Maybe Argentina was running the triangle offense
From Johannesburg, South Africa — The geometry of the World Cup can be complicated this early in the tournament, especially when the straight line between the ball and the net is not necessarily the path that this particularly stubborn sphere will follow.
It was David Miller who started these mathematical thoughts spinning Thursday.
Miller, one of the most literary and respected of international sportswriters, was at Soccer City in Johannesburg to see Argentina multiply the problems facing South Korea, which the Albicelestes did comfortably by winning, 4-1.
This is the 14th World Cup for the 75-year-old English author, his debut having come in Sweden in 1958 when, he recalled, things were very much different and his match tickets were posted to his home two weeks before the beginning of the tournament that launched Pele to global fame.
Miller once memorably described Northern Ireland’s George Best as “fantasy brought to life,” but it was the name he bestowed on Dutch legend Johan Cruyff that came to mind Thursday.
The astonishing precision of Cruyff’s passing caused Miller to call him “Pythagoras in boots,” a superbly apt description enjoyed by the writer’s former Cambridge University colleagues but a name that no doubt caused Cruyff himself to scramble for a dictionary.
There was another Pythagorean player on a World Cup field Thursday, Argentina’s Lionel Messi, who is rapidly tracing a trajectory that will put him in the same orbit as Pele, Best, Cruyff, Diego Maradona and Franz Beckenbauer.
The soccer pantheon isn’t quite full yet, and Messi’s place is all but assured.
Although he did not score a goal, he was involved in all four and enjoyed several magical moments against the South Koreans, who were reduced to chasing — and sometimes hacking at — shadows. But one moment stands out.
Messi, all 5 feet 7 of him, got free to the left of the South Korean net. He fired a shot that goalkeeper Jung Sung Ryong blocked. The rebound came to Messi, who fired another shot, this one striking the left post.
The ball rebounded again, this time to Gonzalo Higuain, who tapped it into the net for Argentina’s third goal and the second of his own three.
It’s all about geometry, all about reading the angles.
Higuain’s hat trick was only the fourth in Argentine World Cup history. Guillermo Stabile managed the feat at the inaugural tournament in Uruguay in 1930. Gabriel Batistuta did it twice, at USA ’94 and at France ’98.
The ’98 tournament was won by the French. This tournament will not be. The in-fighting and arguing that has been a hallmark of the France squad ever since it touched down on African soil finally undid the team Thursday night in Polokwane.
Beaten, 2-0, by Mexico, lame duck Coach Raymond Domenech probably has only one game remaining in charge of Les Bleus before he is replaced by Laurent Blanc. Not that Blanc’s 1998 World Cup-winning teammate Zinedine Zidane regards Domenech as being in control.
Domenech “is not a coach” and “there is no teamwork” among the players, Zidane told France’s Canal Plus television this week.
Also poised to fall by the World Cup wayside is Nigeria, one of six African teams playing in Africa’s first World Cup. The Super Eagles lost their second in a row Thursday when they were beaten, 2-1, by Greece and are now the Endangered Eagles.
The surprise result had repercussions all the way to Belgium, where George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, delayed the start of his European Union news conference in Brussels to watch the end of the game.
The victory, he told reporters afterward, provided “a glimmer of light” after months of woeful economic news.
Greece, of course, is where Pythagoras was from, by all accounts, and although he did not live long enough to kick a football around the Parthenon he did leave schoolboys the world over a mathematical theorem to memorize.
It is doubtful that David Beckham could tell you that the squares of the legs of a right triangle add up to the square of the hypotenuse, but the injured England midfielder does know how to put in a mathematically precise cross or free kick.
He probably would have done so at South Africa 2010, but for his Achilles (yes, another Greek) injury. Instead, Beckham was in Cape Town on Thursday having tea with retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Beckham reportedly told Tutu that he was disappointed not to be playing in the World Cup.
Tutu sympathized, but not much. His career, after all, was all about angels, not angles.
