How a 31-0 ‘farce’ changed Australia’s FIFA World Cup fortunes
A 31-0 thumping of American Samoa in 2001 renewed the Australia national football team’s determination to shift from the Oceania Football Confederation to the stronger Asian grouping, offering the chance of direct qualification to the FIFA World Cup.
When the Socceroos defeated American Samoa 31-0 in a World Cup qualifier in 2001, the freak result not only rewrote the record books but also helped change the course of Australian football.
The lop-sided scoreline, still football’s biggest win at senior international level, was greeted with frustration rather than jubilation in Australian footballing circles.
It renewed the Australia national football team’s determination to shift from the Oceania Football Confederation to the stronger Asian grouping, offering the chance of direct qualification to the FIFA World Cup.
The match itself, played before a crowd of 2,500 in Coffs Harbour, had the air of a ritual slaughter well before kick-off.
Australia had beaten Tonga 22-0 to set a goal-scoring record days before, and American Samoa were rated the worst team in the world at 203 in the FIFA rankings.
Worse still, the Pacific minnows could not field most of their senior players due to eligibility issues, and were forced to put out a team with an average age of just 18.
“Frightened is not the word,” coach Tunoa Lui said, before his novice side faced Australia’s hardened professionals.
“We are going to ask for help from above. We are asking the Lord to help keep the score down.”
Men against boys
Luihe’s prayers briefly appeared to have been answered as American Samoa held the Australians goalless in the first eight minutes -- before Con Boutsianis scored directly from a corner.
It opened the floodgates for an unprecedented drubbing as Australia raced to a 16-0 lead at half-time then kept hammering in goals after the break.
The rout was so comprehensive that the scoreboard operators lost count and showed the score as 32-0 at the final whistle.
Once that was cleared up, the scale of the result became apparent.
Striker Archie Thompson had 13 goals to his name -- still an individual record at senior level -- while David Zdrilic scored eight and Boutsianis finished with a hat-trick.
Reaction to the men-against-boys hiding was swift.
“International football was reduced to a farce,” Britain’s Daily Telegraph thundered, while the LA Times said “fair play (took) a real beating Down Under”.
Even Thompson was sheepish, despite describing his world record as a dream come true.
“That sort of thing doesn’t come along every day,” he said.
“But you have to look at the teams we are playing and start asking questions. We don’t need to play these games.”
In Australia, attention focused on the drawbacks of keeping the Socceroos in Oceania, the smallest and weakest of FIFA’s six continental confederations.
‘Final nail in coffin’
“It is too late to end the carnage this time around, but there should be no repetition in four years,” football correspondent Michael Cockerill wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Comprised largely of impoverished, small island nations, the OFC is the only confederation not guaranteed an automatic berth at the World Cup.
Instead, the Pacific region’s best side must prove its worth through a play-off with a team from another, stronger confederation.
It repeatedly led to a situation where the Socceroos breezed through Oceania qualifiers, only to fail during the inter-continental play-offs when they encountered quality opponents for the first time.
The pattern was repeated in 2001, when Australia lost a two-legged tie against Uruguay for a spot at the 2002 tournament in South Korea and Japan.
Australia qualified for the 2006 tournament, this time beating Uruguay in the play-off, but by then the move to Asia had been sealed.
It has proved a smart move: since joining the Asian confederation the Socceroos have not failed to qualify for a World Cup in 12 years, compared to a 32-year drought from 1974-2006 in Oceania.
Football historian Roy Hay said the record-breaking American Samoa game may have been the last straw for Australia’s membership of the OFC.
“Australia trying to get into Asia goes back to at least the 1950s, if not the inter-war period,” he told AFP.
“All through the ASF (Australian Soccer Federation) period (1961 to mid-2000s) they were well aware that apart from New Zealand there were no games against Oceania teams that were of any value to Australia.
“They didn’t get any crowds, didn’t get any interest, you couldn’t sell it to the media. It (the 31-0 match) may have been a final nail in the coffin.”
FIFA World Cup 2018: Scribe’s take - Of deadlines, bleary eyes and a drug called football
For journalists covering the FIFA World Cup, the tournament is a month-long hop-on-hop-offs through airports and stations and the event is of such great magnitude that cities became datelines and pit-stops
Bergisch Gladbach is a short train ride from Cologne and two days before their quarter-final against France, Brazil set up a training session at a school there. Session over, Robinho spoke to the media in a hall where even the air seemed Portuguese and since this wasn’t a conference conducted by FIFA, translation was like a concept from outer space. This is standard practice so, Brazil weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary.
Among the 50-odd journalists present, there were two whose knowledge of Portuguese didn’t stretch beyond ‘Obrigado’. One was writing for this paper, the other from a London daily. Fate brought us together in search of a taxi back to Cologne.
“How many of you are here,” I asked, after the introductions. “Eight on days England aren’t playing and 14 when they are,” he said. “And how many are there from your paper,” he asked. On being told, he looked as incredulous as he would have had England won the World Cup.
That is what my colleague Bhargab Sarmah and most others from India will face in Russia. Yes, there are places beyond the Kop that sing ‘you’ll never walk alone’ — as they did in Dortmund after Germany fell to the magic of Pirlo — but even metaphorically it isn’t meant for Indian journalists at football’s biggest show.
Therefore, my World Cups became a whirligig of trains in Germany; air miles in South Africa and a bus journey through the night from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town to see Brazil and Argentina go out on successive days and more plane rides in Brazil. They were month-long hop-on-hop-offs through airports and stations.
Cities became datelines and because they were almost always pit-stops, you kept asking yourself whether you were where you should have been. The Deutsche Bahn made it possible to have breakfast in Cologne, attend an event in Frankfurt, do a game in Dortmund and return to your hotel. Do it for a month and things could get blurry. So when a French journalist wondered aloud whether he was having short-term memory loss, empathy poured in.
The World Cups were also about hours in billowy white media tents where the food is overpriced but because they spend most of their days there, it is an off-side trap journalists can rarely beat. And they were about vertiginous media tribunes from where you wrote your two cents on a game, dashed some 10 floors to the conference room below to hear coaches and the man of the match give their two cents on it.
How you coped also depended on how you dealt with the elements. A chunk of the 2006 edition happened during Europe’s hottest summer in decades and an equal portion of that in 2010 coincided with South Africa’s bitterest winter in a long time. The sight of Caucasians in overcoats almost embracing the man-size blowers in Johannesburg just before Brazil trotted out to play North Korea are as fresh in my mind as that of the substitutes bench wrapped in layers of blankets. So, hours after Ji Yun-nam had livened up the game at Ellis Park, I was forced to make the trip to a supermarket to buy ear mitts to avoid a winter of discontent in June.
And they were about battling deadlines. By the time breakfast was served in Brazil, the day’s first editorial meeting would have been done in India. That often meant you were awake when Brazil slept and awake when they were too. Sleep patterns becoming as messy as the final turned out for Leo meant being jolted awake in the middle of the night thinking you will miss the flight from Brasilia to Belo Horizonte. On realising it was hours away, I finished writing on the Argentina-Belgium game. Two days later at a stadium not far from my lodgings, Brazil went to sleep in a manner they haven’t ever in a World Cup.
But if like the late Bobby Robson you need a daily fix of the drug called football, the World Cup is the place to be. The country hosting it is more vivacious and more helpful to visitors than it perhaps is at other times. And everything, down to fans wearing false eyelashes in their team’s colours, is around the beautiful game.
You share a media bus with Avram Grant and a media centre with Arsene Wenger, Ivan Zamorano, Tostao, Patrick Mboma and Zvonimir Boban, now the deputy secretary-general of Fifa but a journalist for an Italian channel in 2006, and you run into Mario Kempes by the men’s. You break stairs with Brian Glanville in Kaiserslautern mildly disputing his take on David Beckham being a one-trick pony, interview Geoff Hurst, Patrick Vieira and understand tactics from Gerard Houllier, who headed the Fifa Technical Study Group in 2014. And you are part of the Diego Maradona show, bling and all, that his press conferences in the small, dank hall in Pretoria always were. The World Cup lasts a month, the experience a lifetime.
‘FIFA World Cup no longer the biggest prize in world football’
Yes, the FIFA World Cup throws up the odd upset and a clash between top nations but it is also a tournament where the best don’t always play and coaches get little time with teams leading to a dip in quality
Every four years the phrase ‘football fever’ is often used once the Fifa World Cup starts. I am sure it is a term widely used in India as well. However, is it still the biggest prize in world football? Perhaps not.
Without sounding old and saying ‘used to be better in my day’, it’s evident now that playing in the World Cup is no longer the Holy Grail for a top professional footballer. Instead, a big contract at one of the many super clubs around Europe and perhaps winning the Champions League is considered to be the pinnacle.
Also, the best players in the world don’t necessarily play in the World Cup. Back when I was developing as a player someone as talented as George Best never got to play the World Cup (He was 36 by the time Northern Ireland qualified for the 1982 World Cup). For years, Ryan Giggs (Wales) was limited being a spectator to the spectacle and now his compatriot Gareth Bale, perhaps the scorer of the greatest goal in a Champions League final, will suffer the same fate as unlike the European Championships the World Cup hasn’t yet expanded, thus making qualification difficult for the Welsh.
Two or three decades ago, the World Cup used to be a platform for non-Europeans in particular to announce themselves and get spotted by the top European clubs. Whereas today, there is such a huge migration of non-Europeans to European leagues that the exposure of the World Cup is not as essential.
Pele needed it, Neymar didn’t
Nowadays talented players get scouted and spotted in their early teens as football clubs jostle for the best from all around the world. The competition for securing the signature of such hidden gems is as fierce as for a proven worldclass player. The legendary Pele needed the 1958 World Cup to announce his arrival whereas Neymar was already a superstar even before the 2014 edition in his home country.
I am not one of those who would constantly question the commitment levels of a modern day footballer compared to the professionals of my time but, perhaps with good reason, the desire of most current footballers playing in the World Cup won’t be as great as when they represent their clubs. It’s true that the great Lionel Messi has said that he would happily swap all his honours with Barca at club level for one World Cup success with Argentina but there are also cases of players refusing to play for their national team until bonuses are cleared; like in 2014 when a plane full of cash had to be sent to get the Ghana players interested again.
One also wonders how much was the Brazilian team hurt after losing 1-7 to Germany at home in the semis four years ago as most of them were already multi-millionaires because of what they earned at club level and, on a daily basis, plied their trade far away from South America.
Bigger challenge for coaches
I can imagine how difficult it has become for national team coaches as well. Yes, one could argue that it is a more relaxed environment compared to a coach at club level as the daily pressure isn’t there but, trust me, when you can’t even get a group of 20 players fit and committed together for a session, it is as good as not having a job.
Naturally, it becomes very hard to get the same collectiveness both on and off the field. The players are technically not yours as their salaries are paid by clubs. So, to get the players to do exactly as you want creates its own problems. Coaches don’t get much time to practice tactics, system, positions etc. As a result, the quality of the tournament dips drastically with the teams lacking cohesion and drab affairs become a common theme.
This challenge obviously has been there in the past as well but it has got more and more difficult nowadays because the super European clubs now control the world game and, to be more precise in this case, the national federations.
With so much money from television now, there is too much at stake for clubs and hence they push their top players to the limit to overcome the relentless pain barriers. This often results in mysterious pull outs during international breaks even though the same player might be seen in action for his club at the very first weekend after that. Very clearly, the clubs dictate to the national teams now. Back in my day and maybe even till the late 90s, it used to be the other way round.
The importance of international breaks for a national team coach cannot be overstated. It is his only chance to work on something and get some sort of continuity. Unfortunately, clubs and even players now often make a mockery of such breaks, choosing to play or train at their discretion. It can therefore be argued that teams go into a World Cup underprepared, something which will never be tolerated at club football where the accountability of players goes beyond national pride.
What’s in it for the viewer?
I think most importantly as a viewer, the quality seen week in week out in the top European leagues is far superior to the World Cup. A modern day football fan almost everywhere in the world now has access to quality football on television nearly every week. Whereas even 20 years ago, a World Cup every four years would be the only chance for a football fan to watch some of the best players in the world. In England, the FA Cup final used to be like that. In a calendar year it was the only game LIVE on television and hence it used to be an occasion that every football fan would look forward to. From purely a viewer perspective, the World Cup and FA Cup final have suffered similar fates.
This is not to suggest that the World Cup has become unwatchable. Speaking for myself, I will certainly try and watch as many games as possible, with special backing for the Three Lions led by Harry Kane. The odd upset, clashes between two giant nations and ultimately the final showpiece game will always make the Fifa World Cup a global event. But it is no longer the marquee event in the football calendar, not even once in four years.
(John Gregory is the current head coach of reigning Indian Super League champions Chennaiyin FC. He recently received an LMA Special Achievement Award for becoming the first Englishman to win the ISL.)
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FIFA WORLD CUP : GROUP E PREVIEW
http://www.indianfootballnetwork.com/blog/2018/06/08/fifa-world-cup-group-e-preview/
How a 31-0 ‘farce’ changed Australia’s FIFA World Cup fortunes
A 31-0 thumping of American Samoa in 2001 renewed the Australia national football team’s determination to shift from the Oceania Football Confederation to the stronger Asian grouping, offering the chance of direct qualification to the FIFA World Cup.
When the Socceroos defeated American Samoa 31-0 in a World Cup qualifier in 2001, the freak result not only rewrote the record books but also helped change the course of Australian football.
The lop-sided scoreline, still football’s biggest win at senior international level, was greeted with frustration rather than jubilation in Australian footballing circles.
It renewed the Australia national football team’s determination to shift from the Oceania Football Confederation to the stronger Asian grouping, offering the chance of direct qualification to the FIFA World Cup.
The match itself, played before a crowd of 2,500 in Coffs Harbour, had the air of a ritual slaughter well before kick-off.
Australia had beaten Tonga 22-0 to set a goal-scoring record days before, and American Samoa were rated the worst team in the world at 203 in the FIFA rankings.
Worse still, the Pacific minnows could not field most of their senior players due to eligibility issues, and were forced to put out a team with an average age of just 18.
“Frightened is not the word,” coach Tunoa Lui said, before his novice side faced Australia’s hardened professionals.
“We are going to ask for help from above. We are asking the Lord to help keep the score down.”
Men against boys
Luihe’s prayers briefly appeared to have been answered as American Samoa held the Australians goalless in the first eight minutes -- before Con Boutsianis scored directly from a corner.
It opened the floodgates for an unprecedented drubbing as Australia raced to a 16-0 lead at half-time then kept hammering in goals after the break.
The rout was so comprehensive that the scoreboard operators lost count and showed the score as 32-0 at the final whistle.
Once that was cleared up, the scale of the result became apparent.
Striker Archie Thompson had 13 goals to his name -- still an individual record at senior level -- while David Zdrilic scored eight and Boutsianis finished with a hat-trick.
Reaction to the men-against-boys hiding was swift.
“International football was reduced to a farce,” Britain’s Daily Telegraph thundered, while the LA Times said “fair play (took) a real beating Down Under”.
Even Thompson was sheepish, despite describing his world record as a dream come true.
“That sort of thing doesn’t come along every day,” he said.
“But you have to look at the teams we are playing and start asking questions. We don’t need to play these games.”
In Australia, attention focused on the drawbacks of keeping the Socceroos in Oceania, the smallest and weakest of FIFA’s six continental confederations.
‘Final nail in coffin’
“It is too late to end the carnage this time around, but there should be no repetition in four years,” football correspondent Michael Cockerill wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Comprised largely of impoverished, small island nations, the OFC is the only confederation not guaranteed an automatic berth at the World Cup.
Instead, the Pacific region’s best side must prove its worth through a play-off with a team from another, stronger confederation.
It repeatedly led to a situation where the Socceroos breezed through Oceania qualifiers, only to fail during the inter-continental play-offs when they encountered quality opponents for the first time.
The pattern was repeated in 2001, when Australia lost a two-legged tie against Uruguay for a spot at the 2002 tournament in South Korea and Japan.
Australia qualified for the 2006 tournament, this time beating Uruguay in the play-off, but by then the move to Asia had been sealed.
It has proved a smart move: since joining the Asian confederation the Socceroos have not failed to qualify for a World Cup in 12 years, compared to a 32-year drought from 1974-2006 in Oceania.
Football historian Roy Hay said the record-breaking American Samoa game may have been the last straw for Australia’s membership of the OFC.
“Australia trying to get into Asia goes back to at least the 1950s, if not the inter-war period,” he told AFP.
“All through the ASF (Australian Soccer Federation) period (1961 to mid-2000s) they were well aware that apart from New Zealand there were no games against Oceania teams that were of any value to Australia.
“They didn’t get any crowds, didn’t get any interest, you couldn’t sell it to the media. It (the 31-0 match) may have been a final nail in the coffin.”
FIFA WORLD CUP : GROUP F PREVIEW
http://www.indianfootballnetwork.com/blog/2018/06/09/fifa-world-cup-group-f-preview/https://fantasy.fifa.com/en/home
FIFA World Cup 2018: Scribe’s take - Of deadlines, bleary eyes and a drug called football
For journalists covering the FIFA World Cup, the tournament is a month-long hop-on-hop-offs through airports and stations and the event is of such great magnitude that cities became datelines and pit-stops
Bergisch Gladbach is a short train ride from Cologne and two days before their quarter-final against France, Brazil set up a training session at a school there. Session over, Robinho spoke to the media in a hall where even the air seemed Portuguese and since this wasn’t a conference conducted by FIFA, translation was like a concept from outer space. This is standard practice so, Brazil weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary.
Among the 50-odd journalists present, there were two whose knowledge of Portuguese didn’t stretch beyond ‘Obrigado’. One was writing for this paper, the other from a London daily. Fate brought us together in search of a taxi back to Cologne.
“How many of you are here,” I asked, after the introductions. “Eight on days England aren’t playing and 14 when they are,” he said. “And how many are there from your paper,” he asked. On being told, he looked as incredulous as he would have had England won the World Cup.
That is what my colleague Bhargab Sarmah and most others from India will face in Russia. Yes, there are places beyond the Kop that sing ‘you’ll never walk alone’ — as they did in Dortmund after Germany fell to the magic of Pirlo — but even metaphorically it isn’t meant for Indian journalists at football’s biggest show.
Therefore, my World Cups became a whirligig of trains in Germany; air miles in South Africa and a bus journey through the night from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town to see Brazil and Argentina go out on successive days and more plane rides in Brazil. They were month-long hop-on-hop-offs through airports and stations.
Cities became datelines and because they were almost always pit-stops, you kept asking yourself whether you were where you should have been. The Deutsche Bahn made it possible to have breakfast in Cologne, attend an event in Frankfurt, do a game in Dortmund and return to your hotel. Do it for a month and things could get blurry. So when a French journalist wondered aloud whether he was having short-term memory loss, empathy poured in.
The World Cups were also about hours in billowy white media tents where the food is overpriced but because they spend most of their days there, it is an off-side trap journalists can rarely beat. And they were about vertiginous media tribunes from where you wrote your two cents on a game, dashed some 10 floors to the conference room below to hear coaches and the man of the match give their two cents on it.
How you coped also depended on how you dealt with the elements. A chunk of the 2006 edition happened during Europe’s hottest summer in decades and an equal portion of that in 2010 coincided with South Africa’s bitterest winter in a long time. The sight of Caucasians in overcoats almost embracing the man-size blowers in Johannesburg just before Brazil trotted out to play North Korea are as fresh in my mind as that of the substitutes bench wrapped in layers of blankets. So, hours after Ji Yun-nam had livened up the game at Ellis Park, I was forced to make the trip to a supermarket to buy ear mitts to avoid a winter of discontent in June.
And they were about battling deadlines. By the time breakfast was served in Brazil, the day’s first editorial meeting would have been done in India. That often meant you were awake when Brazil slept and awake when they were too. Sleep patterns becoming as messy as the final turned out for Leo meant being jolted awake in the middle of the night thinking you will miss the flight from Brasilia to Belo Horizonte. On realising it was hours away, I finished writing on the Argentina-Belgium game. Two days later at a stadium not far from my lodgings, Brazil went to sleep in a manner they haven’t ever in a World Cup.
But if like the late Bobby Robson you need a daily fix of the drug called football, the World Cup is the place to be. The country hosting it is more vivacious and more helpful to visitors than it perhaps is at other times. And everything, down to fans wearing false eyelashes in their team’s colours, is around the beautiful game.
You share a media bus with Avram Grant and a media centre with Arsene Wenger, Ivan Zamorano, Tostao, Patrick Mboma and Zvonimir Boban, now the deputy secretary-general of Fifa but a journalist for an Italian channel in 2006, and you run into Mario Kempes by the men’s. You break stairs with Brian Glanville in Kaiserslautern mildly disputing his take on David Beckham being a one-trick pony, interview Geoff Hurst, Patrick Vieira and understand tactics from Gerard Houllier, who headed the Fifa Technical Study Group in 2014. And you are part of the Diego Maradona show, bling and all, that his press conferences in the small, dank hall in Pretoria always were. The World Cup lasts a month, the experience a lifetime.
‘FIFA World Cup no longer the biggest prize in world football’
Yes, the FIFA World Cup throws up the odd upset and a clash between top nations but it is also a tournament where the best don’t always play and coaches get little time with teams leading to a dip in quality
Every four years the phrase ‘football fever’ is often used once the Fifa World Cup starts. I am sure it is a term widely used in India as well. However, is it still the biggest prize in world football? Perhaps not.
Without sounding old and saying ‘used to be better in my day’, it’s evident now that playing in the World Cup is no longer the Holy Grail for a top professional footballer. Instead, a big contract at one of the many super clubs around Europe and perhaps winning the Champions League is considered to be the pinnacle.
Also, the best players in the world don’t necessarily play in the World Cup. Back when I was developing as a player someone as talented as George Best never got to play the World Cup (He was 36 by the time Northern Ireland qualified for the 1982 World Cup). For years, Ryan Giggs (Wales) was limited being a spectator to the spectacle and now his compatriot Gareth Bale, perhaps the scorer of the greatest goal in a Champions League final, will suffer the same fate as unlike the European Championships the World Cup hasn’t yet expanded, thus making qualification difficult for the Welsh.
Two or three decades ago, the World Cup used to be a platform for non-Europeans in particular to announce themselves and get spotted by the top European clubs. Whereas today, there is such a huge migration of non-Europeans to European leagues that the exposure of the World Cup is not as essential.
Pele needed it, Neymar didn’t
Nowadays talented players get scouted and spotted in their early teens as football clubs jostle for the best from all around the world. The competition for securing the signature of such hidden gems is as fierce as for a proven worldclass player. The legendary Pele needed the 1958 World Cup to announce his arrival whereas Neymar was already a superstar even before the 2014 edition in his home country.
I am not one of those who would constantly question the commitment levels of a modern day footballer compared to the professionals of my time but, perhaps with good reason, the desire of most current footballers playing in the World Cup won’t be as great as when they represent their clubs. It’s true that the great Lionel Messi has said that he would happily swap all his honours with Barca at club level for one World Cup success with Argentina but there are also cases of players refusing to play for their national team until bonuses are cleared; like in 2014 when a plane full of cash had to be sent to get the Ghana players interested again.
One also wonders how much was the Brazilian team hurt after losing 1-7 to Germany at home in the semis four years ago as most of them were already multi-millionaires because of what they earned at club level and, on a daily basis, plied their trade far away from South America.
Bigger challenge for coaches
I can imagine how difficult it has become for national team coaches as well. Yes, one could argue that it is a more relaxed environment compared to a coach at club level as the daily pressure isn’t there but, trust me, when you can’t even get a group of 20 players fit and committed together for a session, it is as good as not having a job.
Naturally, it becomes very hard to get the same collectiveness both on and off the field. The players are technically not yours as their salaries are paid by clubs. So, to get the players to do exactly as you want creates its own problems. Coaches don’t get much time to practice tactics, system, positions etc. As a result, the quality of the tournament dips drastically with the teams lacking cohesion and drab affairs become a common theme.
This challenge obviously has been there in the past as well but it has got more and more difficult nowadays because the super European clubs now control the world game and, to be more precise in this case, the national federations.
With so much money from television now, there is too much at stake for clubs and hence they push their top players to the limit to overcome the relentless pain barriers. This often results in mysterious pull outs during international breaks even though the same player might be seen in action for his club at the very first weekend after that. Very clearly, the clubs dictate to the national teams now. Back in my day and maybe even till the late 90s, it used to be the other way round.
The importance of international breaks for a national team coach cannot be overstated. It is his only chance to work on something and get some sort of continuity. Unfortunately, clubs and even players now often make a mockery of such breaks, choosing to play or train at their discretion. It can therefore be argued that teams go into a World Cup underprepared, something which will never be tolerated at club football where the accountability of players goes beyond national pride.
What’s in it for the viewer?
I think most importantly as a viewer, the quality seen week in week out in the top European leagues is far superior to the World Cup. A modern day football fan almost everywhere in the world now has access to quality football on television nearly every week. Whereas even 20 years ago, a World Cup every four years would be the only chance for a football fan to watch some of the best players in the world. In England, the FA Cup final used to be like that. In a calendar year it was the only game LIVE on television and hence it used to be an occasion that every football fan would look forward to. From purely a viewer perspective, the World Cup and FA Cup final have suffered similar fates.
This is not to suggest that the World Cup has become unwatchable. Speaking for myself, I will certainly try and watch as many games as possible, with special backing for the Three Lions led by Harry Kane. The odd upset, clashes between two giant nations and ultimately the final showpiece game will always make the Fifa World Cup a global event. But it is no longer the marquee event in the football calendar, not even once in four years.
(John Gregory is the current head coach of reigning Indian Super League champions Chennaiyin FC. He recently received an LMA Special Achievement Award for becoming the first Englishman to win the ISL.)
FIFA WORLD CUP : GROUP G PREVIEW
http://www.indianfootballnetwork.com/blog/2018/06/11/fifa-world-cup-group-g-preview/FIFA WORLD CUP : GROUP H PREVIEW
http://www.indianfootballnetwork.com/blog/2018/06/11/fifa-world-cup-group-h-preview/
5 oldest Players in 2018 FIFA World Cup
http://www.indianfootballnetwork.com/blog/2018/06/12/5-oldest-players-in-2018-fifa-world-cup/