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Belligerent Savant » Thu Jul 10, 2014 2:39 pm wrote:.
The last time these 2 teams met in a WC Final:
Argentina v. (West) Germany, 1986.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/10/ ... to-bayern/
July 10, 2014
‘Stand with Argentina against the debt vultures’
Passing From Barcelona to Bayern
by HARRY BROWNE
They say that international football is generally played in the shadow of the club game, where the real money and power reside. Most of the time, players, administrators and sponsors put big clubs’ interests ahead of those of their national teams. Then, every four years there are profits to be made all-around from the biggest spectacle of all, and the normal order is suspended for the few weeks of a pseudo-carnivalesque celebration of national football identities called the World Cup, when the nations come out of the shadows, their federations clean up on TV money and FIFA graft reigns supreme.
That’s all roughly true. But it leaves out the extent to which the football at the top end of the World Cup itself resides in the shadow of the top club teams. The great Spain team of 2008 to 2012, when the Catalan-Spaniards won two European championships as well as the World Cup, was itself a sub-franchise of the even-greater Barcelona team of the same period. And now the dominant team of this World Cup, Germany – whether they win on Sunday or not, they have both been the best team and delivered, in partnership with Brazil, the overwhelmingly memorable historical narrative of this year’s tournament – are built on the foundations of the best team in European football over the last two years: Bayern Munich, home to the majority of the German starters. Anyone who feels disappointed that there was no ceremonial changing-of-the-guard at this World Cup, a match where Spain stepped out and Germany stepped in, can go find the videos of the two-legged European Champions League semifinal between Bayern and Barcelona in spring 2013 – won by Bayern with an aggregate score of 7-0, one goal better than Germany’s demolition of Brazil this week. If you need a moment when the bell tolled and the transition was made, that was it.
A World Cup semifinal in which, e.g., Bayern’s Lahm crosses a ball, Bayern’s Müller swipes at it but gets barely a touch, then Bayern’s Kroos hammers it adeptly into the bottom corner of the goal is no mere coincidence. These players know how to play together, brilliantly more often than not, week after week all the year round; when Brazil imploded, no team was better placed to pick them apart with precise familiarity and familiar precision than Bayern-surgically-grafted-into-Germany.
It doesn’t matter that Bayern didn’t actually win the big Euro-trophy this year. Barca didn’t win it in 2010, after all, but no one then could have doubted their greatness. The Munich club ran away with the German league in 2014 but stumbled near the finish-line in European competition, partly because they’d cruised to domestic champion-status so early, partly because of trying to make some (unneeded) tactical adjustments under ex-Barca manager Pep Guardiola. The Germany team of this World Cup is like last year’s Bayern, ruthlessly athletic, quick thinking and quick passing, no messing around. Bayern-Germany go into the final now against an Argentina team whose two best players are the non-Spain core of the usurped Barcelona side, Lionel Messi and Javier Mascherano. That is one big reason the Germans deserve to be favourites.
Another reason they’re favourites, of course, is that Brazil gave them an easy-going training game on Tuesday, while Argentina shed blood, sweat and tears in the aptly named Corinthians arena for three agonising hours on Wednesday.
One of the ironies of the Brazilian catastrophe against Bayern-Germany is that Brazil are (were) the exception to the rule, the one national side in the world that definitely isn’t in the shadow of the club game — not the domestic club game, though that has actually grown with the Brazilian economy in recent years, and not even European club soccer, where hundreds of Brazilian players are scattered. Throughout the four-year ‘cycle’, for decades now, the Brazilian Seleção stands (stood) head and shoulders above other national teams, in terms of its drawing power and appearance fees for international friendlies, in terms of its importance for players, in terms of Nike’s brand strategy. That primacy and reputation lie shattered now, of course – and who knows what will become of all the ‘Samba Soccer Schools’ across the Western world that lured gullible parents with the promise that their kids would be trained by genuine Brazilians, from the home of the beautiful game.
What has been largely missed in all the schadenfreude about the collapse of this year’s ugly Brazil is that for the first 10 or 20 minutes against Germany, they were actually trying to play some version of o jogo bonito. Perhaps they had been stung by all the criticism of their literal and figurative fouling against Colombia; perhaps they really believed that Neymar’s Spirit had descended upon them and in a Pentecostal miracle they would find themselves capable of speaking in tongues and dribbling like their fractured hero. Whatever the reason, they tossed aside their defensive shape and solidity, with Big Phil Scolari spurning the chance to tighten up the selection in Neymar’s absence, and they tore into Germany with reckless abandon.
Or, well, they tried to tear into Germany: it quickly became apparent that their frantic rush of ambition and enthusiasm had not actually transformed, say, Hulk and Fred into technically accomplished footballers. And that Neymar’s Spirit would not cover the central defensive area when David Luiz went wandering. Their ‘tactics’ were suicidal, their limitations as attacking players much more quickly obvious than their alleged limitations as mere spoilers had been. When Germany made the evidence manifest on the scoreboard, Brazil could see it more clearly than anyone, and they utterly fell apart, broken just as they had been by a defensive error against Holland four years ago, but with crazier and more lasting consequences.
Surely among the first of those consequences was the way Argentina and the Netherlands played the second semifinal, a veritable pageant of defensive shape and solidity. That game was strangely fascinating, like staring at an interesting chess puzzle but knowing that no one is going to move any of the pieces. The cool efficiency of the on-field dental work that allowed Pablo Zabaleta to keep playing was about as thrilling as it got. However, in the 90th minute Bayern player Arjen Robben came close to bringing himself and ex-Bayern manager Louis Van Gaal to join the Bavarian contingent in Rio next Sunday. That would have been slightly unjust: Argentina’s advance was probably more pleasing to most neutrals, notwithstanding Messi’s evident exhaustion – to the point that one fears he may not make any great contribution to the final. (It should be noted that last winter Messi took a nice two-month hamstring break, regarded at the time as a bit of perfect-pacing for the World Cup, so maybe there’s something in the tank: we live in hope.)
Nonetheless the final brings together, as it so often uncannily does, the two best teams in the tournament, and it shapes up as a promising match. Its off-field political coloration is brightly irresistible. Wednesday’s semifinal took place on Argentina’s independence day, and now the country that had the guts to bail out its people rather than its creditors by defaulting on sovereign debt to international capitalists goes into the arena against the country that has led the drive to austerity in the name of bailing out bank bondholders. This is not ancient or irrelevant history: some of the hedge funds that refused to accept Argentina’s debt restructuring in 2002 have won a case in a US court that is driving the country into another debt crisis, with a deadline looming in just three weeks’ time. “Stand with Argentina against the debt vultures” says an NGO campaigning on this issue. No, they’re not talking about the World Cup final, but all the same…
And yet, in the politics of football, Germany has a good story to tell. After the national team’s piss-poor showing in the 2000 European championship, the national federation and the clubs together revamped the country’s youth-development system. They made it more coherent, more positive and skill-oriented in the sort of football it taught, and even, they say, more humane. (Christoph Hübner’s excellent 2003 documentary Die Champions, five years in the making and sometimes called soccer’s Hoop Dreams, captures some of the capricious cruelty of the old system.) It may be overly simplistic to label any squad of players as ‘the fruits’ of such a change; it’s certainly absurd to make ‘fixed German soccer’ the first item on Jürgen Klinsmann’s personal resumé; but it’s a real renewal all the same. (Klinsmann’s USA famously shares in the fruits with its German-born contingent, as did five other countries at the World Cup.) No doubt the system has drawbacks and failings, but when you add in the fact that Germany has the best-developed women’s football in the world, and look too at the hint of multi-ethnic colouring of the German team, it is difficult not to feel just a little warm and fuzzy about die nationalmannschaft.
So when it comes to picking a team for next Sunday, I guess you could call that a win-win.
Harry Browne is writing for Counterpunch throughout the World Cup. He lectures in Dublin Institute of Technology and is the author ofThe Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power). Email:harry.browne@gmail.com, Twitter@harrybrowne
July 14, 2014
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An Absurd Threshold for Greatness
No Time to Miss Messi…
by HARRY BROWNE
I was already shedding a tear for Lionel Messi as he placed the ball for that 123rd minute free-kick. Thirty yards out, tricky angle, Manuel Neuer in goal: there was no way in the world he would score. And yet in the cruel and ridiculous calculus of these things, Messi’s hopes of being remembered as a great player in the Pelé-Maradona bracket seemed to rest on the dream of one miraculous shot, some combination of blast and swerve that would leave his immortal left foot to find a corner of the net, and give Argentina the chance to win the World Cup in a penalty-kicks lottery.
Fat chance. He hit the free-kick of a tired, beaten player, a miss whose proportions were less tragedy than farce, an effort that handily maintained his team’s record of not getting a single shot on target for the long duration of this final Within a few minutes the twittersphere was all a-sneer at the dodgy FIFA politics of Messi being awarded the Golden Ball as best player of the tournament. After all, what had he done at this World Cup, other than provide the decisive moment in every single one of his team’s victories en route to the final, three times goals, twice passes?
The temptation, for fans like me, was to go find some Messi highlights on YouTube (how about Barcelona’s 5-0 thrashing of Real Madrid in 2010?) or maybe some insane number-crunching to remind ourselves of the unassailable dimensions of Messi’s greatness. Some of that, unfortunately, served to remind us of the great players who have surrounded Messi at his club, diminutive giants such as Xavi and Iniesta upon whose shoulders Messi has danced. Playing for Argentina he has been shorn of such company as surely as he’s shorn of the shaggy haircut of his greatest seasons.
Some of the trimming he has done himself: he doesn’t like Carlos Tevez in the team, so that glorious attacker didn’t even make the Argentina squad. Injuries cost him the company of Angel Di Maria and a fully fit Sergio Aguero. One can only wonder what has become of the once-deadly striker Gonzalo Higuaín. Messi’s teammates in the final were an admirable, determined bunch, but their tactical narrowness (especially after Lavezzi was subbed-off at halftime) literally played intoGermany’s strongest area of the field, and their quality was a notch or two below what Messi was long accustomed to.
There was a moment late in the final when the dogged midfielder Lucas Biglia had a chance to either smash a long-range shot or slip a little pass to Messi, who had an unusual few yards of space around him. Biglia, wisely and unsurprisingly, took the Messi option, but ballooned the short pass over Messi’s head. The little man sprinted after the ball, but it was gone, and so was a moment that in this game didn’t even register as an opening. With a better passer, it might well have ended with a goal. (Yes, Messi got a mighty good pass earlier in the game that he failed to convert in his familiar fashion, so clearly this was a diminished genius.)
The worst of it is that Messi should have won the World Cup eight years ago at just 19 years old, and sailed through the rest of his glorious career without that absurd greatness-threshold set just beyond his stride. In 2006 Messi had better teammates, a better manager (Jose Pekerman, who had rebuilt Argentine youth football), a nicer style of play around him and a less pressured, less powerful place in the team. He was so powerless, in fact, that Pekerman left him on the bench in the crucial quarterfinal, when they went out to Germany on penalties. (It didn’t help that Pekerman had to switch goalkeepers in the 71st minute after Miroslav Klose kneed Roberto Abbondanzieri out of the game.) In the last eight years Argentine football has regressed while it looked to Messi for redemption: after two decades when ‘new Maradona’ contenders were a dime a dozen, there is no sign of a new Messi — unless you count the tiny eight-year-old whose freakish video briefly swept around the world last year. The old Messi will still be young enough to contend for honours in Russia 2018, but he may have a weaker side, and the transformation of Barcelona from a team into a circus act, with a front-three of Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez, doesn’t bode well for his future.
Germany, as we noted here last week, are a team. And that team’s name is Bayern Munich. Once Mario Götze, a nice middle-class boy born in a united Germany, came on as a substitute for Klose in the final, that made a lucky seven Bayern players on the pitch for Germany. Or rather, luck has nothing to do with it. Bayern is by some distance the pinnacle of an extremely professional and well-resourced system of coaching and developing young footballers. Moreover, it is, like other German clubs, majority-owned by its fans, and you can get a season-ticket there for less than $200.*** No surprise when Götze got the great winning goal, reminiscent of Iniesta’s winner in 2010, and the players could line up for their selfies with Angela Merkel.
All is far from entirely hunky-dory at Bayern: the club’s former president, Uli Hoeness, watched the World Cup final in his prison cell, where he is serving a sentence for tax evasion — a shame that didn’t stop Bastian Schweinsteiger from giving Hoeness a shout-out in a post-match interview. And the club is hated as much as loved throughout Germany for its unparalleled, fan-based wealth, which allows it (usually) to dominate domestic competitions and lure the top players from other clubs.
Still, you don’t have to love Bayern-Germany to recognise that they’re doing something right: this is the first time since Argentina won in 1978 that most of the key players in a World-Cup-winning team have not come from clubs in the Spanish and/or Italian leagues. Even the best West German players in 1990 were scattered southwards. But now this German team is largely based in Germany.
Bayern-Germany’s best player in the final, defender Jérôme Boateng, could have played for Ghana, like his half-brother Kevin Prince — whose World Cup ended in suspension after a fight with his manager, amidst the controversy over the Ghana players’ bonuses. (It is interesting to note that FIFA suspended the Nigerian FA from all football activity after Nigeria’s government tried to make personnel changes in the association, but there was no problem with Ghana’s government coughing up the cash to keep its country’s team playing in the tournament.) One imagines the younger Boateng is happy he stuck with the rich, eminently organised country of his (Berlin) birth rather than the poor and chaotic country of his father: he’ll have a World-Cup-winner’s medal in his pocket, once he gets Lionel Messi out of there.*
Few European countries and no countries elsewhere can possibly hope to emulate what Bayern-Germany have done. That won’t stop some South Americans from saying they should try: in 2010, indeed, Argentina’s manager Diego Maradona tried to build his team on talent drawn as much from a couple of top domestic clubs as from Europe. The Brazilian league is richer than it has ever been: it was remarkable that Neymar stayed at Santos, on what were often called ‘European-level’ wages, until he was 21, and some people were surprised he didn’t stay a year longer. But the truth is that the top players will cross the Atlantic. Colombia, for example, has two of its better players, Juan Quintero and Jackson Martinez, at the moderately rich Portuguese club Porto, while the two best, James Rodriguez and Radamel Falcao, are at super-rich Monaco in the French league. The best hope is probably that a core of four or five national players will gather at a single European club and stay there for a couple of seasons before the next World Cup, but even that is a remote and romantic ambition in the chaotic, money-mad world of football.
How remote and romantic seems the ambition we expressed here five weeks ago, of a glorious tournament for Brazil’s footballers and its protesters alike. As Brazil’s poor were subject to virtual police occupation of their neighbourhoods, would-be rebels were kept, violently and otherwise, off the streets and our screens. Some interesting arguments have been sent my way over recent weeks about the politics of Brazilian protests, and certainly the anti-government sentiment that was audible in the stadia — the booing at the final of president Dilma Rousseff, for example — was politically suspect, given the rich white Brazilians (and Argentines!) who were doing it. Nonetheless, the protests, such as they were, have drawn attention to the costly corruption and injustice of the imperial FIFA fiefdom, and they remain relevant as the IOC version rolls into Rio for the 2016 Olympics.
That will be fascinating to watch and support, but my own obsession remains with the politics of the game of football itself. There is, for example, the politics of the European club competitions, which seek to ensure that the largest number of clubs from the richest leagues and TV markets are contesting matches through the profitable winter evenings. One result is that top teams from lesser leagues are already scrapping it out for a shot at a few remaining slots.
Off-season my arse: on Tuesday evening I’ll be back in front of a screen to watch my beloved, once-giant Glasgow Celtic go to Reykjavik to start trying to qualify for some of those crumbs from the European table. There’s barely a moment to miss or mourn this maddening World Cup.
*Note on this joke for readers not fully fluent in footballese: a defender who successfully restricts an attacker’s game is said to have him in his/her pocket.
Harry Browne lectures in Dublin Institute of Technology and is the author of The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power). Email:harry.browne@gmail.com, Twitter @harrybrowne
JackRiddler » Mon Jul 14, 2014 11:39 pm wrote:I really like Harry Browne writing on football.
And yet in the cruel and ridiculous calculus of these things, Messi’s hopes of being remembered as a great player in the Pelé-Maradona bracket seemed to rest on the dream of one miraculous shot, some combination of blast and swerve that would leave his immortal left foot to find a corner of the net, and give Argentina the chance to win the World Cup in a penalty-kicks lottery.
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