Posted on 06/12/2002 8:35:34 AM PDT by moyden
Up together for the Cup
Britain is captivated by the beautiful game and celebrating it collectively. How lucky to be able to care so much
Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday June 12, 2002
The Guardian
By the time you read this, there's a good chance you'll already know. Your street will either have erupted in a roar of relief and jubilation at around 9.15am or the faces on the bus to work will have told their own glum story. Just as you needed no radio or TV or text message to know the result from the Sapporo stadium on Friday afternoon - just a glimpse inside any pub or office would have told you - so a rudimentary grasp of body language will give you the news today. You will know whether England have done enough to qualify for the second round of the World Cup.
But there are some things you already know, thanks to the near-fortnight of this astonishing tournament played so far. For this World Cup, with its giant-killing upsets and delicious reverses of fortune, has not only delighted billions; it has shed some revealing light on Britain - and the world.
For us there has been confirmation of two truths long denied. First, whatever we persist in telling ourselves, we are a people who yearn for and seize on moments of collective experience. Our national myth may still speak of a culture which cherishes privacy above all other virtues, in which we pursue discrete and discreet lives behind private hedges and lace curtains, which demands we stare at the floor rather than make eye contact with strangers - but the myth is getting out of date.
Friday proved it. We love getting together, ideally on the streets, to share a potent, national episode. We saw it at as people clutched each other's forearms, barely able to watch, as David Beckham placed the ball on the spot for that penalty. We saw it again during those last, agonising 15 minutes when England defended their own six-yard box as if it was the Alamo. Whether watching a giant screen in Trafalgar Square or huddled around a radio in a doctor's waiting room, people wanted to go through it together.
And, remember, they didn't have to. This match was not carried exclusively on pay TV, available only in pubs. Everybody could have stayed at home and watched it, for free, on their own or with a few mates. But at least 5 million wanted - needed - a crowd around them.
And that should no longer come as a surprise. After all, we had seen the same impulse on display at the start of the week. The million-strong crowd that gathered for the jubilee show at Buckingham Palace - spilling down the Mall to Trafalgar Square and filling all streets in between - was hailed as a monarchist mass demo, as if every reveller was there solely to vow devout faith in the hereditary principle. But they may have been demonstrating a rather different British trait: a talent for seizing on the chance for a major collective experience.
A free concert on a sunny bank holiday, complete with national treasures Sir Paul McCartney, the Honourable Ozzy Osbourne and the dauphin Will Young all in attendance, topped off with a fab lightshow and fireworks, struck that same, British chord: we like a day out with each other.
It happened when the Queen Mother died - which, fate ensured, also coincided with lovely weather and the kids being off school - and a dozen times before. Whether it was the election night of 1997 or the death of Diana a few months later, the penalty shoot-out against Argentina in 1998 or the eclipse of the sun in 1999, we rally to these moments whenever they're on offer. We even manage to confect collective experiences from next to nothing: think of the Nasty Nick fervour during the first Big Brother or the Will vs Gareth duel that had us hooked in February.
So let the current national obsession - whether it brings joy or gloom today - lay at least one unfair stereotype about us to rest. We are not the atomised, privatised people of our own myth. There is such a thing as society - and we grab every chance we can to prove it.
There is a second World Cup lesson about us. We are lucky - and I'm not referring to the ref's penalty decision on Friday. I mean it is a lucky nation which can feel genuine, all-consuming angst over the fate of its football team.
A fortnight ago I sat at a Guardian-hosted, three-day meeting of leaders from Israel, Palestine and Northern Ireland. Without labouring the point, it's fair to say that these places have other things on their mind besides goal difference. Palestinians and Israelis will not be watching much football in bars, not because they don't love the game but because they would either be barred from getting there or would fear they would be blown to pieces once they had. These are not worries we have in Britain.
We are blessed to live in a country that can have a sports result lead the front page of even its quality papers, as all ours did on Saturday. (Blessed too, for that matter, that we can count a debate about how we select our head of state - genes or votes - as one of our most controversial.) Britain is a lucky place.
And the world feels lucky, too, for these four weeks. For this tournament offers the chance either for a welcome distraction from domestic woe - economically crumbling Argentina needed the morale boost of a win last Friday much more than we did - or as a useful outlet for international tension. So Japan and Russia's historic rivalry could be expressed through a weekend football game rather than a naval war (though even the soccer version of hostilities triggered deadly riots in Moscow). Some old colonial scores have been settled in a safe, non-lethal fashion, too: Senegal's victory over the former masters of France will prove a landmark event in the life of that African nation. (Let's put Nigeria and England to one side.)
Indeed, it is hard not to see some politics in the fate of France, driven out goalless from the competition yesterday. When they were an advertisement for multicultural diversity, the French ruled the world. This time, initially bereft of their star, the Algerian Frenchman Zinedine Zidane, and still under the cloud of the Le Pen election result, France were humiliated. It's as if the world community has made a statement through the international language of football: the inclusive France can be champions but this other France has no place.
And, make no mistake, there is a world community at work here. This tournament has surely overtaken the Olympic games as the pre-eminent global sporting event, followed with passion throughout Africa and, increasingly, Asia, too. But here's the twist. This is one form of globalisation in which America is not the driving force. The US is a bit player, albeit a competent one in the current contest. No, this is one area in which Europe and Latin America lead, recruiting the world to their own obsession. The only pity of it is, we have to wait four years for the pleasure to start all over again.
jonathan.freedland@guardian
Oh, really, PUHLEEEEZE!
These guys are like those Star Trek geeks, and to quote the inimitable Shatner... "Get a LIFE"..
This had nothing to do with the world telling the French to "F" themselves for hinting at conservativism, its just a GAME for crying out loud. The French team SUCKED this year, sucked BADLY.. maybe its the result of excessive socialism leading to a wimpy populace?
I'll tell you what, the day, and that day may come soon, but The Day that the USA wins The World Cup, the world will go into collective mourning, and we'll just go "heh, cool!"
Can't wait to see that day. Just imagine the Americans beating at their own socialist game. Perhaps the world would lose their desire to live. I know it's not fair
that the Americans are so dominant in nearly everything throughout the world, but it's an American world that we all live in! :)
Those guys don't print a newspaper, it's a screed.
What will cheese them off the most is that we'll have beaten them and we won't wildly celebrate, or even care, or even notice, much.
The only thing linking soccer to "collectivism" is the title you created for this thread, and it's a piss-poor one at that.
Can't wait to see that day. Just imagine the Americans beating at their own socialist game. Perhaps the world would lose their desire to live. I know it's not fair that the Americans are so dominant in nearly everything throughout the world, but it's an American world that we all live in! :)
I can wait, thank you very much. We play a different brand of football in these parts.
A better brand....
And of course, let us cast pearls before swine....
Thank you. There's football, and then there's that game where guys run around a field kicking a ball into a net.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
Furthermore, the writer uses the word "private" to signify "not-collective." Any association with private "property" is in your own brain which, unfortunately, has completely mis-read this article.
col-lec-tiv-ism, n. The socialistic doctrine that the land and means of production and distribution should belong to the people collectively. [Emphasis added]
Note the correct use of "collective" as an adverb.
Obviously, I agree with you. There's nothing like American football, and I always watch the beloved Redskins on Fall Sundays. It is absolutely painful to watch them keep losing to the archrival Dallas Cowboys. Hopefully this year will change with Coach Steve Spurrier, and the new defensive coordinator Marvin Lewis. Perhaps in January 2003, we can say Super Bowl and Redskins in the same sentence. After all, New England Patriots won last year, and Baltimore Ravens won the year before.
GO SKINS!!!!
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