22/02/10

Mes que un partido?

I’m lucky enough to be heading to Cape Town this summer to catch some of the World Cup.

And courtesy of the FIFA lottery, one of the games I’ll be seeing is Portugal vs. North Korea.

When the unarguably football mad Charlize Theron first informed me that this fixture was to be my fate, my anticipation was for an amusing novelty game - headline-friendly Euro giants against unknowns who are unknown, etc.

But now I see it as no less than the ultimate symbolic clash of ideals.

For in the right corner we have mercurial Portugal, leading apologists for the primacy of individual flair and expression over collective discipline, and spiritually led by the man allegedly once described by Narcissus himself as ‘alarmingly egocentric’, Cristiano Ronaldo.

While in the left one we have the kings of the collective, North Korea, ready to unleash upon an unsuspecting world their unique concept of totalitarian football.

(This, I’m told, is like the similarly named 70s Dutch phenomenon in its conviction that every player can put in a solid shift in each other’s position, but without any of the flashy bits from Johan Cruyff.)

Yes, it’s the all stars versus the no names, the cult of the individual taking on the power of the collective.

This is a tension of particular fascination to account planners.

For coming on 50 years now the trend has only been one way, and numbering among the first to call the turn back towards the collective grips the planning/futurist community in much the same way that being the first to announce, say, the next ice age must surely excite the climatology one.

This ambition, coupled with the tendency of the left-leaning plannersphere towards wish-fulfilment, has resulted in many a premature call over the past decade or so.

For instance, I remember sitting on a panel of planning directors in Boston pontificating on the likely impact of 9/11 upon cultural attitudes. (Sounds embarassingly pretentious now. Felt embarassingly pretentious then.)

To a man, we were sure that it must spell the end for the ‘just me’ culture. (Yeah, right.)

And we witnessed a similar thing over here when, post-Lehmann, the planning commentariat lined up to bow in supplication before the inevitable new post-consumption economy.
(Incidentally, the only piece of actual evidence I ever heard for this inevitability was some dodgy stat about waiting lists for allotments growing in places like Richmond, which never seemed that convincing to me.)

So we’ve been painfully blinded by this false dawn before.

But if Kim Il-Jung’s red and red army strikes a hammer blow for the collective this midsummer, I might yet be tempted to again call the turn from the post-match party.

If there is a post-match party…

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