Does the World Cup need a script doctor, asks DONALD CLARKE
AS THE World Cup eases into its final leg, it is interesting to consider what the tournament can learn from the movies (and vice versa).
Perhaps the Dutch team have already been down this road. What do we mean? Well, in one sense, their victory over Slovakia demonstrated a slavish devotion to the firm dictums of the scriptwriting gurus. One of the first rules is that the first significant event should happen precisely 17 minutes into the action. Sure enough, at just that point, Arjen Robben put the ball in the Slovakian net.
The Dutch then ruined it all by scoring a second, rather than allowing the antagonists to rally in the second hour. The 2-1 result was structured in a manner that would have appalled even a novice writer. Why it's as if, in Casablanca,Claude Rains begins rounding up the suspects before Paul Henreid gets on the aircraft.
Back to story camp for you, Dutchie.
The English and the Germans made a better fist of it in their second-round match. The protagonists – let’s defy movie tradition and make them the Germans – achieved all their initial objectives before, as the interval loomed, the opposition came back in surprising force. Sadly, the scriptwriters, having introduced a glorious twist with that phantom goal, went on to ruin things by submitting to total overkill in the final stretch.
The second-half thrashing was more Transformersapocalypse than gallant Wild Bunch defiance.
Of course, football does have a problem with that unstable two-act structure. Centuries ago, some Greek bloke declared that good drama demands an even number of acts. He was right. In short, a story needs a middle section. Michael Corleone gets sent to Italy and marries that ill-fated woman. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, now Daphne and Josephine, enjoy a spell of quiet before George Raft turns up again. A goal from some burly English midfielder offers the drunken burghers of Northampton a few moments of misguided optimism. You know how it goes.
Of course, when you think about it, the World Cup as a whole – like all the greatest tragedies – actually has a five-act structure. We begin, in the busy group stage, with a stage heaving beneath the mass of a hundred busily interacting courtiers. After much bellowing and squabbling, one lone figure is left standing knee-deep in the viscera of a dozen slain antagonists. In Shakespeare, he tends to be Danish, Scottish, English or Italian. This year the ultimate hero of The Footballer’s Tragedy will be from elsewhere.
It’s sad for the nation that invented football. But the English can take some comfort from the ways in which this World Cup deviated from the mainstream movie handbook. Hollywood decrees that the snooty villains always be from perfidious Albion. At World Cup 2010: The Movie, however, that dubious honour went to the non-handshaking nation across the Channel.
Well done, Monsieur Domenech. You get to be Blofeld.
