Le Mundial des Surprises!

By J.D. Reed

In Spain, soccer's tumultuous World Cup is alive and kicking

Weighing in at 11 Ibs., the solid-gold trophy, worth $4 million and resting safely in a Madrid bank vault, is not really a cup at all. Whoever wins it on July 11 at the long-awaited final game will have to swig the celebratory champagne straight from the bottle. No matter. Two years of elimination matches among 107 nations have left only 24 survivors, including sentimental favorite and host Spain, and defending champion Argentina, to settle Mundial '82: soccer's global championship. And for more fans around the world than watch almost any other organized activity, professional or amateur, it is soccer--footloose of spirit and often fancy of tactic--that is the true champagne of sport.

This 1982 World Cup--the twelfth summit meeting in 52 years--may be the largest, richest and possibly the most grandiose athletic contest in history. The Cup's only real competitor is the Olympic Games, also a quadrennial event. But, as soccer fans point out, the comparison is unfair--to the Olympics. After all, the World Cup has a single, dramatic, inexorable focus: 22 men, eleven on each side, mostly well-paid professionals, speeding around a patch of grass, chasing a black-and-white ball called a tango as quickly and as cleverly as their feet can carry them.

The intensity with which their fans follow this pursuit approaches religious devotion. In neighborhoods from Moscow to Madrid, from Bangkok to Buenos Aires, national teams are regarded as epiphanies waiting to appear. Success in Spain this year will spark nationwide apparitions of greatness. Nor is there any agonized waiting for the miracles.

The game's addicts these days know instantaneously the fate of their favorites. The largest television audience in history for a single event watched the opening game in Barcelona earlier this month: an estimated 1.5 billion people.

Spain's World Cup organizers were pleased. Barcelona's magnificent 120,000-seat Nou Camp stadium was nearly full for the inaugural contest, and many worrisome possibilities that could have spoiled it for host Spain did not come to pass. Highly regarded Argentina, which is the defending champion by virtue of beating The Netherlands in the 1978 final on its home ground in Buenos Aires, had decided to come despite the Falklands war. Great Britain's three doughty qualifiers--England, Scotland and Northern Ireland--had appeared after similar rumbles to the contrary. The Basque terrorist organization, ETA, although promising its own fans the usual number of bombings and kidnapings for an event of this magnitude, in fact had only managed to frighten the residents of Bilbao with a few misplaced charges.

Let the Cup begin. In the second half of the opening game between Belgium and Argentina two weeks ago, a Belgian forward, Erwin Vandenbergh, the former European scoring champ, got the World Cup off on a brand-new foot. A pass from Teammate Alex Czerniatynski landed at Vandenbergh's toe. He had slithered through the Argentine defense like a British SAS unit, and stood alone before the goal. The crowd of 95,000, including Spanish King Juan Carlos, quieted for a moment: tradition hung in the balance. Ever since the single opening game was instituted back in 1966--five World Cups ago--it had always ended scoreless.

Would history continue to repeat itself? Argentine Goalkeeper Ubaldo Fillol unwittingly decided the matter: he charged at the Belgian. Vanderbergh reflexively laced a shot through Fillol's fingers. Final score: 1-0. Modest Belgium--a 28-to-l long shot--had humiliated one of the game's most revered powers. Adios tradition.

Adios, as well, almost all traditions at this Mundial '82 Cup. In what the French are calling "le mundial des surprises," a handful of low-ranked national teams are generating shock waves and upsets. This year, for the first time, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), soccer's Swiss-based, iron-fisted ruling organization, expanded the number of qualifying first-round teams from 16 to 24. The soccer heavyweights complained. The inclusion of nations such as El Salvador, Northern Ireland and Algeria would merely prolong the first round, they muttered privately. Teams like Cameroon and Kuwait would bore the fans. New Zealand and Honduras would increase the probability that stars like Argentina's sensational Diego Maradona, Brazil's Zico and Germany's Karl-Heinz Rummenigge would suffer injuries.

The plot, afterall, called for morning-line favorites, Brazil and West Germany, to make the second round unscathed, having survived the grueling, two-week round-robin competition with stamina intact and muscle pulls at a minimum. The professionals who make up these national teams ordinarily tend toward cautious play; after all, too much money is involved to take chances. Income is more important than imagination. But upsetting results soon came in: Cameroon held the vastly superior Peru and Poland to scoreless draws the week before last. Tiny Kuwait tied a heavily favored Czechoslovakia, 1-1. And Algeria humiliated mighty West Germany, 2-1. "When I heard about Algeria," said the great Pele, now retired and covering the games for a Mexican television network, "I thought the World Cup had gone mad!"

Actually, mad Third World upstarts had merely gone on the offensive. Incredibly, the Algerians--colossal early-line long shots at 2,000 to 1--attacked ferociously. Forward Rabah Madjer scored, and an awakened German team retaliated with a goal by the superstar Rummenigge. But half a minute later, moving with an elan rarely seen in the tentative opening round, Lakhdar Belloumi fired from close range and hit. Said the dejected German goalie, Harald Schumacher: "I'll have a face operation so nobody will recognize me when I go home." If there was no joy in Munich, Algerians danced in the streets of Oran, Algiers and even Paris.

For Cameroon, also a 2,000-to-1 shot with authoritative London bookies, its cup runneth over. After holding off the Peruvians, Cameroon's "untamable lions" repeated the performance against another respected contender, Poland. Dashiki-clad, singing, whistle-blowing fans from Cameroon cheered their team's offensive abandon. As Polish defenders frantically raced in front of the goal, Forward Roger Milla, instead of passing to an unguarded teammate as a normal soccer player would, kicked away, letting the ball carom off Polish bodies. No goal was scored, but such bizarre tactics stunned the Poles, amused the international press corps and mystified many Spanish fans.

Most journalists and soccer pundits, perhaps preoccupied with tiny oil-rich Kuwait's wealth, had ignored its quiet progress in soccer. Coached by the well-regarded Brazilian Carlos Alberto Parreira, the players were briefly sequestered in the Sahara-like climate of Valladolid in north-central Spain but worked out twice daily (and prayed to Allah the requisite five times daily). They broke the monotony by appearing for carefully rehearsed "photo opportunities," dancing around their camel mascot, which sports a FIFA identity card and a team jacket.

Although this year's may be the most interesting World Cup in recent memory, only one-quarter of the expected influx of a million foreign fans has arrived. Ticket sales were falling below expectations.

Julio Abreu, general director of the financially shaky hotel and ticket consortium Mundiespana, blamed the general recession. Ajusting his once Olympian ambitions, he says: "We will not go bankrupt." But despite reports of severe losses to operators of travel, merchandising and ticket sales abroad, FIFA is still bragging that its eventual gross--helped along by revenue from three special Spanish lotteries--will more than cover the Spanish government's $40 million outlay.

In the only serious smudge on the luster of this World Cup, hundreds of police armed with attack dogs, tear-gas launchers and riot gear patrol the streets of Bilbao in armored personnel carriers. The enemy: England's 20,000-strong youthful ragtag army of fans, feared throughout the Continent, loose in the land of cheap vino. They spilled from bar doorways and windows and gathered to taunt the restrained but ready Spanish police before England's match with France two weeks ago. England won, 3-1. One lad slurred: "These here cops are wankers. Our boys'll have 'em right on." But so far the Spanish authorities have kept the situation under control.

Down in Seville, Brazil's fans did the carioca. Hours before the country's three-time cup holders (1958, 1962 and 1970) met and beat a tough Soviet Union in the opening round, more than a thousand supporters danced to drums and maracas in the hot streets around the stadium. Draped in green-and-yellow national flags (or nothing much at all), they celebrated Brazil's best team since Pele anchored the thunderous 1970 squad.

Inside the stadium, where the usual phalanx of police with dogs and automatic weapons ringed the field before the game, the Soviet Union's hard-working Andrei Bal shocked the crowd of 70,000 when his shot was mishandled by Brazil's Goalie Waldir Peres Arruda. Then came a dazzling display of attacking, creative soccer. A player named Dr. Socrates B. Oliveira, 28, Brazil's physician-turned-forward and the squad's field general, came to life against the Soviets, who had trained near Moscow and were unprepared for the 86DEG heat of Seville. Socrates evened the score in the second half, and in the last ten minutes of the game the Brazilians gave a postgraduate course in attacking. Socrates to Eder to Zico--a rhythmic passing triangle of such creativity that many Spanish fans exuberantly awarded oles. After Eder scored the winner with only three minutes left, the victory drums in Seville beat long into the hot night.

That rhythm is almost sure to be heard at the final game. Despite early promise, the upstarts and long shots are nearly gone. Northern Ireland, however, managed to squeak through to the second round. Starting this week, the other survivors will begin to meet their true matches. In the Cup's most politically significant confrontation, Poland will face the Soviet Union. Other contests will include Italy vs. Argentina, Austria vs. France and West Germany against England. Waiting in the wings: Spain, Belgium and the peerless Brazil. But will aggressive and creative soccer continue to be played? Clearly, Royal Spanish Football Federation President Pablo Porta was hoping for the best. Said he: "A good team is like an accordion. Defensive most of the time but able to surge forward for a goal." Over a billion fans will be glued to their sets, praying for the accordion to play a champagne version of I Get a Kick out of You.

--By J.D. Reed. Reported by Sandra Burton/Madrid

With reporting by Sandra Burton

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