The Hindu : Sport / Football : Champion will be a European team

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Champion will be a European team

CAPE TOWN: The World Cup champion will be European. Either Dutch, Spanish or German, to be precise.

Hang on a second, the old continent hogging the summit of world football, haven't we seen that before?

Well, yes. Four years ago, in fact. Remember Italy winning and the head-butt that rocked the world by French captain Zinedine Zidane?

And the truth is, we shouldn't be surprised. Four weeks and 61 matches into the first World Cup in Africa — there's just one semifinal, Sunday's final and the third-place game still to play — have reaffirmed a cold, hard fact: The sport's centre of gravity is still, and perhaps more than ever, in Europe.

Africa proved at this World Cup that it is more than capable of hosting the biggest single event in sport but that it also is nowhere close to winning it. Ghana was the only country to make a real impression and even it got no further than the quarterfinals.

Africa has fine players, competing across Europe in some of the biggest clubs. It also has passion, as evidenced by the way the continent swung behind the Ghanaians after the other five African sides failed to get out of the group stage. But Africa doesn't have the decades of experience, the coaching expertise, and the wealth that make Europe's giants so strong.

For a while at this World Cup of relatively few goals but also genuine upsets, South America strung us along with the illusion that it would be a dominant force. But that, too, wasn't to be. Four of the eight quarterfinalists were South American. None will be in the final.

Thank you, Brazil, for letting someone else win for a change. The five-time champion was nowhere near its dancing, awesome best.

The Brazilians are organising the next World Cup in 2014 and must regroup, perhaps unearth a new Pele if possible, if they want to win it. Thanks, too, to Argentina for a bundle of goals and for lighting up the World Cup with the passion and quirkiness of Diego Maradona, Argentina's greatest player who discovered that coaching wasn't as easy as he used to make scoring seem. — AP

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