The power of football

Eyes wide and limpid watching the geometric splendour of Spain's passing and the public dysfunction of the French, we realised that for a month football has been the joy and agony of the world.

It has been a philosophy and entertainment, a simple game that breeds (sometimes simplistic) metaphors. It has been a distraction for politicians and prime ministers -- ours and others' -- a ploy to play the populist and connect to the masses. It has been a pageant of men in nice hair (the Uruguayans and the Argentines, for instance). It has been a televised casino for the wayward citizens of honourable countries, like ours, and an excuse for morally dubious mischief, like when a Dutch porn star vowed to perform mass oral sex if Holland win tomorrow. Go, Wesley Sneijder!

It has been an advertisement for Africa, waka waka, vuvuzelas, Jacob Zuma, shantytown spirits and the shamanistic power of a German octopus.

Actually, Paul the octopus (he has a Wikipedia page now) is more inspiring than most English and Italian players; bookies in Thailand based their odds on what Paul predicted. It also inspired culinary jokes the night the Germans lost: calamari Paul, tokayaki Paul, or simply, fried Paul. This one is from a Malaysian friend: Paul sits in a coffee-shop in Kepong with a hand phone in each tentacle.

Football is covertly politicised, even romanticised, at least in the jumbled mind of commentators. Speculation ran wild when North Korea were thrashed by Portugal: will Dear Leader boot the squad to a hard-labour camp on the Russian border? Will a Socialist country, historically an athletic superpower in the Olympics, ever win a team sport like football? Apart from England, no other country with a monarchy has ever won the World Cup, though tomorrow it will be the first time two kingdoms contest in a final.When Spain played Honduras, the talk of post-colonial retribution, however remote given the slick Spanish squad, became a delicious fantasy for many.

When Ghana, formerly a shipping port of African slaves to the New World, played the US in the quarter-finals, the insinuation was left hush-hush. Too bad, or is it fortunately?, France wasn't drawn into the same group as Algeria.

Football has the power to help us imagine everything to be all right if a match is won (or just drawn, as in the case of New Zealand). When Gyan Asamoah of Ghana stepped up to take the penalty kick that would have sent an African nation to the semi-finals for the first time in history, he carried the entire continent on his shoulders, the Sisyphian weight of his people long lost to the dark room of history and long yearning for the dawn of glory. Africa will rise if Africa wins. Poverty eradicated and dictators ousted, political and historical woes would retreat, momentarily forgotten, or even be solved, mind you, simply if a football match is won. This belief, like all beliefs, is bordering on hallucination, but it's this hallucinatory power of football that makes it so loved and watched and debated. So perhaps the UN should be organising the quadrennial World Cup, not the Fifa.

Iran didn't make it to this World Cup, but there's an Iranian film that captures football's power to inspire collective imagination and a sense of nationhood. Offside, by Jafar Panahi (the film was released here three years ago), is not about the ever-contestable offside rules, but about an Iranian girl who disguises herself as a boy and tries to sneak into a World Cup qualifying match in Teheran (Iran used to forbid women from entering stadiums.)

She is arrested, along with about 10 more girls who do the same. While being transported back to the police station, the match ends with Iran's victory, meaning the country will go to the World Cup, and the street erupts into an impromptu celebration. Fantasy takes over reality, and every crime, every misery, every prejudice, everything, is temporarily suspended in the void of national euphoria.

Football, or what people believe what football is, transcends all divides with such supernatural force, even if only temporarily.

The Abhisit government has allotted a massive budget to the Prawase/Anand-led National Reconciliation Committee, but one wonders if the money would have been more productively spent on pushing the Thai squad to the World Cup, so all our problems would end and we'd love our nation more than we love Central World.What's the difference! As things stand, reconciliation is as hallucinatory as the nation-building power of football.