THE LAST STRAW/Frank McNally: Apart from Holland's elimination, probably the biggest upset of the World Cup qualifying series was the failure of the Three Tenors to make it to the finals in Japan and Korea. The operatic "dream team" had reached every tournament since 1990 in Rome, when they performed against the dramatic backdrop of the Baths of Caracalla, winning on penalties. They were still going strong in 1998 at the Eiffel Tower (even if some critics claimed the tower's performance was marginally more spontaneous). But time took
The Three Tenors are credited with hugely expanding the global audience for opera, but that audience has rarely expanded at the rate of Pavarotti himself. Indeed, when their conductor once said of his stars that "they each have a Stradivarius in their throat", many feared that one of them had swallowed the Stradivarius player as well. And the singer's outsized condition was widely blamed for his withdrawal from a performance of Tosca in New York last weekend.
As opera lovers will know, Tosca is a story of intrigue, attempted rape, and torture, in which all the main characters die violently. This is a standard opera plot, especially in the "Verismo" (or "true to life") writing style of Puccini. Puccini buffs will also know he flirted with an alternative ending, in which the heroine did not fling herself to death from a parapet, but instead just went mad and finished the opera alone on stage, clasping her lover's corpse. This was not pursued, however, because opera lovers hate a happy ending.
So it was appropriate that Pavarotti's long career at the New York Metropolitan reached an apparently ugly conclusion last Saturday. Having already missed the Wednesday show due to flu, his prospects for making the finale - for which some fans had paid $1,800 - gripped the city for days. Among the more colourful details to emerge as tension grew was that the singer was holed up in his apartment, making soup from a "seven-lb chicken".
Not even this tenor-sized fowl did the trick, however. As Pavarotti continued to ail, the New York Post - famous for its verismo style - declared sympathetically: "Fat Man Won't Sing". But the fat man insisted he would sing until almost the last minute, when the theatre manager had to brave the crowd with the announcement. No doubt grateful that this wasn't Palermo, the manager said he had told the 66-year-old tenor it was "a hell of a way to end a beautiful career".
The replacement was rising star Salvatore Licitra, aged 33. Only half the man Pavarotti is, in every sense, Licitra's performance was nevertheless a triumph, heightening the drama. And while Pavarotti continued to claim there was nothing wrong with him except flu, the newspapers insisted they were witnessing an operatic death scene. Some compared him with a boxing champion who had stayed too long. The Washington Post wondered if he would leave the city in disguise, like Floyd Patterson left Chicago after he lost to Sonny Liston.
Flu or no flu, many blamed his failure to stay in shape. Notwithstanding the tradition for opera singers to be well-rounded, it is certainly sobering to read on Pavarotti's website that as a young man he considered an alternative career as "a gym instructor". Even for somebody with an interest in gymnastics, it's quite a leap from there to the reality of a life in which, whenever he went on a diet, he could depress European agriculture prices.
Still, if he is nearing retirement, the big guy will be missed. And so will the other two tenors when the World Cup reaches a climax next month. They may have spawned more bad imitations than Riverdance, but they also performed a service to music, if only by blotting out the memory of some of the official songs committed by World Cup teams down the years.
Their big success was tapping into the obvious relationship between football and opera, which was at its height in Italia '90. Ireland even had a player then - Cascarino - who sounded like an Italian tenor (although some would say he couldn't even turn as fast as Pavarotti). And the whole Irish adventure had an operatic feel: down to the night of our elimination, set in Rome, when the evil Don Schillaci stole through the Irish defence, despite a late but picturesque dive from the heroine, played by Packie Bonner.
By the time that tournament ended, opera had many new enthusiasts. We all knew Nessun Dorma by heart. And many of us will have sung along with Pavarotti, and those rousing words "None Shall Sleep," before passing out for the night.