PICTURE SPEAK

CLASH OF WILLS: Argentina and Ivory Coast set the tone; (down) Kaka of Brazil

Heat is not simply a physical thing that is making us all sweat under the broiling sun of the afternoons and the sticky humidity of the nights here in central Europe. There is the heat of passion that has spread from South Korea to Mexico and to the Czech Republic as tens of thousand party through their nights of victory. There is the heat that burns inside the heads of men struggling to live up to the high expectations aroused in their homeland-like the Poles who awoke after defeat to Ecuador to the most devastating of headlines: "Don't Come Back Home".

There is heat on a slow burner, churning inside the likes of Ronaldo as he hears what sounds like 180 million Brazilians taunting him as "Fat Boy". And there is the heat of frustration inside men such as Zinedine Zidane, David Beckham, Raul... The gods of the playing pitches whose tournaments have begun with whispers growing into a crescendo inside of them that they are not worth their wages. The rhythms of the global game are mounting apace.

Can none of us any longer treat triumph and disaster as just the same? It says something about modern societies that a first round win sends the masses onto the streets of Sydney or Seoul to hoot horns until dawn.

What does the violence back in England tell us of the state of football's Mother Country? The team won its opening match, but not in the style the people had led themselves to believe, not like the putative world beaters their media had hyped the players to be. So, the hooligans with beer in their hands responded by fighting with police, smashing up their own inner cities to the extent that there will be no more big screens for the public in Liverpool or the London Docklands. It is a small mercy that England's MPs and Customs officials have impounded the passports of 3,500 known troublemakers, preventing them from coming to Germany.

BEHIND THE GOALPOSTS   PICTURE SPEAK TALL DISORDER: England's Peter Crouch (above right) As part of coach Juergen Klinsmann's new-age methods, the German team watched a 10-minute film on the culture of Costa Rica before their opener against the Central Americans. The duration of the film was recommended by the team psychologist who noted that the men under his charge had an attention span of exactly 10 minutes for most things beyond their normal areas of interest. Mexican goalkeeper Oswaldo Sanchez (left) lost his father just before his team's first match against Iran. He took two trans-Atlantic flights within three days to return to Germany after the funeral. Before the match, the Iranian captain gave Sanchez a bouquet as a mark of condolence. The civic authorities who ran extra tram services in Gelsenkirchen to get fans in and out of its World Cup stadium quickly discovered that some fans didn't want to get off-namely the Ecuadoreans, who came to town for the match against Poland and had never travelled in trams before. Japanese fans got caught between tomato-throwing members of the public and 200-odd neo-Nazi demonstrators arriving at the Gelsenkirchen railway station. The tomato throwers were expressing their anger at the neo-Nazis who were eventually outnumbered. An anti-neo Nazi rally attracted 5,000 demonstrators. Between them, the 15,000 volunteers at the World Cup speak 45 languages, including Hindi. Among the volunteers, chosen from 50,000 applicants, is FC Schalke '04s reserve goalkeeper Christopher Heimeroth. Spain's El Pais newspaper called the England team "flat, grotesque and contaminating" and its striker Peter Crouch a "two-metre asparagus". Even the turf is official: only two varieties of grass are prescribed and allowed to be grown as football turf in World Cup stadia: the lolium perenne (rye/perennial grass) and poa pratensis (blue grass/Kentucky grass). The Ghanian camp includes the mother of one of the players whose express purpose for being in Germany is to cook her son's favourite dish of rice and groundnuts.

The baring of emotions, from euphoria to despair in the space of 90 minutes, is both the best and the worst of this modern cult. Football is like an old boot, repackaged and laced up with commerce, low nationalism and an assumed importance way beyond what it was intented to be.

Stop me right there. Ask me what is good about the game, what makes my privilege of being at my ninth tournament on this scale? Easy to answer. At 9 p.m. in the Berlin Olimpiastadion on Tuesday, the sun was setting into a glorious, mellow gold over the concrete steps that led to Marathon Gate. Those steps, which in 1936 Jesse Owens ascended four times to be an Olympic gold medallist and to destroy Hitler's myth of white Aryan supremacy in the athlete, have been preserved in what is otherwise an oval stadium remodelled at a cost of more than $300 million.

By keeping the old and the new, Berlin has refused to cover up history. By starting off the matches in this arena with Brazil, the team that could well finish it here as well on July 9, sport had done its best to set the scene that will live long after the 18th World Cup is consigned to history and accountancy.

Yet, people around me were long-faced while Brazil laboured to overcome the resistance of Croatia. Why? Search me. The Croats are a proud people, they surely were not expected to come and lay down at the skills of Brazil? They competed with stubborn will, sometimes near the bone of physical force. They put three men on Ronaldinho, but only two on Kaka. That was where the plot was won and lost.

When Kaka, at 24 the youngest of Brazil's so-called Magic Quartet, received the ball 25 metres from goal, when he moved his body in such a rhythmic but deceiving way that both his opponents became wrong-footed, we could sense, almost smell, what was coming. The Croatian goalkeeper Stipe Pletikosa possibly sensed it as well, but even as he hurled himself high and to his right, the shot from Kaka arched around him and into his net. There it was, the Beautiful Game boiling down to a single motion. I forgot my journalistic protocol. I leaped into the air, temporarily just a fan. Why not? Why else would we go to the stadium?

You can argue about the craft of that goal against, for example, the one struck by Torsten Frings during the opening night for Germany, or the two curved and flicked in by the Czech, Tomas Rosicky. You can insist that Tim Cahill's brace of goals to turn the Australian struggle against Japan into victory surpassed Kaka's. You might say the Korean winner by Ahn Jung-Hwan was more ferociously hit.

We could go on comparing the goals and the impressions they made on each of us. The point is, they are the end product of a game that grips so many of us because that is the joy, the diversion that the sport provides.

Not for a second do I believe we have seen the best this World Cup will bring in the first week. Certainly Brazil's first match was, in the words of their coach Carlos Alberto Parreira, "60 to 70 per cent of where we want to be at the end". You start off slowly. You have to fight for the right to show your peacock feathers. You need work ethic as well as skill to unravel the resistance applied by the other team. You believe, as Parreira insists he believes, that Ronaldo will come good again.

If we were to stop the World Cup after the week in which each of the 32 nations has now played once, Argentina would be the winner because their quality against Ivory Coast was the best match of the round. The Czechs would be close because they wiped out the American dream with such stylish football. The Italians would impress because of their know-how and their ability to throw off a scandal like an unwanted cloak. Why, even Mexico and Korea would, in their dreams, be entitled to feel 'six more performances like the first one and we are champions of the world'.

"We could be world champions, too," said Oleg Blokhin, once a devastatingly quick left winger for the Soviet Union, now the unpaid Ukraine coach. He takes no salary because the sport has propelled him to his country's parliament, and MPs there are not allowed a second job. In his "hobby" then, Blokhin suggests, "A football player who does not think he can win is like a soldier who does not want to become a general. He is not a good soldier." Maybe it is a bit military for your taste. But his point, and mine, is that the game is for ambitious people.

Brazil might win again in the end, but they will be all the better if opponents do as Croatia did and make them prove that they are the very best.

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