by JINOY JOSE P.
Dear reader,
This morning, in America’s Kansas City, the 38-year-old Lionel Messi, who has spent two decades collecting all the game’s honours, finally claimed the one that had eluded him. He struck three times against Algeria, the first hat-trick of his six World Cups, and drew level with Miroslav Klose on 16 goals, the most anyone has scored at the World Cup.
Watching it, a question came to mind that any fan would call heresy. Pelé is credited with calling this the beautiful game, but is it also a complete game? And if it is, is it complete because it works, or because it never quite does?
Let’s start with the physicality of football. It is easily one of the most physical of the major team sports, certainly the most psychological, and possibly also the most political. It has, in fact, even started a war. In June 1969, Honduras and El Salvador met across three qualifying matches for the 1970 World Cup, and within weeks their armies were fighting along the border. Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski, the Polish reporter who happened to be in the region, wrote about it in The Soccer War, about what the game can set loose.
He knew that the football had started nothing. The war grew out of land: Salvadoran peasants pushed off Honduran soil by land reforms, and around 1,00,000 of them sent to a country with no room for them. The matches only gave the rage a place to gather. An 18-year-old in San Salvador, Amelia Bolaños, shot herself when Honduras scored in the dying minute of the first half. Her funeral was televised, with the President and the national team walking behind the coffin. Several thousand people died in the hours that followed.
This is the first thing to understand about football’s completeness. It is complete because it is porous. It lets the world in. The land hunger of Central America, the rivalries of the Balkans, the long humiliation of the colonised, the swagger of the rich, all of it leaks onto the pitch, because the pitch is one of the few places where a poor nation can stand level with a wealthy one for 90 minutes and occasionally win. That is why dictators crave it and why the dispossessed guard it. The journalist John Pilger argued that in football, as in much else, Western power disguises its interests in the language of freedom, and the modern World Cup gives a textbook case.
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