Soccer: Time to play the crying game ...

By ANDREW LAXON

In a downtown sports bar in Buenos Aires, Gustavo Turquie watched the sun come up and contemplated the unthinkable: Argentina were out of the World Cup.

"I feel pain, real anguish for our loss and the loss of our country," said the 27-year-old. "We needed to win."

Recession-hit Argentina, he complained, had no luck in soccer or in real life.

"Things aren't even going well in football. Now we will just have to go back to watching price increases, tax increases and the rise of the dollar [against the devalued peso]."

Half a world away on the streets of Paris, the post mortem into world champion France's shock exit was well under way.

"We didn't even look as though we wanted to win. The team is too arrogant and too pretentious," said Jean-Philippe Tuttle, a young fan. "They thought they had it sewn up. They were too busy thinking about advertising and money."

By this morning, Italians will be either rejoicing at their escape in this upset-laden World Cup or slumped in the same national mourning as the French and Argentines. Their highly rated team was playing Mexico overnight, probably needing a win to stay alive after a substandard 2-1 loss to Croatia.

The players will have no illusions about their reception at home if they fail. When lowly South Korea knocked out Italy in 1966, fans pelted the team with rotten tomatoes at the airport.

Traditionally, New Zealanders have regarded scenes of such emotion as foreign to our national psyche. But to make sense of the anguish some of the world's great soccer nations are going through this week, most sports fans need only to cast their minds back to November 1, 1999.

On that day the All Blacks dived out of the World Cup at the hands of the French at Twickenham. The semifinal loss - out of the blue for a team expected to claim their destiny - was greeted with profound shock at first, then a furious backlash.

"Buggeur" read the headline that morning in Wellington's Evening Post. Radio talkback buzzed with calls for coach John Hart to be sacked. The personal attacks on Hart increased over the weeks, with one rugby newspaper running a front-page picture of him with the banner headline "Guilty".

As for politics, National MPs still optimistically hoping to snatch the November 27 election on the back of a World Cup victory knew the game was up.

The savage reaction to the All Blacks' loss shocked many New Zealanders. After the first week of self-flagellation and abuse heaped on Hart and the players, even All Black captains Fred Allen and Sir Wilson Whineray suggested the public should remember it was only a game and it might be time to put the defeat behind them.

Nobody seemed to take any notice. For true New Zealand rugby fans, the ghost of that 1999 defeat will be exorcised by nothing less than victory at next year's Rugby World Cup.

Auckland University social psychologist Professor Graham Vaughan says the events at soccer's World Cup this week show our reaction to 1999 was not abnormal - or even the mark of a small country's insecurity.

"This is a universal phenomenon. New Zealanders oughtn't feel that they've fallen off the edge of the earth when they get depressed about something like the All Blacks losing. That's the way it is - it's a human response, it's the same in any country."

Vaughan says our emotional attachment to the fate of national sports teams is part of our need for a wider social identity and should not be seen as irrational.

"Even as individuals, a lot of our good feeling about ourselves is bound up with social groups ... to the extent that you think as part of that group.

"In this case, a sporting team is seen as a representation of our country, and if it's doing well, we all take pride."

The flip side is that if our team is unexpectedly humiliated, so are we.

New Zealand's national obsession with the All Blacks gives us some appreciation of the agony felt by millions of diehard soccer fans around the world this week.

For the French, the competition has been a nightmare from the start. Their star-studded multiracial team of "blacks, beurs, blancs" (blacks, Arabs, whites) was supposed to repeat its emphatic home victory in 1998, helpfully reinforcing a sense of national unity against the far-right, anti-immigration policies of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Just like the All Blacks' Rugby World Cup build-up in 1999 (which included endless Weetbix ads and pictures of the team's front row on their plane to Europe), the French team's faces were emblazoned on almost every product: sports gear, mobile phones, cars, soft drinks and cereal packets. Children squabbled over cards and plastic busts of the heroes.

The captain, Marcel Desailly, wrote an autobiography. Academics wrote essays on the multi-ethnic composition of the team, saying it was a balm for France's racial tensions. Liberal politicians reminded people that France's playmaker Zinedine Zidaine, the world's most expensive player, was the son of a warehouse worker from Algeria.

But the dream faltered from the opening game, when France's former African colony Senegal (dubbed "France B" because all its players play in the French national league) beat the joint favourites 1-0.

France could only draw 0-0 with Uruguay in its second match and the return of Zidaine for the third game against Denmark made little difference. Needing to beat Denmark by two goals just to survive, France lost 2-0 and never looked like winning.

The Herald's Paris correspondent Catherine Field described the country coming to a halt as the match unfolded, "as if a collective act of will could help the team through". The city's landmark Place de la Concorde, usually a whirling mass of traffic, sat deserted as football fans watched the game in anguish on a giant screen outside City Hall.

Afterwards they were disgusted. "World champions and this is all we could manage," said 16-year-old Eddy Remy, who had sneaked away from school to watch the match, dressed in a blue, white and red France strip, a golden crowing cockerel stitched over his heart.

Raphael Bordes, 16, another schoolboy taking a break from his books, said: "It's shameful. We are the champions of the world and we couldn't even manage a goal."

If anyone can top the French for national depression, it could be Argentina. Fans there were looking forward to the World Cup as a welcome distraction from the financial collapse of the past year.

Street riots and supermarket lootings last December claimed more than two dozen lives and saw Argentina go through five Presidents in two weeks. The country, which is suffering its worst economic crisis in decades, moved on to its sixth Economics Minister in April. The peso has sharply devalued, people are not allowed to withdraw their savings from banks and unemployment tops 25 per cent.

But for football-mad Argentines, there was a silver lining - their national team was playing exceptionally well. Many critics picked Argentina ahead of France to win the World Cup after the team romped through their qualifying group, outclassing arch-rivals Brazil.

Even better was the prospect of playing the old enemy, England, in the first round. Leaving aside the two teams' dramatic history on the pitch - including Diego Maradona's illegal "hand of God" goal in 1986 and England star David Beckham's controversial sending-off in 1998 - the unspoken backdrop to these matches is always Argentina's humiliation over Britain's retaking of the Falkland Islands in 1982.

After Argentina won the World Cup in 1978, the military junta used pictures of the victory intercut with scenes from "Las Malvinas"as part of its propaganda.

But the script started to unravel in the England game, which Argentina lost 1-0, thanks to a disputed Beckham penalty.

Although they mounted waves of attacks in their final game against Sweden, the team could scrape only a last-minute 1-1 draw - not enough to make it into the second round. It was Argentina's worst World Cup outing in four decades.

Back home, legions of drowsy fans who skipped sleep for the 3.30am broadcast wept and went back to bed, inconsolable.

Normally bustling morning trains travelled half-empty into the capital, their passengers workers red-eyed and mute. Buenos Aires streets appeared barren until past midday.

Argentina's special World Cup editions underscored the mood: "The Dream Shattered," read one bold headline in Clarin's World Cup edition, beneath a photograph of stunned Argentine striker Gabriel Batistuta holding his head in shock.

"We needed a win to help us forget our economic crisis," said Marcelo Cordoba, a 22-year-old student. "The only thing I hoped for was a chance to forget about Argentina's problems for a month, but this only lasted a few weeks."

Other supporters were less philosophical. At least 61 people were arrested as drunken fans threw bottles and stones at police in the central city of Cordoba and attacked a branch of US bank Citibank in coastal Mar del Plata.

Sometimes fans' anger at a World Cup loss can have tragic consequences. Colombian defender Andres Escobar was assassinated by a fan for scoring an own goal in the 1994 World Cup. And in this competition, two men died in Moscow on Monday when thousands of vodka-sodden Russian fans staged a violent rampage after a 1-0 defeat by Japan.

Like the Argentina-England game, the surprise loss had political overtones. The two countries have been feuding for 57 years over the Kurile Islands, which the Red Army annexed after Japan's World War II surrender.

nzherald.co.nz/fifaworldcup

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