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So long and thanks for the memories, Brazil. We’ll never forget you
We came expecting protests and chaos. But the lasting legacy of 2014 will be the recasting of international football at the pinnacle of the sport and a new Wunderteam from GermanyThank you Brazil, and goodbye. It’s been … emotional. After 32 days, 64 matches, 171 goals, 182 yellow cards, 48,706 passes, 2,124 tackles, $4bn in revenue for Fifa, plus of course an unceasing spume of digital opinion, a tsunami of public weeping and a mountain of deep-fried cheese pasties, the 2014 World Cup has now left the building.
...This was a World Cup of bold, rich flavours, a heavily sauced affair that was at times almost a little too pungent for its own good. Never have so many tears been shed by so many athletes in such stunning high definition close-up. Never has so much incident, outrage and media-fanned obiter dicta successfully intruded from the fringes. Above all it has been a deeply sensory, even rather sensual World Cup. Just as the global TV audience swooned over the action and the tournament’s heavily marketed poster boys – J-Rod, Leo, C-Ron, Louis van G – so travelling around Brazil’s cities and stadiums was a brilliantly engaging experience.
This was the first tournament South American fans have travelled to in such numbers on their own continent. In the days leading up to the final, the streets of Rio were duly thronged with sozzled and boisterous Argentinians, the same supporters who had removed their shirts and staged celebratory fraternal fist fights in the stands in São Paulo after the victory against Switzerland...
And what about the hosts anyway? In the end Brazil 2014 was both a PR disaster and a triumph, a shared sporting nightmare and a shared success; a triumph of stadium building fatally undermined by the spectacle of inadequate roads, housing and basic infrastructure that surrounded many of these high-spec space capsules.
Inside Brazil’s wet-paint mega-stadia the experience was slick enough, the staging spectacular, the relentless toadying, schmaltzified handshakes for peace, white doves of Blatter and all the rest of it familiarly inane. For this success no credit whatsoever must go to the spendthrift politicians and discredited organisers of Brazil 2014, but to the workers responsible for somehow sweating the whole thing into place and to the army of local volunteers who brightened and eased and smoothed what delays and hitches – the vanishing staircase, the neurotic fear of adequate signage – did show through...
More at:
http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jul/14/brazil-world-cup-memories-legacy-2014
...This was a World Cup of bold, rich flavours, a heavily sauced affair that was at times almost a little too pungent for its own good. Never have so many tears been shed by so many athletes in such stunning high definition close-up. Never has so much incident, outrage and media-fanned obiter dicta successfully intruded from the fringes. Above all it has been a deeply sensory, even rather sensual World Cup. Just as the global TV audience swooned over the action and the tournament’s heavily marketed poster boys – J-Rod, Leo, C-Ron, Louis van G – so travelling around Brazil’s cities and stadiums was a brilliantly engaging experience.
This was the first tournament South American fans have travelled to in such numbers on their own continent. In the days leading up to the final, the streets of Rio were duly thronged with sozzled and boisterous Argentinians, the same supporters who had removed their shirts and staged celebratory fraternal fist fights in the stands in São Paulo after the victory against Switzerland...
And what about the hosts anyway? In the end Brazil 2014 was both a PR disaster and a triumph, a shared sporting nightmare and a shared success; a triumph of stadium building fatally undermined by the spectacle of inadequate roads, housing and basic infrastructure that surrounded many of these high-spec space capsules.
Inside Brazil’s wet-paint mega-stadia the experience was slick enough, the staging spectacular, the relentless toadying, schmaltzified handshakes for peace, white doves of Blatter and all the rest of it familiarly inane. For this success no credit whatsoever must go to the spendthrift politicians and discredited organisers of Brazil 2014, but to the workers responsible for somehow sweating the whole thing into place and to the army of local volunteers who brightened and eased and smoothed what delays and hitches – the vanishing staircase, the neurotic fear of adequate signage – did show through...
More at:
http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jul/14/brazil-world-cup-memories-legacy-2014
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