Qatar 0-2 Ecuador (Valencia pen 16′, 31′)
AL BAYT STADIUM — The football doesn’t lie. It took 11 men of Ecuador just half an hour to cut through the masquerade that is Qatar 2022. You almost felt sorry for Qatari players having to carry the pretence of authenticity onto the pitch before an audience of billions. Qatar is not a nation that merits a place among the game’s elite, either as a participant or as a host.
Like a squad of FBI agents walking briskly into a Swiss hotel to bring the rotten Fifa leadership that bequeathed this event to account, Ecuador pulled down Qatar’s expensively assembled World Cup edifice with ruthless efficiency. It felt like a blessing, as if the tournament needed to address and to expose the false premises underpinning it at the outset so that we can at least talk about the football going forward.
Little about this place feels connected to the World Cup experience. The vast expense lavished on stadiums that serve no community purpose always felt ridiculous, as architecturally magnificent as they are. The barren landscape that surrounds the Al Bayt arena, the furthest stadium from Doha an hour’s drive to the north, stood as a featureless rebuke to the arrogance and potty-ness of it all.
More from Football
A former milk salesman and an England U18 star - what to look out for when Qatar play Ecuador20 November, 2022
Southgate will lose his job if England do not reach the semi-finals and that would be unfair20 November, 2022
‘World Cup widows’ are so last decade: New stats show most UK young women will watch Qatar 202220 November, 2022Ecuador had what looked like a decent goal rubbed out after only three minutes. The two-minute VAR interlude that denied Enner Valencia his moment can be seen as the first strike of the familiar against the unreality with which we have had to deal to this point. VAR as honest actor if you like. Valencia had his revenge first from the spot and second with another fabulous header 15 minutes later.
The noise made by the “Qatari ultras” behind a goal was momentarily silenced before rising up again suspiciously. Qatar is not versed in fan culture. Qatari citizenship in a population of almost three million people hovers around 15 per cent, a wealthy cohort not known for colonising stands and banging out football anthems at weekends. The carefully constructed stripe of maroon-shirted supporters split the seating down the middle, dividing in two a more conservative demographic clad in traditional white thobes and head dress.
This impeccable group sat quietly in marked contrast to the arm-waving enthusiasts as if they were witnessing the football spectacle for the first time. If the authorities can stage manage a celebration of Englishness by expats from India outside a team hotel, it would not be beyond them to create a pop-up Qatari chorus. Much like the cheerleaders shipped across the 38th parallel by Kim Jong-un to support the unified Korean hockey team at the Winter Olympics in Pyeonchang, this did not have a ring of spontaneity about it. It did however chime with the wider practice of narrative spinning.
Enter Morgan Freeman. The default Hollywood baritone layered the opening ceremony in practiced schmaltz, talking about life and dreams, journeys taken together. As we know some are more together than others in this land of biscuit coloured scrub where very little grows unless adulterated by the vision and imagination of human beings.
If Qatar 2022 can stretch credulity by selling the World Cup as a unified search for beauty and justice, a place where all are welcome, gathered as one, then it is surely within its gift to set right the fundamental wrongs addressed by human rights groups and the brave souls who dared to speak out against a divisive and discriminatory regime.
Given the backdrop of scandal and corruption, of human rights abuses and migrant deaths that have plagued the build-up to the tournament, there was of course a hollow ring to the preaching of tolerance and inclusion in Freeman’s theatrical introduction. Intermingled with music and dance Freeman delivered this paid-for texture effortlessly but the script was dealing in the same wild fantasy articulated by Fifa president Gianni Infantino 24 hours earlier, setting out a reality painfully at odds with the lived experience of those who do not conform to the world view of a medieval patriarchy.
Thus for half an hour before kick-off did this splendid arena, a towering contradiction of the itinerant Bedouin culture at the heart of pre-oil Qatari identity, pulsate to the familiar choreography of the Big Show, once more begging the question what are we doing here? And why like this? The camels and their riders occupying cod staging posts at the entrance to the stadium looked epically out of place, ready at any moment it seemed to reverse out of their military shape and resume the vast desert emptiness that surrounds the structure.
It was an impulse hard for their paymasters to resist following the torrid correction of the opening period. The stands began to empty embarrassingly early in the second half, the occasion having quickly lost its appeal for the locals. Only the ultras sang on, perhaps mindful of terms of engagement that required 100 per cent commitment for 100 per cent reward.
This was not the dream promised in the World Cup 2022 brochure, the empty stadium a reflection of football’s lack of attachment in a territory strange to it, the result a rejection of the falsehoods on which Qatar’s central role was built. The Ecuador players deserved better than the insult bestowed by departing hosts. So too their opponents, for that matter, innocent pawns in a much bigger game being played by their political masters.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/iAvIKEB
Post a Comment