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Friday, Jan 9, 2009
France fades into Sartrean nothingness, Argentina dances the tango of despair and the United States and Japan, titans of world baseball -- sorry, I mean soccer -- rise up.
Jun 12, 2002 | Way out there on the other side of the Pacific, where the approaching East Asian monsoon season threatens to drown the gladiators of World Cup 2002, the soccer world has become Bizarro World. So it seems, anyway, as the tournament's first round comes to a close and both defending champion France and pre-tournament favorite Argentina depart under black clouds of their own making, the French without winning a game or even scoring a goal.
The United States team -- long viewed as a club-footed outsider in the sphere of international soccer -- dropped the soccer equivalent of a daisy-cutter bomb on heavily favored Portugal and is virtually certain to advance to the round of 16, while world-football darlings Italy and Portugal were forced to gaze deeply into the Nietzschean abyss of first-round elimination that had already claimed France and Argentina. Japan and South Korea have been revealed as maniacal attacking sides that nobody wants to play; apparently Asian soccer was ready for its close-up after all.
Unheralded sides from Costa Rica, Denmark, Ireland and Paraguay are all still alive, while the French, winners of both the 1998 World Cup and the 2000 European championship ... well, let's just say il fait très beau in Paris this time of year. Although nonscoring forwards David Trézéguet and Thierry Henry -- the latter ignominiously missing the last game after being sent off with a red card -- had better wear disguises if they want to get served in the hot boîtes of the Left Bank.
But beneath the apparent chaos of upsets and topsy-turvy group results, soccer order is in fact asserting itself. Sooner or later the glass slippers will be pried off the American and Japanese and Senegalese feet. Nearly unnoticed amid the hubbub, a handful of elite teams -- mainly the old warhorses from Brazil and Germany, with England and Spain lurking just behind -- have come through the first stage reasonably unscathed and are now zeroed in on winning the championship. (Despite its mediocre first-round play, Italy also scraped through on Thursday morning, thanks to a 1-1 draw with Mexico and Croatia's surprising loss to Ecuador; if Portugal can survive South Korea on Friday, they'll remain contenders as well.)
You could even call this year's tournament the Revenge of the Ice People: With Denmark, England, Germany and Sweden all advancing -- and one or two of those teams likely to survive to the semifinals -- the grind-it-out industrial style of North Sea soccer seems to have vanquished its flashier Mediterranean cousin. None of this, of course, is to say there won't be more shockers: Japan in the semifinals? The U.S. beating Italy and Spain? This is the year when the old sports cliché that anything can happen is actually true.
Some jerk who writes for Salon apparently picked France to repeat this year, but without injured midfield general Zinédine Zidane, who watched the first two games from the sidelines, the team was revealed as an incoherent collection of high-priced talent, disorganized in defense and jittery on the attack. The championship French team had seemed, almost miraculously, to escape from the phlegmatic national character, but in its second game of this tournament, a spiritless 0-0 draw with Uruguay, all the ennui and anomie and escargots and general je ne sais quoi seemed to come flooding back.
As Internet soccer scribe Adam Novy has observed, this journey through the desert of goallessness transformed French head coach Roger Lemerre into Jean-Paul Sartre: "Doubt is the fate of all thinking men," he told a postgame press conference. Zidane returned for the final game against Denmark but limped around through the thickening existential gloom with his thigh muscle heavily bandaged while Trézéguet bounced more shots off the crossbar. It was 2-0 Denmark and back to the future for France: If the joyous '98 victory was often compared to the 1944 Liberation, this ignominious defeat (coupled with the international embarrassment caused by semifascist presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen) might bring the national mood closer to the humiliation of 1940.
Sure, Argentina was the consensus front-runner this year, but the potential for disaster was evident all along. The players pretty much announced that they were bringing home the Cup to salve their nation's wounded pride -- to say nothing of its ruined economy -- when what they were really doing was writing the script to a classic Argentine melodrama of tragic love and crushed expectations. After barely managing to squeak out a 1-0 win over Nigeria in a game where they had 77,538 scoring chances (by my unofficial count), the Argentines were driven to boredom and despair -- along with the world television audience -- by the smothering defenses of England and Sweden.
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