History of FIFA World Cup

[ProudPersian]

I Iran's football team is good, just inconsistent as the players occasionally struggle to find the ideal team dynamic. They are vast improved though from the team I remember a few years back. Though they fell three places, Iran is still ranked 18th. Here are the men's soccer statistics.

http://www.fifa.com/en/mens/statisti...p-2005,00.html

[Rasputin]

Cannavaro, Ronaldhino and Zidane vie for FIFA's Player of the Year award

Next Monday the global glitterati of soccer will meet in Zurich at the FIFA World Player Gala 2006. One of three men — Fabio Cannavaro, Ronaldinho Gaucho, and Zinédine Zidane — will be pronounced this year's outstanding individual in a team game that is played in every country where there is life and movement.

The winner is predetermined. The poll among the national team coaches and captains closed months ago. So the fact that Ronaldinho has recently scored for Barcelona two of the most artful and artistic goals that we will ever see will have come too late to influence the award.

Ronaldinho is unique. No other player performs with such a smile on his face, and none communicates such childlike joy in inventing his own special way of movement and magic. He plays to the gallery, but he also plays for the team, and the tricks are often most effective when competition becomes as tense and taut as a violin string.

However, Ronaldinho has probably lost the Player of the Year title he held last year. At the beginning and the end of 2006 nobody could touch him for class and creativity, but he had a flat summer, coinciding with the World Cup, that destroyed his and Brazil's hopes of living up to the hype.

When it mattered most, Brazil lost its rhythm, its beauty, its purpose — and lost possession of the World Cup. Ronaldinho made the barely credible excuse that it was not his role to score; rather he was there to pass the ball to the designated strikers.

Pass the ball, or the buck? Who on earth told this man, this finisher of invaluable goals, that he was restricted to the task of provider?

The World Cup, played in June and July in Germany, was the main event of soccer's four-year cycle. The world was watching, and the man gifted with the talent and temperament to be the great showman was reduced to reining in his talent so that others could get — or miss — the glory.

I could not fathom Brazil's thinking on that, back then in high summer, and I have not yet understood how Brazil's head coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira, a most experienced trainer, came to instruct the world's best player to inhibit his performance on the grand platform.

Clearly Frank Rijkaard is of a different disposition from Parreira. Rijkaard had an excellent vision of the game as a player, and now is the most liberal of coaches. He is a Dutchman allowing Ronaldinho to orchestrate the worldly skills on show at Barcelona.

Ronaldinho has freedom to improvise within Barça's team structure. Barcelona's winning La Liga and the Champions League was not all about one genius — but Ronnie made them follow his example as if he were the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Does that make him the world player once again this year? He cannot be. You cannot take the World Cup out of the equation, cannot ignore that Ronaldinho was subdued on the global stage, and for months afterward resembled a diminished player searching for his game.

He rediscovered it to the point where his goals were masterpieces, and he scored more of them than any other player in Spain. He also found ways to work with new strikers after Barcelona's leading forwards, Samuel Eto'o and Lionel Messi, suffered injuries and even the first reserve, Javier Saviola, was ruled out.

But if Ronaldinho is not the world Player of the Year, who is? Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the demands on body and soul, especially in a World Cup year, which breaks athletes under the unremitting schedule, are just too extreme.

Another example would be Maxi Rodríguez. He scored twice in Argentina's 6-0 thrashing of Serbia and Montenegro and played his part in two of the most memorable goals of the World Cup. In Gelsen***chen, where the Argentines flowed with incomparable beauty, Rodríguez and virtually every other outfield player passed and moved the ball with such sweet control that no Serb could arrest the flow of 24 passes, culminating in Hernán Crespo's back-heeling the ball for Esteban Cambiasso to score.

Then, in Leipzig, Rodríguez ended a fantastic Latin American encounter between Argentina and Mexico that was equal until the 98th minute when Juan Pablo Sorín hit a long cross-field pass toward Rodríguez. The winger took the ball on his chest, expanded his muscles to flick it a few feet into the air, and as it dropped leaned back to volley it perfectly from the edge of the penalty box to the top far corner of the net.

[Rasputin]

The volley was with the left foot; Rodríguez is predominantly a right- footed player. That goal, immaculate in its timing in every sense, was a moment

when instinct took command.

Where is Rodríguez now? Recuperating while his club, Atlético Madrid, counts the cost of a probable six-month absence after he tore a knee ligament playing for Argentina on Oct. 11.

A candidate for Player of the Year became a statistic in the club-versus-country tussle over who pays the insurance and the compensation when players are injured. This question reached the European Court of Justice during the year while FIFA continued adding to, rather than ameliorating, the workload on players.

At the World Cup, where Rodríguez found his best form, France fleetingly gave wing to an exciting and unusual talent. Franck Ribéry, the Marseille maverick known as the Magician with a Scarred Face, came into the Bleus' team when it wilted under the searing sun. He dazzled, he gave breathing space to France's aging stars, but he proved to be a butterfly. Fleetingly, he dazzled, then he fluttered to deceive.

As Ribéry became a new Bleu, so Zidane, the most admired of the old generation, faded. His comeback to the world stage was bewitching at times, sad at others, and frankly overplayed by FIFA, the world governing body.

He was not the Zidane of 1998, when he used his head so splendidly to score twice to lead France to victory in the final against Brazil in Paris. Eight years on, too much was asked of Zidane. It was a sad end to arguably the finest career of his era when he head-butted the Italian Marco Materazzi in the chest, apparently in pique because the Italian had insulted Zidane's sister. Somehow that act became misinterpreted as heroism. The referee sent him off, as he had no option but to do, for violent conduct. Yet a French lawyer is still attempting to prove in court that Zidane was wronged by the red card and that France, therefore, did not legally lose the World Cup on the penalty shootout that followed extra time.

That ridiculous legal process would be an irrelevant sideshow were it not for the fact that the day after the World Cup ended, and Zidane retired from

playing, FIFA named him as the man of the 2006 World Cup. There are those in French society, seemingly from the president down, who would make him an even more iconic figure, viewing his head butt as a mark of masculinity. The pity is that so much in Zidane's career was truly admirable.

Amazingly, FIFA is about to honor him again at next week's player gala. The votes cast by coaches and captains in almost 200 lands put Zidane up there with Ronaldinho and Cannavaro.

The Italian, already chosen for the Golden Ball of 2006 by international journalists polled by France Football, has a strong case for the ultimate accolade. He led Juventus to the Italian Serie A title in 2006, before Juventus was found guilty of corrupting matches. Cannavaro promptly decamped to play instead for Real Madrid.

Like many World Cup players, he took time to shrug off the fatigue of the summer and to rediscover composure in performance either for Italy or for his new club. Yet, indisputably, he had been the leader of the best defense in the world and was the most accomplished defender in a tournament in which negativity won the final.

Tradition has dictated that the outstanding individual in a World Cup is recognized as the player of the year, so Cannavaro is the logical choice. He was

there to the end for Italy in the Berlin Olympic Stadium — the reliable rock, the coordinator of the team that yielded least and took home the prize.

For what its worth, he won my vote as player of the World Cup. Over a whole year, however, my leanings are swayed toward players who excite audiences on a regular basis while at the same time display a sense of unity to the side. Having conceded that Ronaldinho will not win the award, I have trouble looking away from him, not least because it takes inner courage to believe in skill while defenders are attempting to the point of physical destruction to prevent it.

It is worth remembering the 12 months of Francesco Totti. In February, playing for his beloved Roma against Empoli at the Olimpico stadium, Totti was caught by the boot of Richard Vanigli. It was a late and vicious scything tackle that had no chance of winning the ball, yet the referee issued only a yellow card to Vanigli.

[Rasputin]

Totti was taken to a hospital, his left fibula smashed, the ligaments torn from the bone. He was surely out of contention for the summer World Cup?

Not so. Totti is known for many things, for artistry, for loyalty to his boyhood club, Roma, for sometimes less than applied intelligence to his game and his life. But in 2006 he was to become a true man. He worked to resurrect his World Cup dream, and did that. He worked at fatherhood, and is enjoying that. And he has dedicated the second half of 2006 to one sporting ambition, leading Roma to the Italian championship.

By the start of December, Totti led the Serie A scoring chart, with nine goals and

two assists in 14 matches. He has moved forward from his playmaking role to take main responsibility as a striker, and the volley that he scored with that once-damaged left foot against Sampdoria on Nov. 26 was proof that the injury does not trouble or inhibit him.

There remain 10 metal screws in that ankle joint, and it was one of the quotes of the year when Totti explained why he ruled himself out of the Azzurri, the national team, at least until the new year.

"I won't play for the nazionale a long as there are screws in my ankle," he said. "My mind is only on Rome."

Totti was the comeback of the year. The departures included Telê Santana, 74, a Brazilian who truly coached the Beautiful Game, and Ferenc Puskas, 79, the Hungarian who played it as well as any man could.

With respect to those men of the sport, the abiding memory of 2006 was not what happened inside the arenas, but outside them. Germany had a plan to open up the game truly to the masses, with its concept of the "Fan Mile" at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and other venues. It was a simple, but a daring idea: Give the people a way of sharing World Cup euphoria even without the price of a ticket. By putting the games on giant screens in open places, Germany invited millions from all manner of nations to the party, and the world responded.

The Beautiful Game redefined. Quite a legacy, and a challenge to anyone else who takes on host responsibility for the biggest single sporting show on earth.