There is something luxurious about the group stage of a World Cup. Gone is the waiting. Gone the fill-inch columns about arcane details of squad selection. Gone the faux-humanitarian pearl-clutching about global sport events being a massive waste of time and money. Gone the moaning about the scheduling. Just stay up late; it’s actually quite fun.
For now, here we are, with the glorious, technicolour feast. Goals left, right and centre. None of the quotidian misery of a goalless draw on a rainy Tuesday night in Stoke. Now it is the sun-soaked rush of national anthems, heroes, villains and – most of all – a goal fest aided by defences that barely know each other from Adam. Matches that you’d never before think twice about – Uzbekistan vs Colombia at 3.00 a.m. on a Thursday for example – take on the immense significance that trampolining and archery suddenly do at the Olympics. You’d never touch it normally but now, if it’s on, I’m all in.
You measure your life in World Cups, and in Olympics. The four-year gaps between them are short enough to see you haven’t changed entirely but long enough to see some demonstrable change in your circumstances. It’s nowhere near as bad, for example, as the baleful leap forward you make in your life when you change your passport every ten years.
Of course, this sense of change is magnified the younger you are. Your experience and understanding of the World Cups you watch when you’re aged six, ten and 14 are more varied than those you watch at 34, 38 and 42. In those early three – the ones that marked my growing consciousness of these imperial four mad weeks – the memories that stick are Roger Milla’s dancing at Italia 1990, the Bulgarians rampant in USA 1994 and the wondrous waltz and dagger stab of what one is obliged to refer to as that Bergkamp goal in France 1998. Those early memories are blazed onto the back of my eyelids in much fiercer light than the never-ending pabulum of my twenties and thirties, the World Cups that only seemed to involve Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard and Rio Ferdinand scowling at each other and crashing out with unseemly haste.
The vast tectonic shifts of the World Cups of youth mellow into subtler and gentler gradations as you grow up. The eight years separating this England World Cup squad from the one in 2018 – the one that saw the joyful Gareth Southgate renaissance – seem like nothing. Harry Kane, Marcus Rashford and Jordan Pickford were as beloved then as they are now. Yet the eight years between Italia 1990 and France 1998 appear a vast chasm. How do you go from Peter Shilton, Des Walker and Terry Butcher in 1990 to David Beckham, Sol Campbell and Michael Owen in only eight years?
This part of the World Cup is like the glorious first week of Wimbledon, where the sport becomes the inevitable backdrop to everything else
But back to this World Cup and the group phase. We aren’t yet encumbered with the binary terror of the knock-out stages where, for all but one team, the joy of victory at each match is tempered by the memento mori of the next round. This phase – where we are still in only the second game of the group stage – is Schrodinger’s World Cup, with everything possible. Cape Verde, Paraguay or Panama could all win the tournament from here, unlikely though it might be. England – whisper it – could take another step to bringing it home if they power through tonight’s game against Ghana. And if Scott McTominay fires against Brazil, the Tartan Army’s invasion of the US will get only more rapturous.
This part of the World Cup is like the glorious first week of Wimbledon, where the sport becomes the inevitable backdrop to everything else: world events, work projects, the ups and downs of mundane, daily life. This cheering, Punch and Judy pantomime is its swirling wallpaper. The first two games of the group stage are – to an extent – risk-free football. It’s a kind of Supermarket Sweep smash-and-grab before the third game of the group stage when the whole mess begins to descend into a brutal cull towards the final. Tomorrow that third game phase starts. Enjoy it while it lasts.
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