Some Soccer Thoughts

Random Thoughts About The Beautiful Game
From An Ugly American Outsider Looking In

by David Kennedy

World Cup 2002: One Year Later

Why wait until now to comment on last year’s World Cup? Because I am a firm believer that time is the best ingredient in making an objective analysis of anything. The problem with a real-time, immediate study and scrutinization of anything is that our first impressions our usually colored by emotion, allowing even a small amount of subjectivity to leak into our scrutiny. Besides, as Washington Post editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee once observed, “Never believe the first reports”. Even the best of us are guilty of this. I found myself fighting the urge to publicly comment about Korea/Japan 2002 many times over the past year. But I wanted the dust to settle and see what the short-term legacy of the tournament would be before finally remarking, to see the effects of the World Cup on players, coaches, clubs, governing bodies, and now ongoing leagues and competitions both domestic and international. After all this time some of the assumptions that have come out of Korea/Japan I have found to be lacking credibility. So without restating some of the obvious things, here is how I see the last World Cup:

Was Korea/Japan 2002 a great tournament, on par with the legacies of past great World Cups? If you listen to all of the talking heads, pundits and media experts outside of Brazil, Germany, South Korea, Turkey, Senegal and the United States – all of whom got farther than anybody ever thought any of them would – the answer is a resounding no. Aside from the conspiracy theories about the officiating – a habitual tradition exercised by some disappointed fan-base after every World Cup – the one feature always cited that was lacking from this year’s tournament was quality. The world soccer press has been incessantly and expertly claiming that mediocrity was celebrated at this year’s competition when second- and third-class citizens Senegal, South Korea, Turkey and the United States (and quite often Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Japan and Paraguay – and, yes, even finalists Germany -- are often put in this same group) advanced well into the knockout stages, while traditional soccer powers France, Argentina, Portugal, Italy and to a certain degree Spain played uninspired, boring futbol, as if they were sleepwalking throughout. They cite the profusion of “negative”, “ugly” defensive play and the lack of “positive” offensive flair, creativity and inventiveness as the reason this competition flamed out in interest to a large worldwide following (I guess the 12-18 hour time differential inherent to a live international event being held in the Far East had nothing to do with it – like the rest of us have nothing better to do than to wake up in the middle of every work night for a month). Ergo, they point out the dearth of any true inspirational individual performances of “quality” (there’s that word again).

Well, I beg to differ.

I realize that I’m a relative neophyte to the sport of soccer. Now in my early forties, I have come late as a fan. I’ve only been watching club and international matches on a weekly basis for close to nine years now; European and South American matches are weekly fixtures on my television set. I’ve only seen the last two European Championships, and I’ve only religiously watched the last three World Cups – the important qualifying matches and every match from the first fixture to the final match. Before that I only observed the previous three World Cups with tepid interest. I have a limited and surface knowledge of soccer’s history, so needless to say I have very little historical perspective to draw any real comparisons besides what I’ve heard and what I’ve read. With that in mind, here goes…

Was there a lack of “quality”, as the talking heads put it? That depends on how you define “quality”. Soccer aficionados generally tend to define “quality” as offensive futbol replete with hypnotic ball wizardry and awe-inspiring inventive attacking resulting in fantastic finishing, especially on an individual level. If defined solely using this prism, then I certainly wouldn’t disagree. That kind of “quality” was noticeably missing in Korea/Japan, with the stars and superstars from whom we expected so much flair and excitement contributing so little.

But overall quality, using a broader definition, was clearly in abundance. You just had to broaden your point of view in order to appreciate it.

Quite possibly for the first time, this World Cup was less about an individual superstar putting the fortunes of his team on his shoulders and carrying them to a championship. Rather, we were witness to several teams playing fundamentally sound, mistake-free soccer and executing tight game plans that relied less on the abilities of certain individual players but more on the overall abilities of everyone to execute their part of the overall plans. For the teams that did well, the whole was greater than the sum of their parts. For the teams that didn’t, they played far below what their abilities indicated.

What that meant was that the most important individuals in the 2002 World Cup were not Zinedine Zidane, David Beckham, Michael Owen, Francesco Totti, Luis Figo, Juan Sebastian Veron, Raul, Fernando Morientes, Gabriel Batistuta, or a host of other stars and superstars we all expected to take over the tournament. What’s telling, though, is that Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, Roberto Carlos, Oliver Kahn, Miroslav Klose, Michael Ballack, Hasan Sas, and El Hadji Diouf – the stars and superstars we all expected to take over the tournament, and did – weren’t the most important individuals, either.

Nope. The most important individuals in this tournament, the ones who were most responsible for the success of their teams, were Luis Filipe Scolari, Rudi Voeller, Senol Gunes, Guus Hiddink, Bruno Metsu, Bruce Arena and Sven Goren Eriksson (and to a lesser extent Mick McCarthy and Javier Aguirre) – the coaches of their respective teams.

That more than anything is what rankles the world soccer community, that these caretakers took what normally is a beautiful, fluid, almost operatic symphony and turned it into something boring and mediocre. But where is the beauty of getting your brains beaten out when you know that, against teams that do have that kind of attacking quality and flair, you have no shot?

Being an America, I am a witness to a lot of the games we Americans play that are not nearly as popular worldwide as soccer, most notably the four major American sports. Most of the world that sees a baseball game for the first time can’t make heads or tails of it. American gridiron football is so foreign a concept internationally that it is played professionally in only two countries, Canada being the other. Try finding hockey anywhere below the 25th Parallel. Basketball is probably the second-most popular sport on the planet, and internationally offense dominates. But we Americans long ago came to grips with a fundamental truth no matter what the team sport: Defense wins championships. Sure, the idea is to score more than your opponent, so you can’t underestimate the importance of offense. But you can have the greatest offense in the world; if you can’t keep the opposition from scoring you won’t win. There are way too many instances in sports history in which the teams with the better defenses have beaten the teams with the great offenses. And teams that concentrate almost solely on offense to the exclusion of defense don’t win anything. As Casey Stengel once said, “You can look it up.”

Yet spectators pay to see offense, and they want lots of it. What is unfortunate to a large portion of the viewing public is that in the last fifteen years or so a lot of sports teams seem to be concentrating almost solely on defense while giving scant attention to offense. The effect of this in recent times has been the large number of championships won by teams that have had great defenses but mediocre, sometimes awful offenses. Highly skilled and world-class offensive athletes cost a lot more money than highly skilled and world-class defensive athletes. The glamour positions are the offensive positions, so of course offensive players are going to command large payoffs. In contrast, defense, while arguably more important and always very necessary, is considered grunt work and less glamorous, so defensive players don’t command the big publicity and money that their offensive counterparts get. So if follows that the least expensive way to get good quickly is the build your defense while getting just serviceable offensive players who “just won’t screw it up,” who put up just enough points while the defense actually wins the game for you.

Is this true of soccer internationally? With no lengthy historical basis to draw this conclusion, I daresay it is. I need look no further than the transfer market for clarity. Of the thirty most expensive transfers in history, 27 were for midfielders and forwards, while only three were for out-and-out defenders -- and not one single goalkeeper. If it follows that those 27 midfielders and forwards are getting contracts commensurate with the money spent on them, then that is a disproportionate amount of money being spent on attacking.

I’ve heard and awful lot of media pundits complaining how the game of soccer has lost a considerable amount of its offensive appeal over the last thirty years. How games, leagues, and whole seasons have degenerated into these trench warfare tactics where ball skills and creative finishing have taken a back seat to careful ball control and suffocating defensive tactics. How defenders are allowed to get away with things they couldn’t get away with as recently as the 1960’s. And especially how brutal physical tactics have discouraged offensive innovation. I can’t argue this point one way or another, but it is clear that the teams that were successful in 2002 learned well from what worked for Brazil in 1994 and France in 1998.

USA 94 was clearly a setting for great creative offensive flair, even by the winners, Brazil, but what many of us forgot was that Mario Zagallo’s charges played some of the most suffocating defense ever displayed at a World Cup. Or at least the most suffocating defense until France 98, when the hosts, while piling up 18 goals in 7 matches, not only never established a finisher up front but allowed only two goals all tournament – and only one of those was during the run of play. Both Brazil in ’94 (Romario) and France in ’98 (Zidane) had individual stars who played otherworldly and thus elevated their games to the point that they could carry their teams to a championship, but what actually distinguished these champions was that they had a total team concept that emphasized organization, athleticism, pace, workrate and tactical proficiency over offensive creativity, flair and innovation. Both used anticipation, quickness, strength, suffocating man-marking and discipline to close down the penalty area. And both teams used patient ball-holding, movement off the ball, quickness into open spaces, and short, direct passing to control the midfield. As a result, both teams won the possession battle and spent more time than their opponents on the offensive end of the pitch. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that if you can do both of those things you are going to create innumerable chances to score goals and win games, which both did.

But what’s noteworthy about both Brazil in ’94 and France in ’98 is that, while they played defense better than anybody in their respective tournaments, they never needed any more than three or four defenders to do it. Neither team flooded the defensive end with bodies trying to keep the opposition from scoring.

With that in mind, I don’t really think it is a function of soccer over the last 30 years getting more defensive. I think it is just a function of (1) some rules tweaking that has allowed defenders the freedom to do more physically without the worry of punishment (I know, the tackle from behind is a sore point with a lot of people, but that is an argument for another time), and (2) defenders just simply got better at defending.

What does all this have to do with the 2002 World Cup? You didn’t see teams come to Korea/Japan with a number of ball magicians on their rosters looking to dazzle both the opposition and the rest of us with their offensive wizardry. In fact, the teams that did have some ball magicians were, for the most part and with very few exceptions, not the impact players we all thought they would be.

Three things happened at Korea/Japan that, in confluence with each other, made for the most surprising and stunning tournament ever: (1) The traditional soccer powers, and a number of the best players in the world, played far below what their abilities would have normally indicated at the exact same moment that (2) coaches came up with alternative tactics and schemes to combat dazzling ball skill and creative, innovative and magical offensive flair because (3) players on the national sides that did well were picked less on reputation and star-quality and more on their ability to work well together and form a cohesive unit. This would not have been noteworthy had it not manifested itself so well.

It turned out that the opening match was a forecast of things to come. Senegal, the very definition of a futbol neophyte competing in their first ever World Cup, was expected to be the sacrificial lamb for defending champions France, who hadn’t lost to anybody in four years. Yet Bruno Metsu came up with a brilliant game plan. Senegal did have soccer talent, but more importantly Senegal had young, well-conditioned athletes that were prepared to run all day if they had to. So instead of trying to trade punches with the perceived offensive juggernaut that France supposedly was, Metsu used pace, conditioning, workrate, organization, and discipline to his advantage.

Senegal flooded their end of the field in numbers, conceding the possession to France but never giving Les Bleus any space to create any offense. Then, when Senegal did gain possession, usually deep in their own penalty area, they didn’t bother to try to control the midfield or the ball for any length of time. Instead, they used long passes to quickly advance the ball into the French end, where a single forward, El Hadji Diouf, used his world-class speed to quickly get control of the ball in the French penalty area. Because Diouf was usually the only player advancing in the French end he was quite frequently left by himself against two or three French defenders. But Metsu correctly surmised that France’s defense, having played together for the better part of five years and getting long in the tooth, could not keep up with Diouf. By the 45th minute, Senegal had sprung Diouf passed an aging and slow French defense, and the resulting score was due to France’s lack of quickness and inability to recover enough to cover a trailing finisher, Pape Bouba Diop.

The lone goal stood up because, despite France’s repeated furious attacks, Senegal maintained their defensive discipline, dropping everybody back into their end, never giving France any space to put together a concentrated attack, and then quickly countering with those long passes into the French end for Diouf to run onto, thereby dispersing France in transition. Of course, it also helped that, without Zidane, out through injury, France could turn to nobody else to create offensive chances. Without a creative central magician, France attempted to spread the field to the wings, but Senegal’s defensive wingbacks, Omar Daf and especially Ferdinand Coly, stayed home, never let Thiery Henry and Sylvain Wiltord have any space to make things happen, didn’t fall for their fancy footwork, and dispossessed them at will.

This major upset was clearly a function of great coaching by Metsu and a lack of any direction by France head man Roger Lemerre. There were so many times when just some adjustments by Lemerre, both tactical and personnel-wise, could have won this match for France, but he never made any. Instead Lemerre just sat back and employed the same game strategy all match long without ever changing it or tweaking it despite the overwhelming evidence that it wasn’t working.

Metsu understood that he didn’t have the talent to match up against France’s hypnotic offensive wizardry, even under the best of circumstances, so he used what attributes were available to him – discipline, athleticism, conditioning, workrate and pace – to compete against the soccer elite. It wasn’t as “beautiful” and as “attractive” as flashy offensive creativity and mesmerizing ball skill, but it got the job done…

…It turned out Metsu and Senegal weren’t the only ones.

Ireland had only one world-class player, Roy Keane, and he was sent home days before the tournament after a row with his coach, Mick McCarthy. But McCarthy wasn’t going to rely on Keane to carry Ireland even had he stayed. Staying within themselves and playing mistake-free football, Ireland played even with Cameroon and Germany, both of whom had more talent but couldn’t create enough offensive chances against a very disciplined Irish side. Discovering that it is hard to slug it out with somebody who won’t go toe-to-toe with you, Germany and Cameroon (and Spain in the second round) couldn’t generate enough offense against Ireland. Ireland, having gone down a goal to both Germany and Spain, didn’t panic, didn’t make any more mistakes, and waited for the eventual mistakes that leveled both matches.

England played in the toughest group in the tournament, but Sven Goran Eriksson, who had at his disposal two of the best players in the world in David Beckham and Michael Owen, wasn’t going to rely on talent to beat Argentina, Sweden and Nigeria. As it turned out, neither Beckham nor Owen were significant contributors.

If you will recall, at the time of Eriksson’s hiring a year and a half earlier, England was awful and in danger of not qualifying for the World Cup. But Eriksson did four things: (1) cleared the side of many of the previous old guard stars who would be less likely to buy into a new scheme and style from an outsider but nevertheless thought of a place on the national team as their birthright; (2) scrapped the old English tactic of running the ball down the flanks, crossing it into the box and hoping somebody would run onto it; (3) revamped the entire squad by meticulously and carefully scouring the nationwide leagues from the Premiership on down for the players he believed would execute his vision and game plan; and (4) sold his vision and game plan to his players, many of whom may not have been of star quality but who would nonetheless fit into Eriksson’s scheme and therefore execute it.

Because Eriksson found gems-in-the-rough Danny Mills and Ashley Cole on defense and got surprisingly significant impact from Nicky Butt and Trevor Sinclair in midfield, England had the best defense in group play despite scoring only two goals. They rode that defense all the way to the quarter finals where, despite a lackluster offensive effort and a loss of midfield and defensive discipline later, people fail to realize that for the first 45 minutes England absolutely handcuffed Brazil’s attack, not once even allowing them into the penalty area.

With the exception of getting to the second round in 1994, the United States had done nothing but embarrass itself in the World Cup. Shortly after their last-place finish at France 98, Bruce Arena took over and immediately set about spending the next four years basically doing what Eriksson did with England: try out scores of players who were never stars, and whittle it down to the few who would execute Arena’s game plan.

The USA has always had the reputation of never really defining a style of play that is particularly unique to it as a country and culture, and Arena continued that ambiguity. But while Arena may be a soccer coach, he is still a coach in the fine tradition of American coaches in other sports: Arena is not going to be identified with a particular style that he would stick with exclusively, but will change tactics, schemes and approaches based on who the opposition is right now and what he thinks will get him a win right now.

To that end, rather than finding players that fit into one role, Arena found hybrid players who could switch roles on a moments notice. Landon Donovan is a forward who Arena will drop into a creative midfield role. Claudio Reyna had always been the focal point of the USA attack, but Arena can drop him into a more holding midfield role. John O’Brien usually plays a defensive and ball-winning role just in front of the back four, but Arena will surprise teams by having him go forward to compliment the attack. Tony Sanneh is the hard man on the right of the backline, but if you saw the match against Germany then you saw Sanneh actually spend a lot of time making runs into the center of the attack, right in front of the goal mouth.

From their opening match against tournament co-favorite Portugal it was apparent that Arena was going to confuse his opponents. Clearly he didn’t have a talent advantage against a team with Portugal’s offensive arsenal. So Arena started by benching his prime scoring target up front, Clint Mathis, moving Donovan into the midfield, employing DeMarcus Beasley on the wings, advancing O’Brien on counter-attacks, sending Sanneh on random runs up the right flank, and leaving Brian McBride as the lone striker in the penalty area. Then Arena dropped everybody else back on defense and employed a scheme much like Senegal used with success against France. The USA conceded the possession to Portugal, but when they did get possession they got the ball directly to Beasley and Donovan on the wings who, using their blazing speed and quick reactive-ness, advanced the ball into the Portuguese penalty area ahead of their defense, and let McBride and O’Brien do the rest. This exposed the Portugal defense as the slow, undisciplined, non-reactive bunch that they were, a fact they were never able to recover from the rest of their short stay in the tournament.

This worked so well that, until their semi-final loss, nobody came closer to defeating South Korea than the USA. An implosion to Poland notwithstanding, the USA used the same hybrid approach against Mexico in the second round, who fell victim to Donovan’s, Beasley and McBride’s lightning quick counter-attacks and the tight discipline and cohesion of the USA on defense and in midfield. It didn’t work in the quarterfinals because in Germany the USA ran into a much more disciplined and cohesive unit who weren’t going to be drawn out to the flanks by Beasley and Donovan (because both teams were so well prepared, it became a matter of who made the first mistake, which turned out to be costly indeed). But credit the USA for bringing the attack against Germany who, until their final game loss, had not come closer to losing.

By far the most entertaining and surprising team of the tournament was the co-hosts, South Korea. But given the circumstances, should we really be surprised at their success? Understanding that in five previous World Cup appearances these minnows had never even won a fixture, let alone advanced past the group stage, most of the soccer world seems not to take into consideration that South Korea came into this tournament with what was possibly the best prepared team of the competition. Head man Guus Hiddink was able to secure the use of all the players on his roster three months in advance the tournament. That is, every last one of his players were let go from their respective club commitments and allowed to train together and become a cohesive, well-disciplined, fundamentally sound unit three months in advance. At most, because of club commitments and extended playoff commitments going deep into May, virtually all of the other nations weren’t able to get their full squads together until two weeks prior. This meant that, while Hiddink was continually training, playing numerous friendlies and putting together a team for months, the rest of the competition had only a couple of weeks to get players familiar with each other, each other’s styles and idiosyncrasies, and the strategies and schemes they would have to employ in short order (as an aside, this is the same reason given by the USA in explaining why, for the first time ever, they embarrassingly crashed out of the World Basketball Championships last August).

The three-month advantage in preparation does not completely explain why South Korea did so well. Hiddink, a Dutchman, is one of the best coaches in the world, having had past success with both club and country on numerous occasions, so he is no fool. South Korea didn’t win before now because South Korea just does not have the exhaustible soccer talent of the major soccer powers – and they certainly don’t have any real soccer stars of note -- so Hiddink knew going in that he was not going to match up with the likes of Portugal and even the United States by playing attractive, attacking football. But like any other industrialized nation, it does have athletic talent. So Hiddink went about building his team around speed and stamina. But more importantly, Hiddink filled his roster not so much with soccer talent as much as with players who would listen to him and follow his game plan to the hilt.

Using the home-field advantage and a swelteringly hot summer to their benefit, it worked better than anybody had any reason to believe it would. Not once did South Korea ever display any true offensive flair, relying mostly on somebody to bring the ball up field and then crossing it into the box looking for a player to run onto it and shoot – but that wasn’t the point. While creatively uninspiring and somewhat mundane to watch, South Korea’s strategy was simple: Stay disciplined and organized on defense and don’t make any mistakes in the middle, and as the game wears on relentlessly run the opposition to exhaustion and take advantage of the mistakes an exhausted opponent would make late. They never gave up more than one goal in any of their first six matches, never got down by more than a goal, and then always came up with the late goal they needed.

Poland got run off the pitch early. The USA could have won had they not given up their attack to drop back in numbers and try to protect a one-goal lead too early in the game, thereby letting South Korea run all over them late. Portugal played such a stupid match against South Korea, making bad defensive fouls that cost them a two-man disadvantage (South Korea wasn’t even trying to score, but with so many holes in the Portuguese defense how could they not?). Italy tried to do the same thing as the USA, getting up a goal early in the second round and then dropping back in defense to protect the lead, even taking out forwards early to replace them with defenders – and just like the USA they got run off the field late.

What was so bewildering about South Korea’s quarterfinal with Spain was that Spain didn’t even try to attack, a departure from the attacking approach they had used with great success in their previous four matches. To this day I can’t for the life of me figure out what Spain’s head man Jose Antonio Camacho was afraid of. One striker up front supported by three midfielders and two wingers was not going to penetrate a South Korean defense this disciplined. In playing as cautiously as they did Spain played right into South Korea’s hands (why it is teams play for penalty kicks is beyond me).

State simply, there was no better coach in the tournament than Guus Hiddink. But in the semi-finals not even Hiddink’s charges could break down the discipline of Germany, who (1) didn’t go chasing better conditioned South Korean athletes all over the pitch, instead choosing to clog the center and make South Korea come to them; and (2) were the only team to run on the flanks against South Korea, opening up enough space long enough for the lone goal to stand up, and (3) kept attacking and stretching South Korea even after they had a lead.

If there was a side that could be said to have had underrated talent it would be Turkey. This is made more so by the observation that they were under-whelming in group play, only playing up to snuff in their first group fixture – a loss no less -- against a Brazil side that had obviously rediscovered its fluency and swagger in attack. Both Turkey and Costa Rica displayed nothing beyond ill-temper and bad form; neither side played like they wanted to win this match, and neither did. Turkey’s match against China was a gimme, so Turkey basically backed into the second round because who else was going to? Even in the Round of Sixteen Turkey advanced more because of what Japan failed to do. Not unlike Spain in the quarters, Japan changed their lineup, strategy and tactics from what had worked up until now, and Turkey was happy to just play a contain game that pried loose an early goal that stood up.

But once Turkey got to the quarterfinals Senol Gunes and his charges woke up. Against a motivated and well-balanced Senegal team, Turkey went on the offensive, finding space in the midfield to weave chances in the box. This kept Senegal off balance and on their heels all match long, never able to get forward and make their own concerted chances. The Cinderella story of the tournament flamed out against an attacking Turkish side that left them confused and confounded.

A rematch with Brazil in the semi-finals not unexpectedly ended Turkey’s dream run through the tournament. But what was most telling about Gunes and Turkey was the strategy they employed against South Korea in the third-place match. South Korea had relied on keeping their matches close and then relentlessly running their opponents into submission in the latter stages. So Gunes did something nobody had yet to do against South Korea; he sent numbers forward early and attacked with abandon. Why it is nobody else thought of this strategy is beyond me. For the only time in the tournament South Korea got down by more than a goal, and when that happened they panicked. All of South Korea’s vaunted discipline and organization went up in smoke and gave way to chaos and disorganization in a frantic yet futile attempt to get back into the match.

So even though for most of the tournament Turkey played less-than cohesive futbol, it was Gunes unexpected attacking tactics and schemes that got them past upstarts Senegal and South Korea.

So while coaching, fundamentals and execution made winners out of non-traditional soccer teams, the lack of coaching is what killed a number of soccer powers.

France flaming out the way they did was as surprising as the advancement of any upstart. Injuries to Zidane and Robert Pires left them without any invention, Youri Djorkaeff and Christophe Dugarry were poor replacements, complacency and old, tired legs did them in defensively, and Roger Lemerre never made any personnel or tactical adjustments in the face of everything that was going wrong around him, even with as much talent that was nonetheless available to him.

Argentina should have crushed everybody on their way to the final, like they had for the previous two years. But when coach Marcelo Bielsa saw that Juan Sebastian Veron and Ariel Ortega, the cornerstones of the Argentina attack, were not going to have good tournaments, and that Gabriel Batistuta could not get his shots off, he never changed strategies or tactics (and he left Hernan Crespo sitting on the bench). I’ll bet Bielsa wishes that he hadn’t left Javier Saviola behind.

Italy played badly even in the group stages, getting virtually nothing from Christian Vieri, Francesco Totti, Alessandro Del Piero and Fillipo Inzaghi, and all it took for their vaunted defense to lose its organization was for Alessandro Nesta to come off the pitch and Paolo Maldini, playing out of position in the center instead of on the wings, to lose his composure. And Giovanni Trappatoni had no answers for any of it.

Portugal was nothing short of pathetic. This so-called Golden Generation were old and slow on defense and were man-marked out of existence in attack, Luis Figo and Rui Costa had their avenues of service cut off, and Vitor Baia was quite possibly the worst goalkeeper in the tournament. As with Lemerre and Trappatoni, coach Antonio Oliveira had tons of talent and tactical options to choose from, but for some reason he didn’t use them. It was clear by the way Portugal lost their composure in the loss to South Korea that Oliveira had lost control and had no clue.

Of course, with the upstarts and Cinderella’s all eliminated by the final match in Yokahama, the soccer world could breath a sigh of relief that the status quo had manage to stay intact in the end, that ball skill and offensive creativity and flair finally won out over fitness, athleticism and pace. Ironic how it is that the same media pundits who were relieved that Brazil and Germany had reestablished the proper soccer hierarchy at the end of the tournament are the same people who didn’t give either one of these teams a chance one month earlier. They didn’t know what they were talking about before the tournament started, and they certainly didn’t know what they were talking about at the end.

In reality, the presence of Brazil and Germany in the final was not a reaffirmation of the status quo but -- as with the upstarts and Cinderella’s who relied on fitness, athleticism, pace, discipline and organization – a confirmation of how far a coach who knows what he’s doing can take his team. And despite withstanding a hellacious amount of criticism for over a year for everything from technique to tactics to personnel, both Big Phil Scolari and Rudi Voeller clearly knew what the hell they were doing.

            For two years Voeller was blamed for everything from lackluster tactics to bewildering roster moves, especially after having flamed out so atrociously in the last half of their World Cup qualification campaign, which saw their once insurmountable group lead disintegrate into having to win a playoff against lightly-regarded Ukraine just to make the tournament. In the process, Voeller had totally remade the team, filling it with players who had no real star quality on the international scene to date. Germany was hit by injuries to key men (Sebastian Deisler, Jens Novotny) who wouldn’t make it to Korea/Japan and could not even garner any excitement from their own countrymen, whose populace and media beforehand regarded the Nationalmannschaft as the worst German side in living memory. But like his successful coaching brethren in this tournament, Voeller instilled teamwork, discipline, an iron will and an absolute belief in themselves. Then he rode three players -- Michael Ballack in midfield, Miroslav Klose in attack, and most notably Oliver Kahn in goal -- all the way to the final match.

            (As an aside, Voeller clearly doesn’t have a problem with a goalkeeper being the best player on the pitch. Not unlike American sports, Voeller rode with the person who got him victories regardless of where they played. In the NHL it is the hot goalkeeper at the moment that usually ends up lifting the Stanley Cup. And Bill Parcells was smart enough to realize that the best player on those great New York Giant teams of the 1980’s, Lawrence Taylor, was going to get him championships at linebacker, not quarterback or running back)

Another attribute displayed by Germany was sacrifice. Ballack, the key midfield creator, caught a lot of heat for his blatant yellow-card foul on South Korea’s Lee Chun-soo, depriving Ballack of a chance to play in the final match. But Ballack, realizing as the Korean attack unfolded that this represented Korea’s best chance at a goal in what at that time was a scoreless match, made the ultimate sacrifice in preventing the goal that many thought was sure to follow. Blatant? Yes. Bullying? You bet. On the north side of violent? Arguably? Necessary in order to keep Korea from taking one-goal lead late in the game? Absolutely. It’s what we in the United States call a “good foul”. Ballack scored and created several important goals for Germany, but that one foul quite possibly was the most important play he made the entire tournament. His score two minutes later and Germany’s ability to keep their tactical and defensive discipline in the face of the eventual Korean onslaught that was to follow got Germany their chance at a 4th world championship…

…Admittedly, is was a chance that was greatly diminished by Ballack’s absence, and we’ll never know if Ballack would have been the difference between winning and losing (considering Germany had several chances on goals against Brazil), but Ballack’s foul is what arguably got Germany to the final match – and isn’t that the idea? To illustrate my point better, in Spain’s goalless draw against South Korea in the quarterfinals, Jose Antonio Camacho rationalized using only one attacker, Fernando Morientes, because he wanted to save his other two attackers -- Raul and Diego Tristan, who were less than totally fit for the Korea match – for the semis. Well I have a novel idea: HOW ABOUT GETTING PAST THIS GAME FIRST and then worrying about the condition of your two strikers for the semis? By going with only one forward Camacho was conceding his attack against a team already playing suffocating defense. Hell, a less-than-healthy Raul on the pitch would have at least drawn a covering defender away from somebody else – maybe one of the trailing wingers Joaquin or Gaizka Mendiata – who may have been left uncovered. Sure, you sacrifice Raul’s fitness but at least you have a semi-final match to play in which that can be a worry. As it was Korea had only Fernandez to mark for 120 minutes – and he got tired late, wilting under the oppressive Korean sun. This may be a totally American thought, but I’d much rather worry about what I’m going to do without my two main strikers after I get to the semis than worry about my ability to keep my job for not playing them in the quarters – clearly a thought Michael Ballack understood perfectly.

Did Ballack, and by extension Voeller, take a lot of criticism for that yellow card offense? Sure. But they could comfort themselves in the knowledge that they had a final to play because of it.

There was probably no other coach who took more criticism going into the tournament than Scolari, who personified the systematic fouling and brute force bullying that had become endemic to Brazilian football the previous five years. That, coupled with the fact that he manned his side with expatriates who plied their trade in Europe and as a result had become indoctrinated into the methodical, tactical style most Brazilians despise, made Scolari one of the most unpopular people in Brazil. Because it was perceived that Brazil had gotten away from the ball-playing artistry and exuberantly creative attacking style its citizens called “The Beautiful Game”, Brazilians, not unlike Germans, didn’t give their national side much of a chance of getting past the quarters.

For starters, Big Phil, in the tradition of many American sports coaches such as Bill Parcells, doesn’t give a rat’s ass what you or anybody else thinks of him or his methods. Unlike a lot of soccer coaches who give in to public opinion, media scrutiny and criticism from his soccer counterparts – most notably Romario -- Scolari gave back as much criticism as he took (in fact, the more criticism he took, the more belligerent and surly he became). Secondly, he never settled on a set lineup or roster, always bringing in different players with each fixture, never allowing any players to gain any familiarity with each other, usually a no-no; by the end of 2001 he had used more than 60 players on the national side. Thirdly, as Scolari’s side played more and more friendlies and qualifiers, the more he used players who committed borderline assault. This had the effect of making Brazil, usually easy qualifiers for the tournament, late qualifiers; they didn’t qualify for Korea/Japan until the last qualifying fixture, just narrowly missing a playoff. Lastly, he alienated most of the Brazilian soccer fans and even his own confederation by excluding a number of popular stars, key among them Romario.

Ah, but as it turned out, there was a method to the madness. Not once during the World Cup did you see any evidence of the bullying brute force tactics exhibited by Brazil the previous year and a half. That’s because Scolari never intended to play this tournament that way. Scolari played “bullyball” in friendlies and qualifiers because he knew that “the beautiful game” played in Brazil was not going to be who his competition was going to be in the Far East in 2002. So he had to prepare his charges for the methodical, tactical European style prevalent throughout most of the world, which also explains why his roster was made up primarily of European-based Brazilians. It was risking a lot, but Scolari was counting on his team regaining that wonderful and magical creativity that is almost natural to the Brazilian make-up in time for this tournament. What happened was Scolari’s methods successfully married European tactics with Brazilian flair, with fantastic results. When in possession there was no side more offensively creative, no side that had more chances on goal. When not in possession there was no side more proficient at dispossessing, no side more disciplined in the back despite only having three true defenders.

Lucio, Edmilson and Roque Junior – though not the most physical defenders – played with great discipline and anticipation. Cafu and Roberto Carlos used their speed and quickness to patrol the wings from backline to backline, helping to create on offense while quickly transitioning back on defense. And Ronaldinho, Rivaldo and Ronaldo created virtually all of the scoring chances while converting most of them (it worked so well that goalkeeper Marcos was credited with having a better tournament than he really had; the defense in front of him was that good).

Everything put into context, the Brazil-Germany final was less about individual accomplishment (Ronaldo’s two goals notwithstanding) and more about the total team concept, which both sides bought into from the start. For the record, Germany played as well as they could under the circumstances; unlike previous matches, they didn’t have Michael Ballack creating chances (even though they took 12 shots on goal, three more than Brazil), and Oliver Kahn made his lone mistake of the competition, one that turned out to be fatal. Maybe this wasn’t the best German side assembled, but what’s lost in that thought is that this surely wasn’t the best Brazilian side assembled, either. There were quite a few other Brazilian World Cup sides that may have been better but still didn’t come home with the hardware.

As for those critics of this tournament, I have one question: What’s wrong with the best player on the field being the goalkeeper? Kahn’s saves got Germany farther than they (or the critics for that matter) had any right to expect. Germany surely was NOT the poorest team to reach a World Cup final, as Gavin Hamilton of World Soccer claims. Germany may have had the least amount of talent than any final side, but they clearly were not the poorest team. If they were as bad a Hamilton claims, then clearly they were greater than the sum of their parts. It may not have been pretty or “beautiful”, but what is the choice here, to look good while getting your brains beaten out like Brazil did in ’98, or to look mundane in getting all the way to the final match, a result not even Germany’s most ardent optimists could have realistically hoped for?

As for the romantic ideal that most people have of soccer’s past: GET OVER IT. Hey, we all lament the disappearance of offensive-minded tactics in every team sport. Seen the recent NBA finals, where the new champions shot less than 40% from the field? San Antonio won with defense; the better shooting, flashier teams (Lakers, Mavericks, Kings) all had a shot at the Spurs – and the Spurs easily excused them like a nuisance fly. We were all hoping the 40-points-a-game Oakland Raiders would bury the offensively inept Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but who ended up scoring 48 points in the Super Bowl (for those of you who don’t know it was Tampa Bay). Hell, the 2003 UEFA Champion’s League Final was played with both AC Milan and Juventus attacking at will, but it was the defenses that told the story in the 0-0 draw decided by penalty kicks.

The days of 5-3 and 6-4 scorelines are gone. There is a reason nobody uses the straight W-M formation anymore – it wouldn’t work!  Players are smarter, stronger, faster, quicker than they were way back when – in every sport. Only in baseball are scorelines higher than they’ve ever been, and that’s because the lords of baseball have literally legislated defense (and pitching) out of the game. I know you keepers of the flame of soccer want more offense and less bullying, but I know enough about soccer to know that changing rules that haven’t changed in over 130 years is sacrilegious even to you. Soccer’s rules are sacrosanct, so you’d rather stomach 1-0 games than change the rules.

What has been Korea/Japan’s short-term legacy? Unfortunately, the world soccer economy collapsed at the exact moment that the media was putting out the illusion that there was a lack of individual quality at the 2002 World Cup. So the usual high-dollar spending on World Cup players that followed virtually every other World Cup really didn’t happen this time. Only three high-value transfers took place: Manchester United spent an obscene £30 million on England defender Rio Ferdinand; Real Madrid pried Brazilian forward Ronaldo away from Inter Milan for £47 million, and Liverpool bought Senegalese winger/forward El Hadji Diouf for £10 million. Most other transfers happened at bargain-basement prices, with teams getting world-class players at far below what they would have had to spend only one year earlier (hell, Rivaldo signed with AC Milan on a free transfer).

Otherwise, most of the players who did have good tournaments individually stayed put and went back to their roles with their respective clubs. So far the current close season hasn’t been any different. England midfielder David Beckham’s recent transfer from Manchester United to Real Madrid for £25 million is far less than the £50 million he could have commanded only one year earlier. And his replacement at Old Trafford, Brazil attacking midfielder Ronaldinho, is expected to come in at the bargain-basement price of only £9 million. A better example is Ireland forward Damein Duff, a second-tier World Cup star whose club side, Blackburn Rovers, is haggling with Newcastle over a measly transfer difference between £3 million and £5 million. Two years ago River Plate were hoping to eventually cash in on forward Andres D’Alessandro. But with the collapse of the Argentine economy and, by extension, the Argentine football league, European clubs know they don’t have to pay top dollar to Argentine clubs for world-class players. Now, if River Plate gets £5 million pounds they will consider themselves lucky. Everybody else is just kind of waiting to see what shakes out. The halcyon days of tens of millions of dollars spent of marginal stars are over.

Of the 32 coaches, only four of them kept their jobs past the World Cup, Rudi Voeller, Sven Goran Eriksson, Senol Gunes and Bruce Arena. Not even Big Phil Scolari was willing to put up with the constant criticism from his countryman anymore – and like Parreira, he won the damn thing!

European and South American pundits like to cite the long club fixture season for the unpreparedness of a number of the soccer elite at Korea/Japan. That excuse just does not float. Roberto Carlos played in the UEFA Champion’s League final not two weeks before Brazil’s first group fixture; he didn’t seem the worse for wear, and along the way was named all-tournament. And what few Brazilian-based players were on Scolari’s roster were playing club fixtures in the convoluted Brazilian leagues ten days prior. It didn’t seem to keep Brazil from a fifth world championship. Besides, if the long club fixture season is really a concern, then how about each country’s soccer confederation following South Korea’s lead and release their players a month or two in advance? If it really is important than FIFA and the regional governing bodies (UEFA, CONCACEF, COMEBAL, etc.) will mandate it. Sure, clubs like Manchester United and Real Madrid would lose half their players with a full third of the league season still to play, but you can’t have it both ways now can you? If that isn’t acceptable to you then shut the hell up.

What about the officiating? Yes, it was less than competent, and it did seem to favor certain sides at the most critical of times. But has there ever been a World Cup where an aggrieved nation hasn’t taken issue with the officiating. Should Francesco Totti’s goal not have been disallowed? Probably, but blame should be placed less on the officiating and more on Italy’s conservative strategy after scoring only one goal and their inability to create an effective attack throughout the entire tournament. Should Fernando Morientes two headers have been allowed? Probably, and the Spanish side had more to complain about than anybody, but that doesn’t excuse Spain for its ineffective attack, and there is certainly no excuse for giving up after each perceived offense.

We won’t really know for some time what the lasting legacy of Korea/Japan 2002 will be. One thing I am sure of is that nobody ever pays to see a coach. That said, it will be interesting to see how national sides are cobbled together in the future now that we’ve witnesses what a motivated coach can do when allowed to create a greater whole out of parts he is allowed to assemble. If star-quality and individual magical flair are not the keys to building future champions of international tournaments such as the World Cup, European Championship or Copa America, then the long-term legacy of Korea/Japan 2002 will be lasting and far-reaching.

Some Quick Observations about the All-World Cup Team:  Can’t argue with Oliver Kahn in Goal, and Rustu Recber had a splendid tournament, but I don’t know that Recber deserves to be here ahead of the USA’s Brad Friedel. For the first three fixtures he had to live with Jeff Agoos’ incompetent ass making glaring and costly mistakes in the center of the USA defense, and outside of Agoos’ own-goal, Friedal made up for all of them. Friedel made some of the best saves of the tournament, and to top it off save three penalty kicks. That has to count for something.

I don’t think Roberto Carlos belongs on the all-tournament team as an out-and-out defender. He was more of a winger and midfielder in Brazil’s attack. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why Sol Campbell made it when the defender with the most impact for England was Rio Ferdinand, whose performance in the center all but sealed his £30 million price tag. I’m certainly not saying that Alpay Ozalan and Fernando Hierro didn’t have an impact with Turkey and Spain, respectively, but I think the USA’s Tony Sanneh and Senegal’s Ferdinand Coly had more of an impact. Both were key in dispossessing on the defensive end and starting the attack on the wings. Especially Sanneh, who made up for Agoos’s errors and even made forays into the center of attack in the USA’s quarterfinal loss to Germany.

In midfield I don’t really see how it is that Claudio Reyna was more of an impact player for the USA than John O’Brien, who defended in front of the back four well and complimented Beasley, Donovan and McBride in attack. That said, Neither Reyna or O’Brien had a better tournament than England’s Nicky Butt, who did a fantastic job of keeping England’s first four opponents out of the penalty area, and even showed some skill in attack with some imaginative one-touch passing (at this juncture I think that Butt would be a better fit in the Manchester United midfield than Roy Keane, who is always one step away from a meltdown and hasn’t really shown an affinity for introducing the attack in a couple years now). And while Hasan Sas gets a lion’s share of the credit for starting Turkey’s attack, little Yildary Basturk probably had more to do with that than Sas.

Even though he didn’t score a single goal, I have no problem with El Hadji Diouf making the all-tournament team as an attacker. His quickness and speed broke down the defense of every team Senegal played, creating finishing chances for trailing attackers to take advantage of. Diouf had the most impact of any Senegalese player.

I guess it’s true what they say: Be the best player on the World Cup winning side and you will win the World Footballer of the Year regardless of what else you do during the rest of the year. In the case of Ronaldo, though, it is a matter of what else he didn’t do the rest of the year. Sure, he gave arguably one of the ten best individual performances in World Cup history. And the World Cup is the biggest sports tournament there is, so playing otherworldly there counts for a lot. But at it’s most fundamental it is at most seven contiguous games. Ronaldo spent the first half of 2002 injured, and when he finally was healthy he scored a total of two goals for Inter. Then after Korea/Japan, he spent the better part of three months acclimating himself to his new surroundings in Madrid with Real before becoming an impact player with them. In essence, for a vast majority of the year Ronaldo was either useless or ordinary at best. If you include all competitions, that is some 70-odd matches his club and country played, of which at most 65 he was either not available or wildly ineffectual.

So let me see if I’ve got this straight: Ronaldo is anointed the best player in the world on the strength of seven games?

You can dismiss me as an American all you want, but my idea of a Player of the Year, in any sport, is the player who had the biggest impact for the entire year. That is, from beginning to end. Using that as a yardstick, Ronaldo doesn’t even enter into the discussion.

Who had good years from beginning to end? Only a handful a players enter the picture (Michael Ballack, Roberto Carlos, Zinedine Zidane, Oliver Kahn, Rivaldo, Michael Owen and Ronaldinho to name a few, but these guys all have some kind of glaring hole in their performances in 2002 that can’t be ignored), but the two who stand out are Arsenal’s Thierry Henry and Real’s Raul. Henry was the main man in Arsenal’s attack, and on a weekly basis he showed it. In fact, he was the impact player every time he took the field in 2002 – every time, that is, except those three French fixtures during the World Cup. Raul once again led the Spanish league in scoring in 2002 and was just as much an impact with Real as Henry was with Arsenal. He even had a good World Cup for Spain, until the knockout stage, when he disappeared.

A tough choice, and a toss-up all around, but in deciding who was the better footballer in 2002 – Henry or Raul – the only thing that separates them is the talent around them. Both have world-class talent they play with, but the players surrounding Raul are significantly better, so I can see how Raul’s goal-scoring largesse could to a large degree be a function of all the world-class talent he plays with. The player’s complimenting Henry are good – some of them even great. But if you watch both Real and Arsenal play, you see that Henry does a lot more by himself than Raul. Not that Raul can’t, but you see Henry breaking down defenses by himself a lot, going to the half-touch line and bringing the ball into the offensive end himself, and creating his own chances more than you do Raul. Furthermore, Henry is asked to do a lot more by Arsene Wenger, oftentimes doubling as both a winger and a striker, sometimes having to bring the ball into the box from the wing and then shooting. Raul is the beneficiary of a lot of attacking options that Real has; a flat-back four is asked to defend Raul as well as Ronaldo, Luis Figo, Zidane, and a trailing Roberto Carlos, so Raul is often left open in front of the goal mouth.

So the best player in the world in 2002? By a hair: Thierry Henry.

David Kennedy is the host of The Sport Authority, a weekly radio sports talk show in Sacramento, CA. Weaned on American football, he recently started watching English Premier League games, and sees a lot of his beloved San Francisco 49ers in Manchester United, whom he has adopted as his soccer favorite.  

Copyright 2003 Accurate Letters Enterprises

EMail your comments to Sport Authority host David Kennedy here :

DAVEYDOUG@earthlink.net

Return to The Sport Authority