Winners all the way

It’s about youngsters who will sign themselves in. Blessed with gifts they will travel afar and some will take first steps towards becoming legends.

For the next month, emotion will speak in different languages, dialects and wonderful accents. Countries, hopelessly separated by man and by geography, will perform against each other on a common field. And there will be tears and there will be laughter, those universal emotions that tell us that for all the differences in cultures, victory and defeat mean the same thing. But those that cry shall go home, as indeed those that laugh; to their loved ones, to their work, to their good fortune or misery. The biggest game in the world is celebrating its four-yearly festival and the faithful are congregating. You and me too.

And so, some unusual candidates will come together. America will not be a first world power perpetually flexing its muscles, it will be a mere football team. As will Iran shorn of suspicions about its bomb and its dogma, merely the footballing skills of its players to identify it. Spain will not be Catalan or Basque and Serbia and Montenegro will go their separate ways once their football team leaves Germany.

This World Cup is about football but it is about so much more than just football.

It is about admiring the unbelievable skills that will light up this tournament; of Ronaldinho and Kaka; of Messi and Riquelme; of Henry and Vieira; of Gerrard and Lampard; of Totti and Toni; of Ballack and Klose. It is about watching them discover space where we thought none existed, about seizing opportunities that we hadn’t even seen.

It is about saying goodbye to those that made us gasp and, when that feeling had subsided, made us shake our head and just wonder. The peerless Zinedine Zidane, his feet and mind not quite in sync as before will be willed on by Frenchmen and others to display a little bit of magic once again. He may not but we will pretend we saw it and across continents we will clap our hands when he leaves the football field for the last time. Then he will become better with every passing day!

There will be others like him. Luis Figo, blowing hot and cold, will not play a World Cup again; nor will Zidane’s teammates Lillian Thuram and Claude Makelele; hardworking, industrious men that pave the way for the genius in others to manifest itself. Henrik Larsson, still coming off the bench at Barcelona to show he has the fight for a big day will receive bouquets from Swedes and opponents.

And what about those two wonderful men who slotted in on the team sheet as defenders and so nonchalantly, so breathtakingly, threw their job description away. Cafu and Roberto Carlos will test their strength, their stamina and their will against a pack of hungry young players. They may never play again for Brazil but will they be pillars or will they provide only the flavour not the meat?

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And this World Cup is about youngsters who will sign themselves in. Blessed with gifts they will travel afar and some will take first steps towards becoming legends. They learnt how to play in different parts of the world and they will now come together to confront each other; Messi of Argentina, Fabregas of Spain, Podolski of Germany, Ronaldo, the other Ronaldo, of Portugal and who knows maybe even Ramos and Ribery and Rooney, should his foot heal in time. Or maybe the prodigiously gifted Aaron Lennon of England.

But this World Cup is also about others to whom merely being present is a victory in itself. It is about Angola who have endured 27 years of fighting and neglect to put together a football team that is good enough to play in Germany. Nothing will unite their country more, as indeed it will be with their African colleagues, Cote d’Ivoire. All 23 of them play outside their country but when they qualified, the sly and explosive Didier Drogba prayed that the country will come together around this wonderfully talented football team. It is about the Soca warriors in Trinidad, their happy image masking the economic reality of their existence. Young men could have taken to drugs and violence, instead some chose religion and others football. Win or lose on the football field, they have won already. They have given their nation a smile and another reason to dance!

These are the finest athletes you will see and they live in a real world of aggression and ability; of hard tackling and deft footwork. Every moment on a football field is a statement of skill and equality. In those 90 minutes, there is no cocaine and there are no junk traders; and caste is so beautifully irrelevant. Some may not understand it but you that do, submit. If you haven’t already submitted.