Chris Laidlaw: Greatest show on Earth

They predicted the world would stop and it has. For soccer.

Everyone is watching it. Morning, noon and night, it doesn't seem to matter.

Glide time is back, and employers don't seem to mind. A little reduced productivity is neither here nor there when it's World Cup time.

At moments like this, when the entire population is preoccupied with football, opportunists inevitably seize the moment.

While Spain played, the Reserve Bank was burgled. While Croatia played, the Government devalued the currency. In Mexico, the new President whipped a couple of unpalatable laws through the system.

Many others are similarly tempted.

Those of us who are accustomed to comparatively minor sports events such as the rugby World Cup are always staggered by the sheer scale of the global devotion to soccer.

This, more than anything else on Earth, can be truly said to seize the attention of the world community at large.

Whole nations, more than ever before, are mobilised behind their football teams.

Brazilians can think of nothing much else. Football outstrips even sun, music and sex for a few weeks. Until, of course, the Brazilian team lose, at which moment they are set upon by everyone in the land and their citizenship called into question.

Unrealistic public expectations of victory are something that every Brazilian team now have to live in fear of, a phenomenon which will strike a familiar chord with certain New Zealand practitioners of a different code.

Every other Latin country virtually closes down for the duration.

Normally sedate Uruguayans have cast aside their composure. Argentines realise their true calling after fruitless flirtations with rugby. And Mexicans just go mad.

Because it is such a truly global game, picking an eventual winner is a lottery.

The French are desperately anxious to see evidence that their champion team are not yet over the hill. The Italians are desperate to prove that they are.

The Germans keep saying that they haven't a chance this time, but people are putting this down to the opaqueness of the German sense of humour.

Between each tournament, this remarkable game just keeps growing. It is being taken up seriously by more and more countries. Even the superpowers have realised that if they aren't into soccer they aren't into life.

Reports have it that more than 300 million in China alone watched their national team appearing in the finals for the first time.

Happily for the Government, this match took place on the anniversary of the Tianenmen Square massacre, but everybody forgot. The middle classes were all too busy watching the footy on new, Chinese-made digital television sets.

Even the Americans, who usually hold sports events called the world champs or the world series in which only they compete, are gripped by it.

Their national team, like that of the Chinese, are also at the finals, but unlike China, they won their opening match, a 3-2 victory over the highly fancied Portuguese.

The networks have woken up to the fact that the United States, as an immigrant nation, has a huge number of closet football fans waiting to express themselves. And to buy a cable subscription.

Heaven only knows what will happen when the Chinese or American soccer franchises begin buying up all the world's talent.

nzherald.co.nz/fifaworldcup

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