Next time for Africa

African footballers are jazz musicians, they play by ear. They don't need a written score, just the array of chord progressions and scale they are born with
Hartman De Souza Pune

While Spain gets down to kicking its feet in the air, and just as in the days of Generalissimo Franco, gleefully using football to prove to an unhappy middle class that all is well with the world, those who continue seeing it without vuvuzelas and bullshit may need to get down to the serious business of figuring out why they're crying into their glasses. 

To aficionados doing the needful in a quiet village bar in Benaulim (Goa) - or a noisy dive in Malappuram (Kerala), or a similar den in Santoshpur (Kolkata) - it is grievous that 96 hours played in South Africa may see $12.4 billion injected into the South African economy, 4,15,000 jobs created, and 3,00,000 visitors expected, but barely manage six hours (if not less) of proof that football can actually be beautiful. 

That just four delicate but deft touches of a ball between two players in the same team, smiles on their faces anticipating the joy of bulging a net, can slice through a supposedly impregnable defensive wall of four or five burly full backs banded together like the fingers of a bright plastic glove, as easily as a hot knife cutting through butter; and there's not a single shirt-tug, elbow in the face, kick on the ankle or stamp on the instep standing in the way of the sheer bliss of the moment. 

Those that genuinely love the game as just a game know beyond doubt that individual and team philosophy, style, flair and flamboyance need not cave in to the cold-blooded pragmatism that makes winning more important than 'playing'.  There are many, not just old football drunks, who will willingly attest to the intrinsic beauty and joy of the game even though this won't stop their tears.

Pretty young anchors wearing flower-embossed frocks and outfits that even Auntie Mary would not wear to Sunday morning Mass at Varca can join the entire bevy of pundits on our insipid, hysteric TV channels to wax eloquent on the beauty of the game, but when push comes to shove, old football lovers know this is just that magic word 'marketing' coming back to haunt them. 

They know that these are people paid to love the game and make it sexy, and get those watching (or buying) to do the same. The older truth is that beyond the predictable vagaries of South Africa 2010 lies the aesthetically-bereft English Premier League 2010-11, ready to be hocked to a gullible public, with every industry with something to sell, from toothpaste to whitening cream to motorcycle, primed to book mid-week and weekend slots. 

Through all this to be then told that such a business creates happiness, wealth, contentment and will even improve the quality of this beautiful game, is enough to drive even Auntie Mary in Varca to drink. 

In 1970, universally accepted as the World Cup ever thanks to an effervescent Brazilian team, those old enough to know may have been found in vaddos in Goa, or padas in Kolkata, huddled around a three-band Sony transistor with a copper-wire aerial climbing into a chikoo tree in the wee hours of the morning. They would be tweaking the knob and hoping to catch the BBC World Service commentary and facing heartbreaking static, and then, catching a station broadcasting a crucial match in Arabic. 

But who cared when the names of the players on both sides were common? Who needed a specific language to know that the match was tight and that the English were well-drilled, or, that one's imagination need not be determined by reality?