The World (Game) According to Les Murray by Les Murray

Author:Les Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2014-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

The World Cup was once considered a contest between the best football teams in the world vying to become undisputed kings of the world game; in short, a series of high-quality football matches strung together. While this may have been the intention when FIFA launched the event in 1930, today it’s much more than that. Today it is a monumental celebration of global cultural diversity and far beyond being just a sporting event. More so than the Olympic Games—which primarily celebrate individual achievement (citius, altius, fortius), as they must and should—it is quintessentially the global village at play. Moreover, as a tournament involving teams in a team sport, is about the collective, about communities and about tribes. It gathers, grips and then embeds the willing hordes, who in turn become part of the struggle and ride with it until it reaches its inevitable end, sadly or happily.

Indeed the World Cup is many things besides being just a sporting tournament that seeks to find the best in the eventual winner. That is the necessary blueprint but it is never the final reality. Many times in the past, some would say, the winner was not even synonymous with the best team on view or in the world. Such unforeseens, paradoxes and even so-called injustices are intrinsic elements of football and especially the World Cup. Such things must be accepted and life must go on. The pathos and often grand theatre of such outcomes and such surprises give the World Cup a tint and dimension that are at once painful in their crude reality and joyous in their irony. The World Cups, all of them from 1930 on, have been steeped in these things, with outcomes determined by anything from heroic hat-tricks by irresistibly gifted players to a bad call by a referee or a linesman. Each as much as the other is part of the game and is essential to its wretched beauty as a human endeavour.

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