Quarter-finals, and the end of Ghana's epic

Waking up in England to the quarter-finals of the World Cup reminded me of an episode of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers in which the boys decide, as an experiment in alternative realities, to stop taking drugs and be straight for a bit. As we shift from frame to frame the cartoon begins to dissolve into a grim photographic reality: a filthy kitchen piled high with dirty washing-up, stained floors and broken windows. By frame six they are filling their faces with pharmaceuticals and everything is beginning to look much better.

Watching the tournament from the sofa, straight off the plane, initially I felt like the cartoon hyper-reality of being in South Africa was dissolving and in its place appeared the harsh televised reality of a highly orchestrated and commercialised sporting mega-event. But by Saturday night there was enough compelling football to have returned me, if only momentarily, to the World Cup bubble of the last month, where one “realises just how important these games are.”

The quarter-finals of the World Cup are an insane exercise in speed reading. The four games are played in just over 24 hours, and now with something really at stake, both defeat and victory carry complex messages for all the participants and (in our case) vicarious observers. The first and most obvious message to emerge is that the idea mooted only a week ago, that this was Latin America’s tournament, was undercut by the defeats handed out by European teams to three of the quarter finalists. Uruguay, the only survivor from the continent progressed by beating Africa’s last representative, Ghana.

Second, all the victors (as well as the Ghanaians and Paraguayans) showed exemplary teamwork rather than relying on star turns and appear to have squads at peace with themselves. Third, despite all my usual prejudices and preferences, I find myself liking the German team. How can one not? Against England and Argentina they have been entertaining, expansive, yet straightforward too. The complex multi-ethnic make-up of the side is, it appears, delighting the German public, and though France 1998 is a warning against reading too much of a country’s race relations into its football culture, this can only be a good thing.

As to the issue of Uruguay’s own “Hand of God” moment I am torn. On the one hand, it seems an appalling miscarriage of justice that Ghana should be denied their last-minute winner and a place in the semi-finals by such a blatant handball and even worse those they should miss the penalty that followed. On the other hand, I am not convinced that football is about the application of rational canons of distributive justice. Reflecting on England’s defeat to West Germany in the 1990 World Cup semi-final, Pete Davis argued that Germany had the better tournament, but England had the better story. It might not cut much ice in Accra at the moment, but Ghana have given us and themselves an epic to remember.