THE WORLD CUP AND ME:OUR LOVE STORY SO FAR!!

Legend has it that when I came out of my mother’s womb I was silent and motionless, I wasn’t crying out loud like most babies do. The midwife on duty thought I was dead or something had happened but obviously I wasn’t. I had other plans. I laid there quietly for about ten seconds and whiles the nurses were frantically moving about in an attempt to save the ‘dead’ baby, lo and behold the baby Jude screamed out loud “gooooaaaaal”!!!! It took the nurses by surprise and everyone present burst out into uncontrollable laughter. Soon, word spread throughout the whole township that a “goal baby” had been born. Sometimes I’m forced to believe this myth but that of course never really happened.

This is rather the truth about my birth. I was born in a world cup year, in a world cup month and on a world cup day. On the day I was born, Brazil was playing against Northern Ireland and Spain was playing Algeria. There were plenty of goals in both games. Brazil won their game 3-0 and Spain recorded a similar scoreline against Algeria. All in all, six goals were scored in the World Cup on that day. Perhaps, there may be some truth my “goal baby” story but never mind that’s not a story I want to sell to you. All I’m trying to point out to you is that I’ve always had this special bond with the WORLD CUP. I like to believe that bond is congenital.

Football has always been my biggest passion. Whether I’m playing, watching, reading, writing or arguing about the beautiful game, I always do it with a certain level of enthusiasm that sometimes amazes even me. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no game like football especially when it comes wrapped in ‘World Cup’ colours. I like league games, cup finals, Champions league and all the other variations of football competitions but believe you me; the World Cup is something else. The feeling is deep. 32 nations, 64 games, 31 days of non stop end to end action with plenty of subplots like best player, top goal scorer, best young player, best fans, the women in the stands, moments of brilliance and magic, the celebrations and of course the heartbreaks, what more could you ask for in 31-odd-days. The World Cup is truly where heroes are born and legends are made. The global showpiece records the highest TV viewership than any other event in the world. Nothing even compares to the football festival FIFA gifts us every four years.

It’s less than 3 days (and counting) to the World Cup. In those 31 days, the history and the future of the World Cup script will be re-written. There’s been 18 World Cups already and the next world in South Africa will be the 19th World Cup and the first to be staged on African soil. I’ve always been a big fan of the World Cup and today my mind decided to ran back to my previous World Cup experience. I’m taking it back to where it all begun. But before then I want to say this: my best World Cup ever is ironically a World Cup I didn’t watch, I wasn’t even born by then. That’s a bit weird but trust me, there’s a reason for that unusual choice of a favorite-World-Cup tournament.

You can’t blame me for ‘lusting after’ the 74 World Cup, you know, cos in this age of ‘YouTube’ and ‘Wikipedia’ its not too difficult to research into such ‘ancient history’. Sometimes you read/watch so much of earlier events that you begin to relate to it as though you were there. Anyways, the 1974 World Cup was hosted by West Germany and it was at this World Cup that the philosophy of “Total Football” was born by the ‘Dutch Masters’. The Dutch were so talented and organized that, if not for the efficiency of the Germans which we’ve come to know and envy, Johan Cruijff and his team of “Orange delights” would have won that World Cup. In my opinion Cruijff is one of the most underrated legends in the history of football. Most people know of Maradona, Platini, Zidane, Pele, Bobby Charlton et al but if you take time to read about Cruijff it would amaze you to know how much of a gifted player he was.

The 1974 World Cup featured stars like  Grzegorz Lato ( a Polish and the top goal scorer at the tournament), talk of players like  Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Neeskens,  Uli Hoeness, Fabio Capello, Gerd Müller, and Jairzinho. It would surprise you to know that back then Haiti was represented at the World Cup but they failed to win a single game. Surprising uh, Haiti at a World Cup? England didn’t qualify for the World Cup, maybe that explains why I love that particular World Cup so much. Ignore that last sentence. Most importantly and more relevantly it was at this tournament that the current World Cup trophy was first presented. The Brazilians had won the previous Jules Rimet trophy for keeps after winning the World Cup for the third time in Mexico 1970 ( plus the ’58, ’62 World Cups). Enough of the ancient history lets bring it forward to more recent times.

I wasn’t old enough to have seen Maradona’s “Hand of God” against England in 1986, similarly I didn’t see his second goal in that same game when he dribbled half the length of the field past five English players before scoring. That goal was voted “Goal of the Century” by FIFA in 2002 and for those of you old enough to have seen it, you should be thanking God.  All you “Latter Day Saints” should just check it out on YouTube. Then came Italia 1990 and I still couldn’t be bothered much, I was still peeing in my shorts, and struggling with nursery rhymes, football was only a distant thought. I heard the Germans won that one exacting revenge for their loss to Argentina in the ’86 World Cup. The Germans have been to a joint-record seven finals and they’ve won the title on three occasions. The other joint-record holder is eerrm (you guessed right), the Brazilians, they’ve also been to seven finals and have won five titles. You see those penta-stars on that famous yellow Brazilian jersey, yeah the stars are not there for decoration. The Brazilians have earned the right to put those 5 stars there.  It comes from hard work and sometimes luck (ask Italy in 2006). Italy has got 4 stars, Germany 3, Argentina 2, Uruguay 2, England 1, and France 1 star. I’m still waiting for an African team (preferably Ghana) to join that A-list of ‘star studded’ teams.

Nineteen ninety four was when I broke my World Cup ‘virginity’. My memories of USA 94 are very scant and patchy but one thing that I still remember about that tournament is the Roberto Baggio penalty miss in the final game. I remember Maradona was banned from the tournament after failing a drug test but I don’t remember seeing him play in Argentina’s opening game. I wasn’t supporting any team per se but being an African and watching the games with much older football fans, I was drawn towards the Cameroonians and Nigerians. I was particularly impressed by the Nigerians. My favorite player in that Nigerian squad was Yekini. I followed the African teams in that tournament but after they were eliminated, I switched my allegiance to Italy and that was a very ill-informed decision. Basically I was followed the ‘popular’ choice. For some strange reason (maybe hate or envy) most of the fans I watched the tournament with were anti-Brazil. So here I was, young football fan, following the populist agenda. Sometimes the voice of the people isn’t necessarily the voice of God. Very early in my life I learnt a very useful lesson: always take decisions for yourself.

The Italians lost the final through a penalty shootout. I was heartbroken especially because Roberto Baggio of all people missed his penalty kick. I liked him because of his hair style and because he was more like the star man of that Italy 1994 squad. As a kid I was always drawn to “number tens”. Aside Baggio, I fell in love with two other players, Bebeto and Romario. I still remember that ‘rocking baby’ goal celebration which has been cemented in my mind because it was always on “Gillette World Sports”.  When Carlos Caetano Bledorn Verri, better known as Dunga lifted that trophy aloft, I was dejected but equally proud of the Brazilians. After that tournament , anytime I played football with my friends I tried to mimic the skills and ball control of those two Brazilians but as fate would have it, I was no ‘Ronaldinho’, the skill just wasn’t there and so I had to give up my dream of playing for the Black Stars. (Teary eyes and running nose, crying out loud). I gained one thing though, the fans’ ardor had a pronounced effect on me. I contracted the football fever and that was when the madness started.

The long 4 year lapse between  USA 94 and France 98 wasn’t that long or so it seemed. I had other football competitions to occupy me. The under -17 tournaments were always a delight to watch. France 1998 was by far a better World Cup for me in terms of watching the games. I moved from the black-and-white TV on car battery back in USA 1994 to a more advanced coloured TV in the comfort of my family house. My Uncle had just returned from his sojourn in UK and brought home with him a powerful Grundig TV which had powerful speakers and the picture quality was just amazing. Now we are watching football in HD and 3-D, back in the day we had to make do with no-definition and 0-D television pictures. Thank God for the lives of scientists and engineers who keep blessing us with their wonderful inventions.

The tournament itself was a huge success. The games were good. I remember keeping a journal on most of the games. I don’t remember but I think some of the matches were shown in the evening and I had the opportunity to judiciously follow the games. I loved France 98, by then I hadn’t heard much of the English national team and my uncle was supporting England. Me, I was the biggest Argentina and Holland fan back in the days. I was backing the Argies because of Gabriel Batistuta (aka Angel Gabriel) and Ariel Ortega, I supported the Dutch because they almost always had a collection of star players, and because of their attractive jersey. I still remember players like Lizarazu, Davor Suker, and the Brazilian goal keeper, Taffarel, among others. There was no internet to check the squad list or any of those details about the World Cup teams and so I laboriously compiled a list of the squads in an A1 exercise book. I don’t know why I did that but I just loved it.  I kept a record of the score lines and the goal scorers too. I fancied myself a football pundit as early as those days.

There was the Beckham red card, Ortega’s head-butting of Van der Saar and Brazil’s suspicious defeat to Norway in the group stages which resulted in Morocco’s sad exit. After Holland had eliminated Argentina and Brazil outscored Holland in a penalty shootout to book a place with France in the final, I threw my support behind the French. I hated Brazil for defeating my beloved Holland and for that ‘arranged match’ against Norway. Unlike the Italians in 94, the French didn’t disappoint me at all. Thanks to a brilliant Zinedine Zidane and a determined French team (plus Ronaldo’s alleged food poisoning ), the French lifted the World Cup trophy on home soil. Two Zidane headers and Petit’s late goal suffice to hand the trophy to the French “team of All Nations”. I was excited particularly because my uncle had told me about a certain Ghanaian born French defender called Marcel Desailly. Even though he didn’t play in the final game, he’d been instrumental in the French’s success. Desailly had earlier signed for Chelsea and once I got to know that, my heart was attached to that London club. You can call it French Connection UK.  The rest they say is history.

Korea/Japan 2002 wasn’t a good tournament for me. I think we were still in school and we never really had the chance to watch the games. I was in a boarding house by then. Some boys ‘broke bounds’ to watch the games at Achimota Hospital but I never gathered enough courage to follow those ‘hard guys’. Throughout that tournament I felt like a prisoner in Alcatraz yearning to escape from prison. I don’t have any solid memories of that world cup but I remember supporting Brazil throughout the tournament. From start to finish, I was committed to the course of the Brazilians because of “El Phenomenon”. The ‘fat’ Ronaldo was then one of my favorite players (plus Henry and Zola). The Brazilian squad had Ronaldo, the in-form Ronaldinho and of course the outstanding Rivaldo. The 3 R’s were a threat to any defence and they brushed aside (maybe not Turkey) the other teams on their way to winning their fifth World Cup title. France disappointed me but by then I wasn’t even supporting ‘Les Bleus’. I wish I’d watched more games of that tournament. That prayer was to be answered in Germany 2006.

Germany 2006 is a more recent World Cup and I’ve got a lot of fond memories of that tournament. Ghana qualified for the World Cup for the first time in our history. Also, I had a lot of free time on my hands to follow every game. Earlier I’d ‘resigned’ from a vacation internship just to dedicate my time to the one thing that I love most: Football in the form of the World Cup. Germany 2006 was a joy to watch and it still feels like yesterday when Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi. I remember the Spain-France game, the Ghana-Brazil game and my best game of the tournament the France-Brazil game. I watched France versus Brazil at Paloma with the my mates and mehn that game was just superb. Remember the Germany vs Argentina game, the England vs Portugal and Holland vs Portugal game. Those games were just exciting.  After Ghana had been eliminated I harboured resentment in my heart against the Samba boys and I soo wanted to see them ‘crush and burn’.

Evidently that hatred stemmed out of unguarded jealousy because in my mind, we had been robbed of a quarterfinal slot. It was basically a case of blind nationalism and nothing else. I hailed curses on Lubos Michel (the ref) for nothing. Maybe the second goal was indeed an offside but I don’t intend to concentrate on that too much. With the benefit of hindsight (and sober technical reflection), we were eliminated because of our own undoing. We played a high defensive line and also impudently used the offside trap against the Brazilians. That of course was a clear case of tactical naivety from our technical bench. On the whole, Germany 2006 was a blast, the fanfare in the country was amazing, the Ghana flags were flying high, we raved like crazy and nothing drew Ghanaians together more than that mundial. Let’s hope we are able to repeat the dose and see how far we can go. Impossible is nothing we just have to dare to dream.

I recall Graham Poll’s “three yellow cards to one player” error, the red cards in the Portugal Holland game, the Germany-Argentina penalty shoot outs, Wayne Rooney’s red card and C.Ronaldo’s subsequent vilification in the English press, Gatusso’s insane celebrations, Ghana’s defeat of Czech and USA and the massive celebrations thereafter, the memories are just too much for me to talk about.

I can go on and on about my World Cup memories but that would be selfish of me. The ‘second half’ of this blog is the comment section and it’s a chance for you to share your own World Cup story with the rest of the World. Evidently very football fan has a World Cup story to tell. And each is just as interesting as the next because they’re all unique. Please feel free to share your “World Cup” story. I look forward to reading your stories below.

Thanks.

JUDE ANIM.

ACCRA, GHANA.