In For The Hat Trick

Finally, after four years of disappointment, Major League Soccer’s prodigal son looks set to propel his team to a legitimately satisfactory finale.

If all goes to plan, David Beckham will gain redemption on Sunday night. Victory for the LA in this weekend’s MLS Cup Final would represent the pinnacle of a tumultuous Galaxy tenure.

Only, it shouldn’t have taken this long.  The blue-and-gold confetti that greeted the United States’ newest idol in 2007 was supposed to have inaugurated four years of revolution. Beckham had promised to stimulate soccer’s growth in America, to push the game into the forefront of previously dismissive minds. Instead, during his first four years stateside the London born star faced up to a grim reality: eradicating the American view that “soccer” is the exclusive domain of children under thirteen would take actual commitment, actual effort.

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Simon Kuper’s Soccer Against The Enemy is a classic of modern sports writing, covering immense cultural ground in its exploration of the game’s political and social influence.

Published in 1994, a time when football’s historical and cultural impact had yet to be fully appreciated, Soccer Against the Enemy convincingly counters the dismissiveness of intellectuals and gives two fingers up to Americans’ happily glorified ignorance. It cast the world’s most popular sport as a key player in games where the goalposts move – where the stakes are life, death and political power, not just a weekend’s three-point haul.

“When a game matters to billions of people it ceases to be just a game-” Kuper writes in the book’s opening lines. “Soccer is never just soccer.” The rest of the book’s 300-odd pages develop that intricate and multi-dimensional thesis, backing it up with mountains of evidence from Cameroon to Argentina, Margaret Thatcher to Maradona. In Kuper’s hands, football’s century of growth, controversy and drama comes to life and the sport comes into its own; not just as a staple of the modern world, but also as a force that holds society in thrall.

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 The seasons of mediocrity should have been noted, and the revolving door management policy condemned for its manifest instability.

This week’s Stamford Bridge crime sheet spares no one. Culpable most obviously for Van Persie’s second goal, captain John Terry was at the forefront of the Blues’ defensive collapse; his slip reminiscent of that penalty in Moscow three and a half years ago. Despite scoring, Lampard was overrun in midfield by an effervescent Ramsey – the Welshman’s dominance at the root of Arsenal’s second half goal rush.

The cracks were showing long before kick-off, though. John Terry has looked sluggish since the 2010 World Cup, Lampard this season a slower, more sterile version of his former self and Petr Cech distinctly inferior to the goalkeeper who won two Premier League titles pre-concussion.

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 The pint sized striker who broke African hearts in 2010 has elevated flirtations with controversy to a bawdy first move.

With the memory of his devilish handiwork on the goal line fading into the distance, Luis Suarez yesterday reminded viewers of the moral impotence that comes with his dynamic craft.

A clash with the already riled Patrice Evra midway through the second half was initially written off as a show of derby day frostiness, but post match accusations of racism now threaten to overshadow what was an intense, if at times incoherent, spectacle.

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