I spent a fair bit of the football World Cup in Brazil last summer eating Japanese food with Barney Ronay, so the tone of his review of the tournament in the Guardian amid all the end-of-year retrospectives didn't come as a great surprise. He spoke of the excitement of the early rounds, the tremendous flair and skill and unpredictability of the group stage, and of the sense of disappointment as a more familiar, more cautious football took over (with the glorious exception of Germany's 7-1 win over Brazil in the semi-final).
I broadly agreed with his sense of weariness, with the feeling that there was something anti-climactic about the final fortnight. The below-the-line commenters, those unacknowledged arbiters of rectitude, though, were even more apoplectic than usual. Somebody, apparently, had decided that this was a great World Cup - it was, comfortably, the best since 1998 - and that meant that criticising it was anathema.
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The vast majority of the bile - and there is something quite distressing about the levels of vitriol people reach for because somebody didn't enjoy something as much as they had - was ludicrous, but I did wonder whether journalists who cover tournaments like the World Cup end up conditioned to frustration because of the sheer exhaustion inherent in covering them.
I recognise that covering a World Cup, whether in football or in cricket or any other sport, is a dream job and that I'm hugely privileged to be able to do it. But working at a World Cup is unbelievably hard. In football, you've just finished the season, the climax of the league finale, and the FA Cup and Champions League finals are barely over before you're bashing out preview material. Then the tournament begins and, for six weeks, you're working 18 hours a day, with no time to eat, exercise or sleep properly.
By the time you reach the quarter-finals, you're exhausted and, even worse, you've already written everything there possibly is to be said about the teams that are still in the tournament. All you want to do is have a healthy meal at a normal time of day, maybe go for a run and have eight hours sleep, preferably without Argentinian fans singing " Brasil, decime qué se siente" outside the window till 4am. So maybe it is the case that we're by the latter stages inclined to dyspepsia; we need something like the 7-1 to get going.
We do experience things differently as children. There is less sense of consequence: there is just sport, happening, often somewhere exotic
This is purely a World Cup phenomenon. I love tournament football. I've been to six African Cups of Nations, three European Championships, three World Cups, a Copa America, an Asian Cup and an Under-20 World Cup. The sense of being in a bubble, in which nothing but the tournament matters, can be invigorating. It's just that the World Cup takes six weeks, not four, and so fatigue has set in by the end. What a strange thing, then, that football's authorities - and cricket's are even worse in this regard - have designed a tournament so bloated that some of the sport's most devoted followers, whose job it is to follow the sport and tease out its nuances day by day, find the final stages indigestible.
Amid the dross, one comment stood out. "You," it said, "just want the World Cup to reproduce the magic of your childhood." At first it seemed weird that that should be a criticism: how outrageous that somebody should want something to be as good as it used to be. But then it occurred to me that, whether by design or not, the sentiment had a profundity. We do experience things differently as children. There is less sense of consequence: there is just sport, happening, often somewhere exotic (admittedly this wasn't true of the first cricket World Cup I really appreciated, in 1983) and we know it matters. We dip out, we come back. We're probably not entirely clear on the structure of the tournament or who's expected to win; nothing is bogged down by narrative and so we don't get that sense of ennui in the knockout stages.
And perhaps that is part of the appeal of World Cups, that they do take us back to a time when we watched them just for the sport and the thrill of competition, unencumbered by the complexities of context. That attempt to recapture the past, though, is doomed to failure; it's impossible as adults to watch sport as we did in childhood, particularly given the nature of modern sports coverage (it may be in fact that the naivete with which we watched sport as children in the '80s and before is simply no longer possible).
Memory heightens the sense that things used to be better: we remember the great goals and the great games, the great players and the great innings, and forget the drabness in between. And so modern tournaments will always to fail to live up to past editions, our memories functioning essentially as romanticised highlights reels.
That's why World Cups, almost whatever the sport, come always with a sense of anti-climax - although it might help if modern World Cups, seemingly in every sport, didn't feel like such a chore.
