World Cups require goals. Without them, it’s fair to say that the sickly combination of corporate interests, nationalism and tactics would produce a quadrennial event that was a lot closer to unbearable than awesome.
Thankfully, then, in Brazil there have been goals. Loads and loads of goals. They started appearing in the opening game of the tournament—with Marcelo going as far as to score for the opposition just to get that particular ball rolling—and they haven’t stopped, so far, since. There was Holland 5-1 against Spain. There was England 1, Italy 2; at times an almost properly end-to-end operation from two teams hardly noted for that kind of thing. There have been no duds and no nil-nils. And helpfully FIFA’s goal-line technology graphic has been crowbarred into every ten minutes of official footage in order to drive home the point: There have been goals at this World Cup.
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“Where have they all come from?” is a decent question to ask at this point, given what happened in South Africa four years ago, when tedium took hold and defence seemed to secure permanent victory over attack. Back then, it felt like no one would ever score again at a World Cup, and yet look us now, almost getting used to the idea that World Cup games can involve a scoreboard.
The transition comes down to a million things, for sure, but one of those things might well be the fact that the goalscorers have reappeared. Yes, where there are goals, there are goalscorers. But I don’t just mean players who happen to have willed a football over a goal-line once, I mean players who have genuinely mastered the art of doing it. They’ve turned up this time, with their well-rehearsed celebrations and armoury of favourable statistics. The goalscorers are back.
After one game, for instance Robin van Persie already has two goals, twice as many as he scored in 2010. His masterful header against Spain demonstrated the absolute power of the genuine goalscorer. His team had been pushed back and was almost two goals down a minute before his intervention, but then he lobbed Iker Casillas with an absurd header and Spain never looked like recovering from the shock of it. Casillas was a mess thereafter, Sergio Ramos and Gerard Pique didn’t know where to look and Holland immediately realized what was possible.
Of course if players are doing stuff like that there are going to be more goals.
And the list of goalscorers to have nabbed something already in this tournament—without even the first round of games played out—is getting hefty. They include: Neymar, Karim Benzema, Mario Balotelli, Tim Cahill, Wilfried Bony, Haris Seferovic and Teofilo Gutierrez. Even England, never exactly at the cusp of the latest footballing trend, have got involved, with Daniel Sturridge getting his first of the tournament at the first opportunity against Italy.
Individually, these players have changed their teams’ games. Collectively, they’ve helped change the tournament. Teams don’t have to work as hard for goals when they have a guy ready to nick one for them at any moment, either capitalizing on good play or punishing opposition’s bad play. With this method put into practice, we’re bound to get games broken open quicker and more regularly.
In South Africa 2010, Spain won the competition by scoring one goal in each of its knockout games, and while David Villa scored five goals, his finishes were like embellishments on top of the 80 percent of possession his team was really aiming for. He wasn’t even allowed to play through the middle. At the same time, Wesley Sneijder got to be at the centre of all of Holland’s plans, with the forwards he was playing alongside merely his facilitators. Now, though there still examples of that kind of thing going on, the fashion definitely feels like it’s gone back to regular goalscorers being expected to be regularly goalscorers again.
Whether it’s on purpose or not, tactical or random, or just a feeling without a fact, the goalscorers certainly feel like they’re having more of an impact on this tournament early on. Which is great, because this is already a million times better than the last two World Cups.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter.