Columnists

Osasu Obayiuwana: Africa must find an edge to smash the ‘glorious loser’ tag

With two African teams making the knockout rounds in Brazil, the continent has obviously written a new chapter in tournament history.

Ever since Morocco became the first African team, at the 1986 finals in Mexico, to reach the Round of 16, the continent has maintained a solitary presence there.

Considering that I had, in a previous piece, seriously considered the possibility that its five teams were at risk of being knocked out in the first round,

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Andrew Warshaw

Andrew Warshaw: Mixed messages on anti-discrimination

It was the most eagerly awaited of FIFA’s daily World Cup media briefings and the questions came thick and fast. Why, asked one highly respected news agency reporter, was FIFA preaching zero tolerance towards racism when zero action on the ground was in fact the reality?

It was a fair point but few, if anybody, expected the two distinguished members of the panel to provide such diametrically opposed responses.

Sometimes, quite fairly,

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Archive

David Owen: The French and German football teams have got more similar. Will the nations follow?

Considering they have a common 450km-long border and have together been the beating heart of the European project for nearly 60 years, France and Germany are remarkably dissimilar.

Not so their football teams, which clash in Rio on Friday in what promises to be a fascinating World Cup quarter-final.

Take the goalkeepers: Hugo Lloris and Manuel Neuer don’t exactly look alike; but they are very proactive exponents of their craft, among the quickest to sprint off their lines to snuff out trouble.

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Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: What does this South American World Cup teach us?

The Uruguayan polemicist and football fanatic Eduardo Galeano once wrote: “Tell me how you play, and I will tell you who you are.”

So now as the World Cup, in the country made for football and made by football, draws to a close it is worth asking what this World Cup has told us about football and about us. That such a question can be raised about what is essentially 22 men in shorts kicking a ball around shows us how football is seen in Latin America.

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Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: Africa’s wait continues

At this rate will an African nation win the World Cup by the end of THIS century?

Pele regularly demonstrates why he was an infinitely better footballer than pundit, but his famous line that an African team would triumph by the year 2000 is quoted more than any of his other theories.

Watching the exciting Cameroon and Nigeria in the 1990s raised hopes that defensive frailties may one day be improved upon,

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Matt Scott

Matt Scott: Cameroon corruption claims put a World Cup in commotion, FIFA must prioritise

“Everyone loves a conspiracy.” The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown

With more than 200 million copies of his novels in print, it turns out the Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown had a point. There is something thrilling to be found in the hidden truth that only the beholder can see.

In football it has many guises: from the ‘in-the-know’ reporter or supporter who purveys gossip about a club’s transfer activity,

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Archive

David Owen: Brazil 2014 – another small step, not a giant leap, for soccer in the USA

Twenty-eight years ago I moved to Chicago a month or two before the 1986 World Cup started. A report I wrote then underlines how far soccer has come in the land of the gridiron and the baseball diamond in the intervening nearly three decades.

“Just my luck,” I wrote. “While the rest of the football-mad globe is getting punch-drunk on a ball-by-ball account of the trail to glory, Windy City is more concerned with the size of Bears quarterback Jim McMahon’s close-season midriff.”

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Archive

Day 18 match previews: NED v MEX, COS v GRE

Brazil 2014 logo

June 29 – CONCACAF vs UEFA. Mexico are growing in stature, the Dutch are growing in renewed promise. Costa Rica have grown up while Greece have the look of having grown old, and sage in the process. All up for grabs in the battle for places in the quarter finals.

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Archive

Day 17 match previews and stats: BRA vs CHI, COL vs URU

Brazil 2014 logo

June 27 – The peculiar feeling of a rest day has settled around the world before the World Cup gets down to last 16 business, the calm before the storm begins again. The opening two knockout matches are all Latin American affairs featuring two of the most exciting teams in the World Cup so far, Colombia and Chile. Brazil are playing as well. As are a toothless-looking Uruguay.

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Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: CONCACAF shines brightly in Brazil

It was a simple message from the President of their Confederation, Jeffrey Webb, but it said it all:

Very proud of @CONCACAF teams and their quality of play at #WorldCup. Let’s keep going #WeAreCONCACAF

This incredible World Cup of action is likely to end with a South American narrative. It is their tournament, it is their backyard. It is Brazil and Argentina I expect to be there at the end.

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