South America has lost four World Cups on the trot, including the current one in Russia; sad, for a continent known to have set benchmarks in the game
There is an endearing moment in every tragedy. In Friday's FIFA 2018 quarterfinal match between Uruguay and France, a television cameraman caught one such, of a little Latino lad crying softly as he watched his team sink.
While I can't really place a finger on the civilisation – it could have been Mayan, Aztec or Inca – what I do remember reading as a kid is this little bit about a Mesoamerican ballgame in which the goalpost was placed at an elevation, not on terra firma. The object was to get the ball through, and the team that excelled in this effort walked away with the spoils. So far, logical. The losing team, on the other hand, had all its players decapitated and their heads were then offered to the presiding deity in some sort of religious sacrifice.
Grotesque as it was, there was a cloak of fascination that the story wore. And somewhere down the line, I would start comparing the heroes and the losers on the ancient ballcourt with Mario Kempes' boys from Argentina, who took 1978 away from the Dutch in a particularly brutal match. And there was no Diego Maradona then.
That was the first World Cup final I sat right through up to the wee hours over several rounds of coffee and biscuits. It wasn't live but came a few hours after the match was over, as Doordarshan, the only channel in those days, did not have real-time telecasting rights. Although I'd heard of King Pele's exploits from my father and some of my older neighbours in the building, I had never really had the chance to see them on the field, save for a snippet here or there, culled out from television archives.
Yet, Latino football began capturing the fertile imagination of a teenager who had hitherto been fed solely on a diet of cricket and hockey. I'd watch with great wonder Maradona toying with the leather using neither his head, hands or feet, but his shoulder. And although Colombia never ever took the Cup after I began my love affair with the game, the country's goalie, René Higuita's, bravado never failed to astound. While his scorpion save was legendary, if unnecessary, his leaving the goalpost in order to get to the half line was downright foolhardy. Yet, it was entertaining and became a hallmark of the South American style.
Between 1990 and 2002, I'd watch Brazil take the Cup twice and be enthralled by the clockwork mechanism of Romario, Ronaldo (not Cristiano, please), Rivaldo, Roberto Carlos and a host of other stars from that country and other parts of the continent, most of whose names now escape me. Latin American football was about the wild beauty of skills, dribbling and darting runs for the goal. It was an unofficial trademark that the game enjoyed and there was always an invisible dividing line between fans rooting for European teams and those betting on the South Americans.
