“Diary from the 2022 FIFA World Cup” Vol.6
3rd Place Play-offs and other pointless ramblings
“3rd Place Play-offs and other pointless ramblings”
World Cup Diaries: Day 25
15th December 2022
Well the footballing world at large have their dream final, the defending champions still have the chance to retain their crown and be repeat champions, and Lionel Messi has one final pun intended opportunity to be formally recognised as the greatest there has ever been. It’s La Albiceleste versus Les Bleus or if you prefer, the white and light blues or the blue and whites, versus the darker blues with the red and white accoutrements. It’s the dream final the world has been waiting for! A ruggedly determined Argentina against a physically imposing France. The grit and dark art determination of the South Americans. The joie de vivre and unbeatable look of the Europeans.
It’s Argentina versus France in the biggest of all possible games in the footballing world, and it’s the dream final for everyone that isn’t English. If the referee is German I believe this tiny island on which I reside may well spontaneously combust with collective fury, but we can’t be selective in wishing to see countries competing for the greatest prize in all sport that we haven’t fought a war with as, well, it would be a very short and limited competition.
My fellow countrymen and countrywomen will be in somewhat of a quandary come Sunday evening as we have the footballing equivalent of that horribly tired old political cliché of “the lesser of two evils”. Who to cheer for, what a dilemma! The French, our cousins across the English channel whom we mock and decry and stereotypically wrap in garlic, onions, smelly cheese and their capitulation to the King’s familial Germanic brethren in a rich man’s war? Or those faraway South American Argentines and another horribly pointless Empiric war of conquest and dominion?
Hands of God?
Hands of surrender?
It sure is a quandary.
I’m with the white and light blue stripes of Messi and Maradona, Passarella and Kempes. I like their dark arts! A bloody minded refusal to be vanquished on a football field, a Machiavellian end justifying the means? I can admire that. But I fear Argentina will be 2–0 down with 10 minutes to go come Sunday evening, and then we’ll see the darkest of all footballing arts!
I’m with the white and light blue stripes because I’m a footballing romantic, you know that don’t you? I want to see Messi held aloft by his teammates, clutching that golden trophy once in the hands of his God, his footballing God, and the comparison pictures that will travel around the known world until the end of time. I want to see the Lusail Stadium, that white elephant to disaster capitalism, rocking and bouncing to the drums and sounds of joyous Argentines bearing witness to a coming of age story, their coming of age story, and if they’re old enough, the second coming of their footballing God and the world in his hands once more.
But I’m a footballing romantic.
3rd Place Play-Offs are as pointless as a broken pencil aren’t they?
There you are, the World Cup at your feet and just a win away from a game of football that will be watched by a quarter of the world’s population and instead: you lose a semi-final in utter heartbreak, you won’t be playing in a seminal event watched the world over, you won’t be 90 minutes away from hoisting that golden trophy of Maradona or Deschamps, Beckenbauer or Lloris, Cafu or Casillas, and you won’t have a career defining opportunity to forever say that you’re a World Champion. No.
Rather, you have a pointless game of football with another team of beaten semi-finalists who are all as equally broken hearted and bewildered as you are.
3rd Place Play-Offs are as pointless as a broken pencil aren’t they?
“3rd Place Play-offs and other pointless ramblings” also acts as chapter 25 within my first ever self-published book in March 2023 entitled “Diary from the 2022 FIFA World Cup”.
"Diary from the 2022 FIFA World Cup" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.