, but neither was he neutralised. 

And what of Mario Balotelli?  Great player or bad boy, saint or sinner, what was it going to be?  Recently I had the dubious privilege of sitting in a court room, listening to a murder trial for nine days, and I have had my fill of expert witnesses talking about personality disorders whether it be ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) or Dissocial Personality Disorder and watching this enigmatic Italian, whose character has doubtless already been shaped by the upset and confusion of his early life, I wanted to analyse him rather than assess his football.  Against Germany he was brilliant and his two goals simply blew them away!  Cesare Prandelli, whether because Mario had cramp or maybe because he had a premonition that his striker still had the opportunity to press the self-destruct button in the closing minutes of the game, withdrew him so that he would survive to reappear on Sunday; how that performance unfolds will entirely  depend on who turns up on the day – Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde!  I watched in dismay as his teammates rushed to Balotelli’s side in an attempt to include him in their post-match celebrations and to manifest their delight in his performance.  It’s as if Prandelli has already left them in no doubt that this skittish thoroughbred needs to have his self esteem massaged.  Like his Manchester City boss Roberto Mancini, I am sure that he realises that Balotelli’s impact on Sunday will be more a matter of psychiatry than physiotherapy.

Now we wave farewell to Poland and funnel our attention towards Kiev on Sunday.  Alas Angelika Merkel will not be there fawning over Boateng her black player, in her matronly way; see how we embrace all nations now as brothers she might have been saying, unlike Adolf who pouted and stamped his foot as Jesse Owens gave graphic lie to the ideal of Aryan supremecy and, of course, they have Odzil besides reflecting the fact that millions of Turkish migrant workers settled in West Germany during the years of the fatted calf. The land east of the Rhine is almost, these days, as multi-racial as England.  I remember how, all those years ago, Andrew Young the Black American politician, diplomat and civil rights activist complained that English football didn’t embrace racial equality.  I think the real reason why black faces were absent from the team was simply because their owners weren’t good enough.  Unlike the positive discrimination shown towards black cricketers under the rule of the ANC administration in the Rainbow Nation that policy has never really been necessary nor even desirable in English football.  There is no danger of the black face becoming an endangered species in the English team, just that elusive ingredient talent!

But no Germany, no Boetang and no Angelika!  Instead possibly we have the prospect of the two Marios, Balotelli and prime minister Monti.  Might the Spaniards be represented by their King and might a victory for them on Sunday be reason again for all Spaniards, whether they be in Madrid or Catlalunian Barcelona to make common cause in joyous celebration.

first semi final

For the
last couple of days I have been licking my wounds – of course I got the line-up
for the semi-finals wrong and thanks to those readers who were kind enough to
point it out; but, having thought about it, it doesn’t matter too much.  On Wednesday Spain will beat Portugal in Donetsk and, on Thursday Germany will take care of Italy in Warsaw. 





The two
winners will reconvene in Kiev (only 132 kilometres from Chernobyl in case you have forgotten) for the
final.  What a shame that the Great Gate of
Kiev in Victor Hartmann’s painting remains a figment of someone’s creative
imagination and has anyone thought to use Modest Mussorgsky’s great theme as
music to introduce a highlights show of the final?




One of my
readers suggested that references to Hong Kong football were inappropriate because the
ex-colony doesn’t have any international status.  Maybe that’s the point.  Players there have no immediate geographical
role models.  The Chinese national team
is hardly in the upper echelons of world football (although Spain only beat them 1-0 just before Euro
2012 so they can’t be too bad).  Football
fanatics from the New Territories only care about playing the beautiful game
with a smile on their faces even though, of course, as fans, they are
aficionados of the European game and tune in late at night (currently there’s a
seven hour time difference between London and China) to watch the English
Premier League, the Spanish La Liga, Italy’s Serie A and Germany’s
Bundesliga.  Uefa nations have a
responsibility to represent our game to the world as something worthy as well
as exciting.




I grow
tired of the play-acting that takes place these days when players of undoubted
footballing skill regard it almost as important, in order to gain the
ascendancy in a game to get opponents dismissed as they do to outplay the other
team and to score more goals.  Too often
we see highly trained athletes tumbling to the ground.  For those actors who want to know how to go
down feigning real injury they need look no further than the footage of Fabrice
Muamba collapsing against Spurs a few weeks ago.  The secret to being convincing is to remain
totally still and not to do a triple salchow on the way down as if to invite us
all to give marks out of ten for artistic interpretation.  How good, by the way, it is to see that young
man making good progress towards recovery.




And what of
the match-up between the two Iberian nations? 
Their contiguity makes a strong rivalry inevitable but, although Portugal are a decent enough team (better than
England for example) it is expecting too much of them
to think that they will overcome that class of genius that is the current
Spanish team.  Ronaldo is both their
strength and their weakness.  Their
strength because he is a superb player; their weakness because he seems to
concentrate too much on his own destiny and not enough on his team’s.  Here’s a novel idea; why not let Fernando
Torres play the whole 90 minutes.  He is
sharper now than he has been since incurring the injury that required surgery whilst
still with Liverpool. 
He is threatening to get back to the same razor sharp standard that he
displayed that day at Old Trafford against Manchester United when he rose like
a salmon and put that beautiful header away.

With the BBC announcing on their news programme (unless I was dreaming) that today, 24^th June is the 70^th anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein I was going to wax lyrical about the oddness of the coincidence between that event, which was a turning point in the course of World War II and England’s loss in Kiev against Italy on penalties.  Might that event too have been a turning point, I mused to myself.  It just shows how sensible it is to check one’s facts because it turns out that Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein didn’t take place until the beginning of November in 1942; so I guess the analogy falls flat on its face and we can draw no comfort from today’s loss whatsoever.

But wait a minute!  Didn’t Sir Alf Ramsey take over an England team that had flopped in the 1962 Chile World Cup tournament.  They had squeaked through their group in second place, finishing ahead of Argentina on goal average and then been well beaten by Brazil in the next round.  Walter Winterbottom, their manager, had resigned and Sir Alf was appointed and went on to win the World Cup in 1966.  Maybe there is a comparison to be drawn here; newly appointed Roy Hodgson, if we are lucky, and despite this loss in Kiev, might similarly be setting us on a course towards better things.

That we only lost on penalties is no consolation.  We didn’t deserve to win because the Italians were the better side and Andrea Pirlo, whose 33 year-old legs had no right to carry him through two hours of play, bossed the midfield as many pundits had predicted he would.  Perhaps what was needed was a good dose of man-to-man marking with a latter-day Nobby Stiles paying him close attention.

It doesn’t take much to send the expectations of an England football supporter rocketing into the stratosphere; but we must accept that, in order to play with the panache of the Spanish, who currently must be everyone’s paradigm, that we have to go right back to basics which have kids playing for fun, developing their skills unworried about the pressures of winning and free from the cynical meanness that creeps in where it does no good.  I was saddened when I listened to a friend of mine telling me how his talented sixteen year old son had picked up the knack of hurting his opponent in the tackle as if this was an inevitable and essential part of his armoury as a fully-formed player.

I visit Hong Kong regularly and am sometimes forced to watch youngsters play kick-about football on all-weather pitches.  Good-natured banter fills the air and hardly a foul is committed; indeed when the player on the ball goes down, for whatever reason, the ball gets passed back to his goalkeeper.  I don’t suggest that’s exactly how it should be but neither is the other extreme, where snarling pitch-side parents ruthlessly drive their children beyond the point of reason.  Watching the Glamour Garden Dragons go up against the Fanling Avengers is, for me, a refreshing breath of fresh air.

But all is not gloom and doom.  We are a long way, for example in terms of fair play from the 1962 Battle of Santiago between Chile and Italy and I, for one, love the way the Spaniards play the game.  That they are winning by playing the best-looking football, can only be to the benefit of the game.  Roll on the semis with, for my money, Germany beating Portugal, Spain overcoming Italy and then Iniesta, Xabi et al triumphing in the final.

towards the semi-finals

So now we know the third piece in the semi-final puzzle.

France’s 2-0 defeat, a few days ago, by eliminated Sweden, was clearly not the best psychological preparation for their up-coming quarter-final against Spain and, with reports of arguments breaking out within the French camp following that defeat, my mind went back to the disintegration of the French campaign in South Africa and the opprobrium with which their World Cup squad was mired as it returned home, broken and defeated, to France.  I seem to recall that the bête noir of that fiasco was Nicolas Anelka.  He, of course, has moved on; now no longer playing for France or Chelsea and, as his powers diminish, is printing his own money in Shanghai.  2010 captain Patrice Evra, clearly a man of firm principles, having fought his battle with the then French coach Raymond Domenech and subsequently making a determined and successful stand, at club level, against the throwaway racist remarks of Liverpool’s Luis Suarez is back in the squad, but never got on the pitch for this game.   

In 2010 the whole thing fell apart on Domenech’s watch and it was, no doubt, seen as somewhat of a poison chalice for new coach Laurent Blanc to grasp although some might argue that things could only have got better, and indeed they did.  France entered the tournament with a run of 21 undefeated games under their belt whereas Vicente Del Bosque’s Spain, current European and World Champions, has a recent history punctured by the odd defeat – remember England’s 1-0 victory at Wembley in November last year for example - but there is always a feeling with that bunch of individuals that, whatever might happen in the friendlies, they can, and will, underpinned by the brilliance of their El Classico stars bring their game up to the boil almost at will.  

Just as I suggested that, from the outset, Greece had been playing for penalties in their quarter final so, it would seem, France were looking to shoot it out over the final half-hour of normal time.  As they brought on more penetrative players towards the end so Spain withdrew theirs and concentrated on protecting their lead.  The last-act denouement therefore never happened despite Riberry briefly coming to life like a stuttering firecracker and we returned to watching the Spaniards trying to unpick the French defence like a bunch of gossiping old ladies hunched over a bundle of old rags.  Unlike Germany v Greece we couldn’t view the fortunes of the game through the faces and gesticulations of the two team coaches, both of who were several degrees more implacable than Messrs Löw and Santos.  Laurent Blanc’s still youthful, handsome face looks like a cross between Franz Beckenbauer and a studious secondary school teacher whilst Vicente Del Bosque’s older, more lived-in, elongated countenance that is redolent of an 18^th century Bourbon king straight out of a Goya portrait, even though he is a few tassels short of being the real McCoy, were altogether much less animated. 

 

Now we look forward to England v Italy tomorrow (Sunday).  I can’t help admitting that England doesn’t seem to be emerging as such a skilful or penetrative unit as the three teams already through.  They do, I suppose, increasingly have the ability to retain possession; to ping-pong the ball around in mid-field but, unlike the Spaniards they make fewer one-touch passes and are therefore more ponderous; they find it harder to make that telling forward pass that has to come from possession sooner or later if there is to be any point to it.  With Italy also, in their traditional way, expected to be cautious I don’t foresee a game charged with high-octane excitement.  England may not be a great side but I am grateful that Roy Hodgson and the Football Association, with the help of Avram Grant and some holocaust survivors, if nothing else, have shown Wayne Rooney and all our other millionaire footballers that the beautiful game is, after all, just that!

 

Nevertheless we can hope for an exciting contest worthy of the occasion.

I don't have a crystal ball or any deep insight into what makes the warped minds of those bound up in hatred, that spills over into physical violence, tick, but I guess we must give thanks, to some extent, that Polish irregulars took the racist headlines away from the issue of colour by pouring their venom onto the Russians last week; maybe we can see that as good old-fashioned tribalism - something I think we might all experience without too much conscience of becoming Nazi degenerates.  How unfortunate it was that the Russians were due to play the Poles on Russia Day (their national day) and how even more ironic was it that this day commemorates not all the bad things for which the Poles hate the Russians (particularly them being under the Soviet cosh but more generally centuries of history as well), but celebrates the fall of the so-called 'evil empire' that saw state communism defeated and the 'liberation' of the masses.  Ironic too that they have swapped the right to work for the right to be unemployed, aimless and adrift!

Sandwiched in between the violence that day was that game!  Wow!  So much to admire, so much skill, so much ebb and flow, so uncluttered with the inflexible hatred that was manifest on the streets and, for so long, did the result hang in the balance and finally, what a great goal.  What little boy wouldn't want to be scoring the equaliser for his country in a major game with a goal like that!  The Arshavin living ghost that the Arsenal fans saw in the weeks and months leading up to his return home has been brought back from the dead. 

Now that both host countries have been dumped out of the competition we find that football issues have largely supplanted the media frenzy around the race issue.  With England progressing into the last eight all the talk has moved on to how many bodies can we Brits get out there to cheer our boys on against Italy rather than how dangerous and unpleasant might it be to head east if the hue of your skin is slightly darker than Palmolive Milk and Honey!

The second quarter final between Germany and Greece was a union made in heaven given the current politico-economic climate that pervades all things European at the moment.  What cartoonist or satirist won’t be making great capital of Germany (finally after a stuttering start) putting their opponents to the sword as Chancellor Merkel looks on.  ‘Yes Angelica’ you hear her male companion saying, ‘Now it is appropriate for you to throw your arms in the air in celebration; but not too wildly, and please don’t outstretch your right hand skywards quite so much.’  The poor woman seemed somewhat bemused about terrace protocol.  I am sure she just wanted those damned, irritating Greeks ground into the dust.  Job done!

The remaining four teams that have still yet to play their quarter-final matches would, no doubt, have been delighted if the Greeks, playing for penalties as they were from the kick-off, had confounded logic and knocked the stylish Teutons out of the competition.  As it turned out the Germans scuppered that plan even before half-time was reached but we might reflect on the usefulness of the penalty shoot-out when it has teams believing, before the game even starts, that this will be how the contest is decided.  Recently a friend suggested that, if the ultimate end of a game is a draw, it should be the count of corner-kicks that each side has had that is the tie-breaker.  That would be a much fairer way of separating the teams because it would reflect the balance of play throughout the game. 

The Greeks have long since been self-delusional but their dream was not to be.  How fierce they looked with their swarthy bewhiskered faces giving the (for the most part) lily-white countenances of the Germans stubble rash in their close encounters.  How fortunate that they have managed to hang on in the Euro Zone until now.  How else might those blue and white daubed supporters have been able to afford their tickets?  They would have needed lorry-loads of new drachmas – shades of German hyper inflation in the 1920s.

Each game will have its own set of dramas.  Now we move on to that intriguing match-up between the Spaniards and the French; an encounter one likes to think where skill will be matched with skill and where the prize will be a semi-final against Christiano Ronaldo.  I am guessing that both sides will fancy their chances against him.  England, last up, already know who they have to contend with, even before they overcome the Italians – none other than the Iron Chancellor herself, those teeming thousands of fans following in the footsteps of their grandfathers and, oh yes, a not inconsiderable German team.