Germany, Ozil and Loew: The Clay Triumvrate.

Watching the FIFA 2018 World Cup match between Germany and South Korea that has just ended, it was damn difficult believing it was the same German team that thumped Brazil 7-1 in the semi-finals of the 2014 edition of the same tournament that was on the field. The

magnificent squad that later went on to win the cup at the expense of Argentina. It is charitable saying the team was a shadow of its former self. No shadow, no matter how miserable, would want to be associated with this pathetic performance. Is this not the same team that used to be called the 'German Machine' by admirers all over the world? A moniker earned for competence, ruthless efficiency, crisp passing and wondrous organization. The squad we've just seen rather looked like a chapped-out car, a contraption coughing badly and no amount of pushing was going to make it start. Plenty of pushing there was, as strenuous as hell, millions of German fans at home and abroad doing all they can to urge on their team to glory, but Joachim Loew's team was simply dire. It was a car they couldn't even get to the mechanic. The fire-high passion of supporters would eventually get damped by a performance nothing short of a damp squib.
The prime architect of the heinous 2-0 defeat  was Loew himself, World Cup winner in 2014, now diving steeply and very fast from hero to zero. If Mesut Ozil and Sami Khedira played so poorly in the first match defeat to Mexico, and the team managed to win against highly-organized Sweden in the second match, why field them again in the final match? A crucial match that they had to win, take their own fate in their own hands and avoid the risk of depending on other results from the group. Perhaps he thought Mexico would beat Sweden. Perhaps he underestimated South Korea. Perhaps he has lost his gravitas for caution, shrewdness, alertness and judgment.
He had an able lieutenant in Ozil, the hero of 2014 that started Germany's precipitous slip in the current edition long before the tournament started by that notorious photo-op with Erdogan, the Turkish president, a rabble-rouser as loud and violent as they come. With Ilkay Gundogan, another German player of Turkish origins, it was not a little rumpus they caused team preparations by posing with Erdogan and calling him 'my president'. Only God knows the inspiration they hoped to gain from the pugnacious lout? And if they thought that muzzling opposition, clamping opponents into jail without trial and screaming at real or imagined threats were all going to be insightful, the idiocy of it all was ruthlessly exposed by Mexico and South Korea. Loew shouldn't have taken the pair to Germany. Just as he was with Arsenal, his performances were slow, lethargic and horribly sloppy and his body language bespoke that of a spoiled brat, a lout quarreling with team mates and himself. The upside of it all is that he knows he is finished in international football and needs a huge redemption at club level. He might have won the World Cup but hanging around his neck now is the unwanted medal of Germany exiting the tournament at a group stage since 1938, before the 2nd World War.
It is that bad. 

World Cup of Scrutiny.

Another soccer World Cup starts today in Russia. Congratulations everyone! We really look forward to a real football fest. Which is what the World Cup should be all about: grand displays of the world most popular sport that one is ever unlikely to find on another platform. We are constrained to dwell a bit on global expectations of this fiesta because the last two editions have not been, generally speaking, all that edifying. The 2010 edition in South Africa was more notable for the hideous noises vuvuzelas were making, the poor pitches and the mayhem in the French national team than for any footballing spectacle. The last edition in Brazil did produce a footballing spectacle, the 7-1 drubbing of the host nation by Germany in the semi-finals. The Horizonte Massacre, as this incredible defeat became known, after the city in which the match was played, has been dubbed Brazil's darkest hour. And rightly so. No national distress in the country is ever going to replicate people weeping openly in the streets as the match wore on and in the aftermath. But before that, in one of the group matches, obstreperous headlines had been made by Luis 'the Snake' Suarez,  the talented but flawed Uruguayan player who had little restraint in reprising his notorious biting inclinations on the Italian player, Giorgio Chellini.
We rather want to see spectacular scissors and scorpion kicks in this edition. We don't want to see Maradona's infamous Hand of God but his famous half field dribbling that eventually nailed England in the 1986 World Cup, we simply want to see what we saw in 1970, 1982, 19...
Yet we cannot help bringing up two things to scrutiny. The first is the rather curious theory that football can be separated from politics or political behavior. This bunkum used to be promoted by the erstwhile FIFA Secretary-General, Sepp Blatter, and his predecessor, Jao Havelange.. Blatter has since been disgraced in a corruption scandal and falling into disrepute too is his theory. The host country, Russia, have been behaving very badly in the international arena. In 2014, it annexed Crimea, a region that geographically belongs to its weaker neighbor, Ukraine, against strident international opposition and that would have been a hefty outrage on its own but Putin has compounded mayhem by sowing seeds of subversion in the eastern parts of the country. Ukraine is now practically partitioned into two and the Donetsk region seems in all respects, a buffer zone to Russia. It is difficult telling what would have happened if Ukraine had qualified for the tournament but clashes in the streets of Russia between fans of the two countries would not have been out of place and the police would have had a hectic time separating them, just as it is now separating politics from football. Or the fake murder of the journalist, Babchenko, a Kremlin critic, in Kiev from the distressing comedy the relationship between the two countries has become.
Still Russia had enough mischief left to attempt to kill ex-double spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, southern England with a particularly poisonous nerve agent, Novichok. Although Russia has strenuously denied culpability, few people are convinced and the idiotic, amateurish assassination attempt has visited on Russia a fresh round of international sanctions. England matches in Russia will surely be focus of international attention in this tournament and that will hardly be because of footballing reasons. 
Under close scrutiny too will be the the fate of the two biggest superstars in world football: Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal and the Argentine, Lionel Messi. If any of these two countries fail to win this tournament, then the chance might as well be gone that they will ever be regarded as real greats. Check out all the illustrious names in world football: Pele, Maradona, Beckenbauer, perhaps the only thing that separates t

hem into the exalted realm they belong is that they all won the World Cup. If Messi or Ronaldo fails to win it, they will be superstars, for a period or era, but never all time greats. We hope they will strive to reach above themselves, have a magical tournament and catapult themselves into that realm that the likes of Pele belong.