nothing you can sing that can't be sung

There was a throwaway line in the flurry of articles about Milan in March-April 2007 after their qualification for the Champions' League finals, about Rino Gattuso, interviewed about the Istanbul final in 2005, saying that for a long time it was unbearable for him to think of anything associated with that night. Istanbul just some Turkish city, penalties what penalties, that sort of thing. Liverpool just the home city of the Beatles.

The reason I think of this on the brink of a crunch game against fake rivals France that is not likely to throw up great football or shining examples of sporting spirit is that I take comfort in the fantasy that Rino, or perhaps his good friend Marco Materazzi, will line-up opposite the French with their heads held high, and on cue after the opening bars of La Marseillaise, will boom "LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!" at their opponents.

It might insult the national sentiments of the French, but then it might also get Nicolas Anelka to smile.

I am interested in human behaviour during the blaring of the anthems. One of pop culture's frequent tests of the measure stupidity among the public is to stop people on the street and demand them to repeat the words of the national anthem [at least, this happens frequently on youth channels on Indian TV]. I suppose the footballing population contains the same pecentage of people who cannot tell you the words of their anthem as the wider populace. Choosing to keep mum and let the others get on with it rather than expose your powers of intellectual retention as weak is a courteous way of doing things.

Surely there are those who choose this method to register a social protest, and I generally applaud the gesture. It would be silly to take a chance to represent your country and not give your very best while playing, but if you wanted to express disgust with your government's policies, or at the way they treat your community, or simply because you don't like patriotic fervour, this seems like a highly visible yet perfectly honourable way to do it. The trouble is, I'm not sure if anyone among the throng of mute footballers at Euro 2008 is doing this. I'm a little disappointed.

On the flip side, of course there is something appealing about a grand gesture of solidarity. Before their opening game against Austria, every starter on the Croatian team raised hand to heart before they started to sing. Perhaps in a different political situation, or against different opponents, it may have seemed less benign. What may seem like swaggering arrogance in one country - or one sport, or one tournament - is a simple mark of committment in another. If the Indian football team ever qualified for a World Cup, I wouldn't be displeased to hear a familiar ditty before the start of a match. Of course, it would mean nothing if they didn't bother to play their best after the singing, which is what will ultimately matter to those who like such a thing as 'national pride' to be quantifiable and result-based. We'd never heckle them at the airport for anything less.

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I've been boring everyone I meet with news of my morbid fascination with Marco van Basten. The graven image in those videos and YouTube pages has suddenly drawn breath -- in rather a scary, Darth Vaderish fashion, appropriate to the buzzcut and the blank, focused stare -- and become a very alarming but intriguing human character. For someone who went into the tournament with roughly the same number of question marks over his head as Roberto Donadoni, he's certainly pulled ahead. [Donadoni has helped with that, no lie.] I think I could live with his winning streak continuing, just to see those goal celebrations.

guest blog: we all need someone we can bleed on

M. Satchi is an artist and football fan from Toronto, Canada.

A petition in .PNG to Roberto Donadoni:

now that it's here

* pulls on ITALIANS DO IT ON THE COUNTER tee-shirt over habit, sits down, waits to be disappointed by Toto di Natale *

Half time. Poor Toto. It is not his fault. Nothing is his fault. He runs and runs and runs. As Yves Saint-Laurent once said of Tom Ford, "he does what he can."

I am having visions of Marco van Basten hoisting the championship trophy. He will be forced to crack a smile once again. How will he deal?

Oh, and: Dirk Kuyt. Really?

Full-time: * pulls tee-shirt off, crosses ITALIANS off, writes in DUTCH in orange felt-tip *

singing the blues

I have probably already made it embarrassingly clear that I am a gigantic n00b to football fandom. I like football history, but I have very little first-hand experience of it. In fact, for me football started in 1998, and not entirely with Paolo Maldini and his Oedipus complex, either, which is my habitual reluctant confession about my beginnings. [Don't make me say more about it - know that the words 'Ricky Martin' are involved and leave me to suffer in silence, I beg you.]

But I love Italy, in spite of their continued associations with bad pop. Yes, Il Divo, I mean you. Back in '98, when I noticed them, I remembered them as a team shadowed by tragedy. In later years I have traced this melancholic instinct back to this photograph, which is my only other memory of USA '94 not related to Romario, or drug busts. Subsequent events in France did nothing to erase this impression. I have only a vague memory of Baggio in France, slipping in and out of the side like a shadow himself.

I have often asked myself if it is dishonest for a team like Italy, with no dearth of middling-to-exquisite talent up front, to rely on their defensive training to do so much of their work for them. In relative terms - do they merely do what any team would have done if they had the talents of Maldini, Nesta, Cannavaro and Zambrotta, as the latest and least of a long tradition, at their disposal? In absolute terms - should such a team not have made more varied demands on their surfeit of good qualities? We'll never know; but if it is ethically suspect to coast and coattail it, then they've paid for it repeatedly, in the most ridiculous, bitter ways possible. Penalties. Bad referee decisions. Petulance. Statistics. Over and over and over again. Never, since '98, have I seriously backed an Italy team to win a tournament. As far along as the quarter-finals in 2006 I was fully prepared to acknowledge the heartbreaking Argentina as just and proper world champions. [Of course, they have a long history in the bitterness and hilarity department themselves. I am putting the finishing touches on a very serious academic study of the correlation of the high incidence of alcoholism in Kerala and the tendency of its people to back Argentina in international tournaments as I speak.]

Italy are anything but heartbreaking. In fact, they're almost chronically impossible to feel sorry for. The players are always experienced superstars, the drama always fulsome and generally unpleasant, and the attitude, on the whole, smug and entitled. Could you ever cry for such a team?

Sometimes I look back at the miracle of pain and Roberto Baggio that was 1994, aka the World Cup I missed, and wonder if it's just the way history works, that he seems to have been the last Italian truly capable of breaking hearts, with his fragility and unworldly genius. I'm willing to put it down to the sentimentality of the new for the old - after all, Homer in the Odyssey makes that quip about no sons ever overreaching their fathers; some are just as bad, 'but most are worse' - but I think that, in the wake of such unexpected good luck and massive disappointment, it would have taken an enduring pair of tear ducts to find anything left to cry for. Perhaps future generations of French supporters will feel the same about their space cowboy team of 2006. [I hope they keep their close-to-hand victories in '98 and '00 in mind, to comfort them.] I don't know if that team were more or less likeable than their successors in Germany. But I don't think the memory of Fabio Grosso gambolling in the fields of Berlin will ever erase the image of that final missed penalty.

But perhaps it's just the way tragedy and its self-aggrandising elements work. The rhythms of club football tend to make everyone, even the pathologically ambitious, make do; but in the rarefied atmosphere of the big international tournament these Aristotelian notions of tragedy and comedy seem to make sense.




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General opinion has it that that final in Pasadena stands unrivalled for tedium and frustration in World Cup history. Maybe so, maybe so. I found this amusing New York Times piece, dated just before the final, that deconstructs the magic of that Italy and that Brazil in its profiling of the heroes of either side.

I'm also pleased to see this great Rob Bagchi blog in the Guardian about the art and history of Italian defending. It is framed by his reminiscences of the brothers Baresi, and their likeness to - that's right, folks! - a comic.

[Thanks to the wonderful Neko for the picture.]

do you have a euro 2008 team?

Why? Isn't it just another excuse for Europeans to hate each other?

Oh, alright, kidding. I love international tournaments. For a long time I had no idea that teams existed outside internationals. Arsenal, Borussia Dortmund, Lazio -- these were just words that echoed off Star Sports' Football Mundial advertisements. My father and grandfather would dutifully exchange cricket for football once every four summers or so, and a lot of my ideas about football - Maradona unquestionably world's greatest, Romario not more talented than Baggio [in fact Baggio simply unlucky poor bugger], Malayalis always support Argentina and Bengalis always go for Brazil, etc - were formed in this crucible.

I suppose I was a neutral, in those days. I should still be. I think I may safely tell you that I am, to an extent. I mean, here is a tourney and a sport in which I have no rational national biases whatsoever. It would be stupid to support anything but exciting football, even if it's a Raymond Domenech team that plays it. This is obviously not the entire truth, however. The truth is that I would like it if Italy won it. In fact, I even have second-favourites: Croatia.

Having confessed as much, what I now put to you is: what about you, reader? Are you supporting a team? A player? An ideology? A kit [thank you, Puma, thank you for bringing back the blue and white]? Why?

mark the music

I'm cut up over England not getting to Euro 2008. I worry that English football journalism will proceed, next summer, to pretend like the tournament doesn't exist. Time for me to get cracking on that Teach Yourself Italian course to be able to scan La Gazzetta with ease, I guess.

Here's hoping ESPN don't revise their match schedules, at least.

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England really don't have an excuse. Like everyone else annoyed with football imperialism I'm tempted to call it a moral come-uppance for their overblown reputation, but an overblown reputation is a symptom - it can explain away disappointment, not failure. It's arguable that any of Western Europe's reputationally advanced teams, young Germany excepted, really deserve to be in this tournament anyway. Spain were pathetically disinterested until two matches ago; France twice ripped through the Faroe Islands but were anonymous otherwise; Italy did what Italy always does, which is just about enough on the day [I'm prepared to admit not everyone finds Andrea Pirlo good enough reason to automatically treat any team he plays in as a miracle of art, although I won't claim to understand such blindness]. And yet they're all there, up to and including the stuffed-with-talent but gormless Portugal, and the always exciting but criminally coached Holland. The points table does their reputations some service, after all.

I'm afraid of the 'Playstations and X-Boxes have done this to our youth' excuse, at least partly because I think it may be true. It may be an unfounded fear to imagine that this is a byproduct of economic and social development: after all, what are the odds that France and Spain don't sell game consoles by the n? Can the collapse of the Italian economy really relate to the annually burgeoning number of children who are entering the calcio youth system there [Pause to imagine a scenario where thousands of Italian infants rip open their presents eagerly on Xmas day expecting a Nintendo Wii and finding instead a note that says, 'Buon natale! My industry is in a state of financial ruin, making all electronic frivolities a luxury for us. Maybe next year. Love Papa.' and a bus pass to the nearest football school attached. Clutch at heart in bittersweet sympathy. Cheer kid on to 2018 World Cup glory.]? When the developed world finally reaches a point where every kid who wants a gaming device will be able to afford it, are all national teams going to be like England?

Obligingly, history and economics - and football, really - appear to be more complicated. There's hope for us all. It may even mean that there's hope for England.