A grounding in stratospheric hysterics

Just under three weeks to go and the along with world class players and goals we’ve had some stratospheric hysterics. Nicolas Anelka has been expelled from the France squad for apparently saying unpleasant things to his coach Raymond Domenech who wasn’t best pleased about his first-half performance.

Reuters

Lots of people have been talking about comments uttered in "pressure situations". And that, it seems, excuses crass behaviour.

Glad I didn’t make it as a footballer.

Though, to be fair, it’s always difficult separating the personal and professional. The Fulham midfielder, Dickson Etuhu, told me ahead of his "pressure game" on Tuesday against South Korea in Durban that he couldn’t ever imagine slagging off the coach.

Being substituted is part of life as a footballer, he said. You don’t always like it but it’s about the team.

Anelka was, at 31, a World Cup virgin. He exploded onto the football stage as a silky colt under the aegis of Arsene Wenger at Arsenal back in the late 1990s.

His nickname in the Arsenal dressing room was the ‘Incredible Sulk’. On he moved to Real Madrid. Then there have been stints at Liverpool, in Turkey and Bolton Wanderers back in England before landing up at Chelsea.

His team won the domestic league and cup double last season and Anelka was instrumental in that success. The Côte D’Ivoire striker Didier Drogba may have won the Golden Boot for most Premier League goals, but Anelka set up a fair number of them and Anelka banged in a couple of crucial strikes.

Most notably there was the goal against Liverpool at Stamford Brdige and then his header to give Chelsea a 1-0 win over a particularly obdurate Bolton Wanderers side during the run-in for the title.

But for all that know-how, he’s raw at the World Cup level. Younger players than him in the squad were at the 2006 World Cup fest in Germany. How can you be an alpha male in those circumstances? It has to play on your mind.

But the lust for glory makes people bristle and bustle and downright belligerent.

And as South Africa prepared to face France in Bloemfontein, there was a whole heap of shaking going on.

France are in disarray. The technical director has resigned. The team fitness coach has been seen ranting at the team captain Patrice Evra. This is not a love song.

With the squad’s public image shot, France need to beat South Africa handsomely and hope that Uruguay and Mexico don’t draw.

With all the French singing Je ne regrette rien, there hasn’t been the usual cacophony about a South American stitch up.

The South Africans are more concerned about the Bafana Bafana giving a good impression of a football team.

I particularly liked the front page of the newspaper The Mercury. ‘Tutu prays for Bafana miracle’, it screamed.

Now any editor that can put God and an emeritus archbishop on the front page gets my backing. That’s out of the box. Blue skies thinking even.

The Daily Sun – which, let’s face it, should have the spatial edge on such flights of fantasy – was quite mundane. ‘Bafana : Now is the hour’, said its front page.

Trooper like stolidity there. And you can’t really argue with that.

It is money time. Or to be spiritual, the moment of truth. Or to be super-self-referential and boy how I love that, it’s Jason Lezak time.

For those not heavenly blessed enough to have followed my blog from the Beijing Olympics in 2008, he’s the American swimmer who rarely won individual races at big competitions but was the anchor in US relay teams.

In the men’s 4x100 metres freestyle, Lezak jumped into the pool a fraction behind the French torpedo Alain Bernard. That was it to most observers – that slight difference was comparable to an hour.

Lezak finished the sprint ahead of a man he couldn’t beat on his own.

But for the team, he’d became a god.