The Paris Review

England's performance was in a different league of awfulness from the regular awfulness that had been seen in earlier games. Before, the problem had been one of not seeming to care; the players behaving as though they deserved to win by virtue of the size of their wages. This time they definitely cared, they were fired up, ready to go and then when they got there, they were just awful.

My brother, an avid Arsenal fan sent me a text during the game: “Hopefully Manchester United will trade their Wayne Rooney for this bloke with the same name.” And my friend Andy Martin sent me an e-mail that read: “When Capello brought that loser Heskey on as some kind of supersub, I took the dog for a walk—we might as well commit ritual hara-kiri right there.”

It’s an odd marriage, the one between the Italian coach and the English team. It doesn’t seem to be working out for anyone. On the bench, Fabio Capello seems genuinely pained by the complete lack of basic technique shown by the English players. During the Slovenia game he was reduced to yelling, “Barry, the fucking ball, Barry.” He is also a fan of the ristrito: shutting his players up in the hotel during the tournament and enforcing naptime between lunch and supper. When John Terry led his insurrection, one of his complaints was that the players were desperate for a beer.

The greater complaint made by the players is that Capello persisted in playing 4-4-2. It's a system he's fond of using, but also one that nullified the talents of his three best players—Rooney, Lampard and Gerrard—by forcing them to play out of their best positions. Almost everyone else at the tournament is playing a 4-2-3-1 and all the England players play that formation for their club teams.

The truth is that 4-2-3-1 requires a great deal of positional discipline from the players, a talent England clearly does not possess. They roamed the field, chasing after the ball, and not holding any kind of shape until the Germans simply picked them off—waiting for the English to organize themselves into utter chaos and then exploiting the spaces that opened up. Germany couldn’t help but win.

In England, much has been made of Frank Lampard’s not-allowed goal. The ball clearly did cross the line and the game would have been tied going into the second half. Jurgen Klinsmann, the former German player and manager, argued that far from getting their heads down, the injustice should have riled up the English players. They should, he felt, have come out for the second half seething with rage and ready to show that nothing was going to stop them from getting their just rewards. Instead it looked as though they had found their villain and could now settle down into feeling hard done by.

For the soccerati, the fashionable book for this World Cup is Soccernomics by Simon Kuper, which is, as the title suggests, Freakonomics but about soccer. It has the first explanation of game theory I’ve ever understood and the unlikely thesis that England would do better at the game if they let the posh kids have a go. Its main point though is that thanks to the spread of globalization, the game is about to get a lot duller.

Everybody knows everything about everyone. Teams that have been thought of as tactically naïve (read African), weaker (read Asian), and overly gung-ho (read Latin American), have now adopted a much stricter tactical acumen—they set up defensively, invite the other team onto them and then hope to catch them on the counter attack. It started with South Korea’s run to the semifinal in the 2002 World Cup, took real hold when Greece won the European Championship in 2004, and reached its apotheosis when Inter Milan defeated Barcelona in the Champions League semifinal this year, despite being down to ten men and ceding seventy-five percent of possession to the Catalans.

The pleasures of truly bizarre play or utter annhilation have vanished. Instead we’ve had France versus Uruguay, a game in which both teams looked genuinely frightened of scoring and the 1–0 victories of both Argentina and Ghana, both of which were convincing without being particularly thrilling.

And then there was the US–England match, which had anticlimax written all over it. In England, where I watched, ITV managed to cut to a commercial just before England scored and cut back in the middle of the celebrations, thus denying the nation the collective roar that they had been preparing for since the draw was made, or since 1812 depending on which way you look at it. The less said about the American goal the better. There has been plenty of talk about the unpredictability of the Jabulani but until Rob Green’s howler, the main effect of it seemed to be long-range shots endlessly flying miles over the bar. There was something rather end-of-Empire about the ball squirming into the net. The teams took turns in the second half to press, both had one good chance to score and both, predictably, failed. (There is something Paxil-requiring in thinking about Emile Heskey, the misser of the England chance who has the astonishing goal-scoring record of seven goals in fifty nine internationals. It never seemed to cross his mind that he might score, let alone ours.) A draw had been emotionally agreed upon. Even the fans in the stand looked rather similar in their red, white, and blue; you had to really lean in to see if the focus was on stars or crosses.

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A director’s take on the 2010 World Cup.

The World Cup operates as a get-out-of-jail-free card for soccer fans. For nine months of the year, our moods are, to an extent that is profoundly unhealthy, determined by the fortunes of our team: win on Saturday against a rival and we believe that this week is the week, we will close that deal, call that girl, our desires will actually actualize. After a good performance on Saturday, everything is attainable. The converse is equally true; lose a match and that’s it for all your hopes and ambitions, completely up the spout.

This clearly is no way to live, and every four years the World Cup comes along and offers the possibility of promiscuity without consequence—a spot of “who do you want to be today?” “Oh today, I fancy a bit of Brazil, I feel like feeling like a winner.” Tomorrow, on the other hand, it’s all “come on you, North Korea” because who, in the end, doesn’t want North Korea to triumph? If I had to support England, the country of my birth, games would have to mean something to me. The pleasure of the not meaning it is one of the charms of the World Cup.

Also—and this may be a more personal reason—I spend nine months of the year loathing all of the England players. I accuse them of terrible crimes, of having profoundly flawed characters; I have been known on more than one occasion to be delighted when they are injured. I cannot find it in myself every four years to care for those for whom my dislike is so integral to my being. Especially when there is the potential joy, no matter how unlikely, of seeing them get absolutely leathered by the mighty Slovenia.

This rule will be suspended when England plays the USA. I am English and live in America, or at least in Brooklyn, so my normal dislike of England is offset by my desperate anxiety that we (see how quickly it comes) not lose to America.

There are also other exceptions to this rule. If the majority of supporters in the bar where I am watching the game are anti-English, in the supporting-another-team way rather than for any kind of xenophobia, then I will become an England fan simply because I like to be on the side of the fewer cheerers.

I am also entirely free to support England if I know England is going to lose, and most likely on penalties. In three out of the last four world cups which England has actually managed to qualify for, they have lost on penalties to Portugal, Argentina, and Germany. In all of these games, I have desperately wanted England to win, secure in the knowledge that they didn't really have a chance.

Will Frears is a theater and film director living in Brooklyn. For the next few weeks, he will be blogging about the games for the Daily.