All that glitters is not cricket - it’s football

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TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

There is, you may have heard, some sort of kickabout going on in Brazil. It is quite important, apparently. People in several countries are bothering to watch it on television at strange hours, and they say there is a fair amount of prestige and money involved.

Here in South Africa, we know how the Brazilians feel. More or less - our national football team is unlikely to be anywhere near as good as theirs for the next few hundred years. But, for a month four years ago, we knew how it feels to be swept up in World Cup fever and fervour.

Enthusiastic citizens of the 31 qualifying countries roamed our malls, our hotels, our streets. They were a joy, from the clearly mad Argentinian who wrapped two South African strangers in one large hug when the United States scored against Algeria - Why? Who knew? Who cared? - to the orange army of Netherlands supporters, far more happy and glorious than the miserable Poms, to the entirely exotic North and South Koreans. And just how were we to tell the difference between the Serbians, the Slovakians and the Slovenians in our midst? Little old us, the 32nd country in the mix, could only gape and gawp.

The wonderful truth was that the world, or a decent chunk of it, was here. Nothing that had gone before in South Africa had created anything like the atmosphere of those magical few weeks, and remember that we have also hosted the cricket and rugby versions of the World Cup.

The unshakeable truth for any other sport is that, on a global scale, nothing can match football for size, impact and importance. Football uber alles, and best we do not forget it. Of course, you may prefer this take, which has been attributed to Jorge Luis Borges: “Football is popular because stupidity is popular.”

Ninety minutes of nothing, which is what many football matches boil down to, is a stupid way to while away a perfectly good hour-and-a-half. But that causes less of a dull headache than the seven hours of nothing that comprises too many one-day internationals. The three hours of not very much that sums up most T20 games is, well, not very much. But it is better than nothing.

Test cricket is a different animal, a proper contest in which unrealities like net runrate and legside wides are dismissed with contempt by the reality of a bouncer to the Adam’s apple. But every vibrant draw - like the one surely scripted by Alfred Hitchcock that crept to a climax at Lord’s on Monday - casts a pile of unremarkable matches into the shadows. They include not only the flaccid stalemates that are forgotten by the time the covers are secured for the night but also games so one-sided they make a mockery of the format.

Of the 2124 completed Tests as of Monday, 728 have been drawn. That’s 34.27%, which compares favourably with the 1394 - or 65.63% - that have been won and lost.

In World Cup football terms, 375 of the 1544 matches played in the tournament before this year’s edition were neither won nor lost. That translates into 24.29% of games that have been drawn.

Is World Cup football 10% more exciting than test cricket? Hell, no. Give us, any day of the week, Sri Lanka’s mostly gormless tail surviving England’s bristling attack under the glowing lights of Lord’s over the clueless, clumsy efforts - also on Monday - of Iran and Nigeria failing to come up with a single goal between them on a bright afternoon in Curitiba.

Thing is, the 2010 football World Cup raked in US$3.48-billion in television and marketing rights alone. Cricket’s 2011 World Cup attracted total business of US$1.03-billion. And, as anyone who takes a serious interest in sport knows, its the money that matters and not the quality of the contest nor of the competitors.

Cricket markets like South Africa’s can only wonder what life must be like in football’s gilded parallel universe, particularly now that they are at the mercy of the swings and roundabouts operated with impunity by the Big Three.

All that glitters is not gold, and Borges may well have been right. But, as with football, the world is not in danger of running out of stupidity anytime soon. Fool’s gold is real gold if you believe it is.