Turf Toe

Federer the King of Tennis? Not on ESPN's Message Boards

To even a casual observer of men's tennis, it's been fairly unmissable of late that this Swiss fellow Roger Federer is quite a player. Just 25, he's already won eight Grand Slams: four straight Wimbledons, consecutive U.S. Opens, and two Australian Opens. He's been ranked no. 1 in the world for 132 weeks in a row. (The record is held by Jimmy Connors, who was no. 1 for 160 weeks.) He has made the finals of the last 17 competitions he has entered, winning 13 of them, and has won the last 54 matches he has played in North America. On average, he loses a game of tennis about six or seven times a year, usually on his least favorite surface, clay, to his least favorite player, Rafael Nadal. Rarely have artistic grace and silky skills, of which Federer has an abundance, been so happily blended with an unrelenting work ethic.

Former men's tennis greats, including Rod Laver, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi and Ivan Lendl are all of the opinion that the Swiss champion has got something pretty special going on. The consensus is that he has a real shot at beating Sampras' record of 14 career Grand Slam victories. His service motion is the smoothest in the game, his footwork has a dancer's precision, and his forehand is famously lethal. And all this despite the fact he only gets to play two tournaments a year on grass, the one surface which allows him to display every facet of his talent simultaneously.

So it would seem that Federer, popularly known in America as "The Fed," or "Fed-Ex," really is something out of the ordinary. This past Sunday at the Toronto Masters, Federer overcame a sluggish start against the talented young Frenchman Richard Gasquet before duly getting his name engraved on yet another trophy after a 2-6, 6-3, 6-2 victory. "MASTER ROGER," proclaimed ESPN'S tennis home page, over a photograph of Federer waving his racket to the crowd following his victory.

But on ESPN's message boards, where hard-core tennis fans deliver opinions on everything from the players' strategies to their looks, sexual tendencies and forehands, it was a very different story. Two of the main threads there were, "Federer Has Been Lucky All Week" ("Tursunov, Gonzo, Malisse and Richard all could have beaten him this week. Chokers!"), and "FED'S BORING DOMINATION IS KILLING TENNIS!!!!!" ("bad enuf he's a hairy robot with no personality… richard [Gasquet] should have won that match but he choked it away"). In this arena, Federer is judged to be a talented -- yes -- but nonetheless vastly overrated player whose aura of invincibility has allowed him to hypnotize his opponents (Nadal excepted) into agreeing to lose to him before they even step on the court.

The chief proponent of the theory that there's less to Federer than meets the eye is someone who writes under the all-caps moniker, GRAF-SAMPRAS. Graf-Sampras is VERY, VERY keen on the use of capital letters, and on beginning and ending his thousands of posts, many of which are virtually identical, with the acronym, lol, or LAUGHING OUT LOUD.

Graf-Sampras, whoever he is, appears to spend much of his life watching tennis on television while laughing out loud, presumably in an empty room. (It has been suggested by some posters that the room may be in an insane asylum.) American tennis great Pete Sampras is his idol, and it is his belief, hammered home relentlessly in post after post, that since the demise of Pete the game of tennis has entered a WEAK ERA (lol), filled with MENTAL MIDGETS (lol), who just roll over at the critical moment and let Federer do whatever he wants to them. In other words, it's not that Federer is so good, but that his opponents (save Nadal) are such wimps. And the commentators who ooh and ah over his every shot, and speculate openly as to whether he is the greatest of all time, are either dupes or liars.

I haven't read all of Graf-Sampras' thousands of posts, but there are two questions it seems to me he fails to address. If, as he claims, Federer is terrified of losing even a routine match because, deep down, he realizes his game is much more vulnerable than it appears, then in trouncing his rivals repeatedly he has surely come up with an extremely sound mechanism for dealing with his psychological "problem."

Secondly, even if it's true that Federer's aura of invincibility fools opponents into thinking they can't win, how did he develop it in the first place? Wouldn't he have had to conquer them over and over again to convince them they could never beat him?

The fact is that few athletes have made utter domination as pleasurable to watch as Federer. While other players grunt and groan, mutter their sports psychologists' mantras and pound the ball according to their coaches' playbooks, Federer is usually silent and relaxed. Almost everything he does seems effortless, and his feet are so light on the ground as to be almost inaudible. As Martin Johnson, the Daily Telegraph's tennis correspondent, wrote in 2004,

"The thing about Federer… is that he appears to be on cruise control most of the time, and only rouses himself when he strictly needs to. He doesn't care to sweat a lot, and reminds you of that old comic-book football hero, Gorgeous Gus, who only came on to the field when his team were two goals down with five minutes to play. Gus didn't like running around either, and he would hand his cape to his butler, saunter on with strict instructions that the ball be delivered directly to his right toe, and duly deliver the winning hat-trick."

In short, for a while Federer made it look supremely easy, and thus embodied the universal dream of absolute physical genius and grace, the player who can hit any shot, at any time, simply at will. But that was two years ago. As the Guardian's Steve Bierley noted back in May, on the eve of Federer's defeat to Nadal in the French Open final, "The Federer façade, as clear as freshly fired porcelain a year ago, has suddenly begun to exhibit hairline cracks and nobody can be quite sure whether it is the lightest of damage or if the cracks will widen."

So far, Federer appears to be keeping the cracks under control. He followed his French Open loss by beating Nadal in the final at Wimbledon, and now he has another trophy under his belt. This week he plays in Cincinatti (the last major hard court tournament before the U.S. Open), where it seems highly unlikely anyone will prevent him from tying Ivan Lendl's record of making 18 straight finals. What's especially impressive about Federer is that he is probably aware that from now on he will have to fight much harder if he hopes to match Sampras' 14 Grand Slams, and that he has a window of three or four years at most in which to do it. Not only must he face down the muscular specter of Rafael "Conan the Destroyer" Nadal, it's increasingly evident that younger players have been tutored in his one obvious weakness, namely a difficulty returning a high-spinning ball to his backhand side. Gasquet managed to manacle him with that shot for an entire set at the Toronto Masters on Sunday, but then Federer started working that old Swiss voudou, changing the tempo, creeping up to the net, and before long he was scoring winners with his backhand rather than missing with it.

"I am only 20. I know I will beat him some day," said Gasquet meekly after the match. One could almost hear the gnashing of teeth on the ESPN message boards. MENTAL MIDGET! How about beating him NOW, dude!!!?????

Strangely, Graf-Sampras stopped watching after the first set -- he "had to run," according to his post, but someone else bravely entered the breach. According to this poster ("hs0022), Federer's success can be explained as follows:

         It's like this (for simple brains)

         Roger: "Hit me with your best shot."

         Opponent: "Bam"

         (Roger still on his feet)

         Roger: "Now, my turn" "BAM"

         (Opponent is knocked out senseless)

-- Brendan Bernhard

BRING ME THE HEAD OF MARCO MATERAZZI

So Zizou has spoken, finally breaking his silence about that infamous head-butt during an interview on the French television station, Canal +. He mixed apology with evasion, and wore a dark green combat-style jacket draped over his shoulders -- a quietly defiant, militaristic touch. Fortunately, he didn't bring a machine gun. His message to the nation, reduced to its essentials, was: "What I did was unforgivable, and if the same circumstances were to present themselves, I would do exactly the same thing again." Unpeeling a fresh layer of vindictiveness, he all but demanded that Marco Materazzi, the Italian defender whose playground taunts provoked his assault, be prosecuted for the "crime" of saying nasty things about his family. Since Materazzi still has a career to consider, it's apparent that Zidane intends it to be a tainted, haunted one. The fact that neither player has been willing to specify precisely what was stated on the field suggests it's too embarassing to go into. In other words, it was the usual petty, hateful, macho "yo mama" crap that flourishes in pick-up basketball games without a soul in attendance as surely as it does in a soccer match eye-balled by billions. Zidane, whose public image is that of a quiet, humble man, is now blatantly trading on his celebrity in calling for Materazzi's head. Had the Italian head-butted Zidane for similar reasons, he would have been dismissed as a moron and a jerk, and deservedly so.

Ultimately, Zidane's legend is likely to be tarnished mainly in the unspoken thoughts of French citizens who'll have noticed that, in stating he had to defend his honor "as a man," Zidane swept the honor of his country to one side. Publicly, though, it will be a different story. He has already been treated to a grovelling speech from France's pathetic President, Jacques Chirac, and the nation's intellectuals have predictably rushed to his defense. Le Nouvel Observateur, a left-wing French newsweekly, applauded him for demonstrating that "dignity is more important than sport and television glory." Bernard-Henri Lévy described him as "a valiant knight," and one of the country's most famous lawyers offered a Clintonian defense of his action. All of this is due not only to Zidane's athletic prowess, but to his status as a Muslim icon in a country that, not without reason, is fearful of much of its Muslim population. Zidane's head-butt carried the faint whiff of an honor-killing, and the French elites, showing their customary spinelessness, have promptly excused it.

And what of Materazzi? A mere journeyman in comparison to the great Frenchman (albeit one with a World Cup Winner's medal, and two superbly taken goals in the final), he is now under official investigation from FIFA and will surely have to play the fall guy to preserve Zizou's aura of iconic purity -- Saint Zidane. There is an irony here, since a player of Zidane's extravagant gifts is able to flourish only when surrounded by "hard" men, by enforcers just like… Materazzi. At the Italian club, Juventus, he had Edgar "Bulldog" Davids to protect him. When his next club, Real Madrid, sold off defensive midfielder Claude Makelele a couple of years ago, replacing him with Mr. Metrosexual, David Beckham -- no one's idea of an enforcer -- Zidane's career went into free-fall.

Granted, it was mostly a wretched World Cup, marred by coaches who tried to turn strikers into an extinct species, and riddled with niggling fouls and floppers and drama queens. From that point of view, Zidane's dramatic lowering of the horns had a certain winning directness to it -- Allez les Bulls! By then the game had devolved into a typical exercise in futility, anyway, with neither side likely to score from open play if they carried on for another fortnight, so why not dispense with the ball altogether and just go at it? Enough of this merde. But unfortunately, Zidane's pseudo- mea culpa has shown him to be full of merde himself.

In anycase, his complaint about what Materazzi said to him raises an interesting question. For Materazzi claims that the stream of insults that issued from his lips did so primarily as a result of, and in reaction to, a look of "supreme contempt" given him by Zidane -- the Olympian glare of a global superstar for a relative nobody. Ouch. In other words, it's a case of hate-looks versus hate-speech. Enough to keep FIFA, and eventually the E.U. and the U.N., busy for decades.

-- Brendan Bernhard

Over and Out

Not for the first time, the World Cup Final, which was won by Italy on penalties after a 1-1 tie, was a disastrous advertisement for soccer in America. But that was the least of its problems, starting with the fact that the more enterprising team lost and France's Zinedine Zidane, the most distinguished player on the field, ended his career in disgrace. There will be much speculation as to why exactly he decided to head-butt Italy's Marco Materazzi in the chest -- an act of astonishing, jaw-dropping viciousness -- and rumors that it was the result of Materazzi's race-baiting him are already swarming the Internet. (Which is no reason to believe them.) Whatever the cause, it was an act of utter stupidity coming from such an experienced athlete. Nor is it the only black mark on Zidane's World Cup career. He was red-carded early in the 1998 tournament after stamping on a Saudi Arabian player, and he was suspended for the third match of this year's competition after collecting two yellow cards in the group stage. Zidane has a temper and it seems to flare up with particular venom in international competition.

One of the peculiarities of the match was that Italy, the younger side and with a day's extra rest, came out after half-time looking utterly exhausted. They were marginally the better of the two teams for the first 45 minutes, but after that they were clearly outplayed, though they hit the bar and had what appeared to be a legitimate goal ruled offside. There were occasional sparks of lively soccer, but the abiding image of the game, aside from Zidane imitating a goat, was of players lying on the field clutching their ankles, heads, shoulders and legs and rolling around in agony. France's opening goal came from an undeserved penalty (though they were later denied a penalty they did deserve), and perhaps that set the tone for a match that turned increasingly sour, culminating in the French captain's astonishing over-time meltdown. Ironically, just minutes earlier, Zidane nearly headed home what would surely have been the winning goal, following a neatly worked move he'd started. Only the outstretched fingertips of Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon's foiled him, pushing the ball over the bar. Had it gone in, Zidane would have closed out his career as one of France's great heroes. Instead, he wound up on the losing side, and remained in the dressing room while the rest of his team collected their second-place medals. A sad and very strange end to a career that has given millions so much pleasure. At his peak, Zidane was one of the most graceful players ever to touch a football, and far more of an "artist" than many people who make their livings in white-walled galleries. Yet his ultimate act, witnessed by over a billion people, was one of stunning brutality.

As for Italy, they offered little of the brio they displayed in their terrific semi-final win over hosts Germany. A World Cup that ends on penalty kicks is inevitably anti-climactic. Couple that with Zidane's disgraceful outburst, the paucity of goals, the endless gamesmanship and diving that marred far too many matches, and you have a World Cup that mostly made a mockery of Nike's "Jogo Bonito" commercials. The best club soccer is a lot more entertaining. So, for that matter, was today's Wimbledon Final.

-- Brendan Bernhard

Federer Holds On

Like a man walking a tightrope over a lake of Iberian hellfire, Roger Federer managed to retain his nerve and poise to win his fourth successive Wimbledon title. More importantly, perhaps, he proved he could finally vanquish Rafael Nadal, at least on his beloved grass. It was a high quality match, though played under a cloud of extraordinary psychological tension. Knowing his mental frailty against the redoubtable Mallorcan, Federer pulled a Sampras and essentially served his way to the title while doing just enough with his ground strokes to flummox his rival. With luck, the victory will now allow him to start to relax against Nadal -- who still has an extraordinary 6-2 overall record against him -- and tennis will enjoy its greatest rivalry since the heady days of Borg-McEnroe in the 1970s and Agassi-Sampras in the '90s. Though no American is involved this time around, the match-up is so compelling that more Americans may start to tune in anyway. Let's hope so, as the rest of the world certainly is.

For Federer there is still much to prove, and his next match against Nadal, even if it comes in the final of a minor hardcourt tournament later this summer (as it's bound to), will be vital for him. Having finally defeated Nadal for the first time in six matches, he will need to reinforce his confidence and back up this Wimbledon victory. As for Nadal, you needn't worry about him. At 20 years of age (Federer is 24) he is improving with every passing month and his will-to-win may be the most extraordinary ever seen on a tennis court. If the talented Cypriot Marcos Baghdadis (who gave Nadal a tough time in the semis) can improve his fitness, and if Marat Safin can recover from his knee injury and start playing consistent tennis again, the next couple of years could become even more competitive for the men's game. Otherwise expect the Rafa-Roger show to keep rolling through the rest of the summer. It should be something to witness.

And now, if I'm not mistaken, something called the World Cup Final is about to start.

-- Brendan Bernhard

World Cup Disappointments

The reason the World Cup now has 32 teams rather than 16, as it did in 1982, is that it didn't look sufficiently global back then. (Effectively, it was a mostly European competition with a few African and Latin American sides thrown in.) Now, it's kind of like the U.N. -- everyone gets their say, but only a few say anything that matters. Thus we have no-hopers like Togo, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Trinidad and Tobago and even arguably the U.S. serving as warm-up acts for the same old soccer powers who always end up dominating the thing and who act as a kind of permanent Security Council lording it over everyone else: Brazil, Germany, France, Italy, Argentina, etc.

Personally, I wish it were more of a round-robin competition in which the very best sides all played each other until a victor emerged. Wouldn't you have liked to have seen Brazil play Argentina, for instance? Or how about Argentina's melancholy playmaker Riquelme square off against the monkish Zidane? How would Italy have done against Spain? Obviously, there's a charm to having total underdogs in the mix, since you never know when someone might surprise you. Greece won the 2004 European Championships, for instance, stunning far more illustrious teams. On the other hand, they then failed to qualify for the World Cup.

But aside from the disappointment of not seeing certain sides play each other -- I would have loved to watch a repeat of 2002's Mexico-U.S. encounter -- there were the individual let-downs, the biggest of which was Ronaldinho. This was supposed to be his coronation, but instead of gaining a crown he crashed out against France wearing a silly headband with a giant "R" on it. Argentina's Lionel Messi was criminally underused, and Wayne Rooney was obviously too affected by his injury to show us what he was capable of. The African teams once again came up short, with Ghana, in its match against Brazil, putting on one of the worst shooting displays I've ever witnessed. On the other hand, they played some great soccer until they came near the goal.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment was the U.S. In 2002, we came very close to beating runners-up Germany in the quarter-final. And if Italy manages to beat France on Sunday without conceding a goal, then the only one they will have given up in the competition will have been to us. Granted, it was an own goal, but despite this year's setback, the U.S., a team with more players than fans (as someone quipped), put up a plucky fight. And since our regional qualifying group is weak, we'll continue to qualify for the World Cup like clockwork, thereby obliquely illuminating certain Old World hypocrisies. For instance, I thought Europeans, unlike nasty Americans, despised flags? Strange, then, how they all seem to be waving them. The American team, on the other hand, had to move around Germany in a flagless, unmarked bus, presumably so as not to cause offense to tender European sensibilities.

It was also sad to see Mexico exiting in the round of 16. They were magnificent against Argentina, particularly captain Rafael Marquez, who was one of the players of the tournament, and it took an absolutely amazing, once-in-a-lifetime goal from Maxi Rodriguez to knock them out. It seemed way too soon.

-- Brendan Bernhard

It's Not Just About the Trophy

World Cup finals, as everyone knows, are usually tense, cautious affairs, and Sunday's final between France and Italy is likely to be no less tense and cautious than usual. But tense and cautious doesn't always mean dull, and there's a good chance that this particular match-up will showcase soccer that is also subtle and exciting. The last major encounter between Italy-France, in the finals of the 2000 European Championships, came down to the wire and ultimately fell 2-1 to the French, with the Italians perhaps unlucky to lose. It was a riveting game, decided in the dying moments, and this one should be also, for they are well-matched teams who both play the continental brand of soccer. The 1994 final, in which Brazil beat Italy on penalties after a marathon 0-0 stalemate, was essentially ruined by the stifling heat of Pasadena in mid-summer. (It was played at noon so that people could watch it live at 9 p.m. in Europe -- a match sacrificed to television.) In 1998, when Brazil faced France, the mysterious pre-game seizure suffered by Ronaldo left the Brazilian team demoralized and in disarray before a ball had even been kicked. Incredibly, they didn't even come out for a pre-game warm-up, and France romped to a 3-0 triumph. Great for France, but it wasn't much of a contest. And in 2002, when Brazil beat Germany 2-0 (with Ronaldo enjoying redemption by scoring twice), few soccer fans complained but the truth was that Germany was a mediocre team while Brazil was barely a team, which is to say a disciplined, cohesive unit, at all. They simply had three superb strikers -- Ronaldo, Rivaldo and Ronaldinho -- all at the top of their form, and that was enough to see them through.

This time around, the level of play is likely to be higher. Both teams are definitely teams, and both have much to prove and play for beyond the trophy itself. The French have all sorts of enticing motivations. They would love to demonstrate that they're not too old, for a start. (Only Trinidad and Tobago fielded a side with a higher average age.) Even more, they would love to defy France's anti-immigration politician, Jean-Marie le Pen, who has repeatedly described France's team, which sports only a handful of white faces, as being not really French. Lastly, there is the personal drama of 34 year-old veteran, Zinedine Zidane, the greatest player of his generation, who is about to retire. Win or lose, he says the World Cup Final will be his last match for either club (Real Madrid) or country. If France wins, he'll be going out on a high note, to put it mildly.

The Italians have some extra incentives too. They haven't won the World Cup since 1982 -- a painfully long time for what is arguably the greatest footballing nation after Brazil. Serie A, the Italian league, is beset by charges of match-fixing, and the scandal is one of the biggest ever to hit the sport and a blight on the Italian game in particular. If they can't undo the scandal, they'd at least like to overshadow it. Then there's the fact that the once proud Italian game seems to have gone into a slight but unmistakable decline. They were beaten (controversially) by South Korea in the last World Cup -- an unthinkable humiliation for the great Azzuri -- and AC Milan managed to lose the 2005 UEFA Champions Leage Final to English underdogs Liverpool after taking a seemingly unassailable 3-0 lead. (If only England's national side played with that Liverpudlian spirit.) And if France has won liberal hearts by representing the new face of multicultural Europe, with the Muslim genius Zidane at the helm, the Italian side is a pre-immigration throw-back without a drop of foreign blood in sight. Cast your eye down the team-sheet and you could almost be ordering off a menu in Little Italy: "I'll have a Cannavaro with a side of Zambrotta, and maybe a Totti to finish. No, make it a Del Piero." Since every member of the Italian squad plays in the Italian league, victory will unarguably represent a triumph for the oft-derided Italian style of play. That could be an extra motivation, too. But presumably, just winning the damn thing will be all the inducement either side needs.

-- Brendan Bernhard

The Nemesis 2: Fear of Nadal

On Swiss tennis star Roger Federer, everyone from past greats such as John McEnroe, Mats Wilander and Pete Sampras to the players who actually face him on the courts now, seems to be in agreement. He is, or may well be, the most preternaturally gifted tennis player of all time. At just 24, he has already won seven Grand Slam titles, including the last three Wimbledons, and on Sunday will try to make that four in a row when he plays the 20 year-old Mallorcan phenom, Rafael Nadal in the final. The sporting calendar is so busy that if there's a rain delay, always a possibility at Wimbledon, or if the match runs longer than 3 1/2 hours, then the World Cup Final will begin while the two men are still duking it out. For a contest this tantalizing, that doesn't seem right. What if Andy Murray had made the finals of Wimbledon and England had gotten to the final of the World Cup? Wouldn't the Brits have changed the schedule?

In my last post, I wrote about soccer nemeses: the way France has Brazil's number, for instance, or how the Germans have always had France's. But being a team sport, soccer spreads the pain of continuously losing to the same opponent through an entire squad. In tennis, it's personal, and it hurts. Federer has lost only four matches this year, and they have all been to Nadal, against whom he has an embarassing 1-6 record. Last month he lost to Nadal in four sets at the French Open on Nadal's favorite surface, the red clay of Paris, having also lost to him on clay in the final of the Rome Open shortly before that.  (Federer held match points in that one, but got tight and was unable to convert.) After winning the first set in Paris, Federer gradually seemed to sink into a morass of lethargy and despair against an opponent who not only beats him on the court, but in his mind as well. Nadal may not be quite so talented a shot-maker as Federer, but his will to win is extraordinary and his style of play (he's a leftie, to begin with) seems to have been designed to foil Federer's. While the Swiss is all smooth Mozartian motion, a classic tennis player playing in a refined classic style, Nadal hits huge, high-bouncing top-spin shots and stalks the court like a trained assassin. Federer wants to win in style, but Nadal has only one goal: to win. And win he does, even against Federer, over and over again with a daunting single-mindedness. Over the last two years, Federer has been as dominant in tennis as Tiger Woods in golf, except against Nadal -- his nemesis. And so we now have the very peculiar situation -- it may even be an unprecedented one -- in which the world's number one player (Federer is far, far ahead of Nadal on points in the ATP ranking system) consistently loses to the number two, while breezing past everyone else.

What makes Sunday's final so pivotal is that, having lost his last four finals against Nadal -- once on hard courts and three times on clay (his least favorite surface) -- Federer finally has a chance to play him on the one surface on which he has been untouchable: the grass of Wimbledon. Should Nadal vanquish him again, it will not only throw the rankings into confusion -- technically, Federer will remain number one, but in every other sense he will seem like the second-best player in the world -- it may also do lasting damage to Federer's potentially delicate psyche. He himself has so utterly outclassed other players -- Roddick and Hewitt come to mind -- as to virtually ruin their careers, leaving them pale, shell-shocked versions of their former selves. Now he is in danger of suffering a similar fate. On paper, his grass-court brilliance should be too much even for Nadal to handle, but that's on paper. The actual match will be played on grass, and in the mind. Men's tennis desperately needs a top-flight rivalry, and if Federer loses to Nadal for the seventh time running it won't be much of a rivalry. Which may be why a lot of tennis fans are hoping that he will reassert his supremacy and finally make his ongoing duel with the young Spaniard into a truly competitive one. Win or lose, everyone knows Nadal isn't going to go away. He is young and utterly fearless.  But there is a worry that, should he lose to Nadal on his favorite surface as well as every other kind, the Swiss genius may crumple inwardly and surrender, just as he seemed to do on the red clay of Roland Garros last month. It would be a tragedy for tennis if that were to happen.

-- Brendan Bernhard

The Nemesis

I was in France the night that the French football team faced lowly Togo in its final group-stage game. France had started the tournament poorly, and needed to beat Togo by at least two goals to qualify for the knockout round. Zidane had been suspended for the match, Henry was struggling, team morale appeared to be non-existent, and according to a poll in the French sports daily, L'Equipe, the nation had little faith that its band of squabbling has-been footballers could manage even one goal against Togo, let alone two.

On the night of the match, I had dinner at the home of a French family in a beautiful hillside neighborhood of Angers, a small city two hours south-west of Paris. There was no television in the house, but occasionally (for my sake more than his own), my host, a charming but somewhat mysterious ghost writer named Jan, would turn on the radio to see how things were progressing avec les Bleus. For a long time it was 0-0. We were sitting out on a patio, enjoying a fine summer evening, and from the neighboring houses on the other side of an ancient garden wall we could hear occasional shouts of joy or agony -- it was hard to tell which, and plainly Jan didn't care much one way or the other. But eventually the shouts got louder, Jan turned on the radio again, and it was clear the news was good: France had got its two goals and scraped into the next round by winning second place in its group.

It was then that Jan mentioned casually that France's victory was very bad news for Spain, which had come out top in its group, and (unlike the French) had done so in considerable style. At this point, the Spanish were deemed second only to Argentina in the quality of their play. The team was young, bold, and bursting with energy and ideas. Moreover, in the figure of young Cesc Fabregas, the brilliant Arsenal midfielder who had thoroughly outplayed Zidane in Arsenal's victory over Real Madrid in the UEFA Champions League only a couple of months earlier, the Spanish had the perfect antidote to Zizou's midfield dominance -- a younger, hungrier version of the great man himself. In fact, at 18, he was young enough to be his son.

But my host didn't see it that that way. "You see," he told me, "the Spanish assumed all along that France would win its group as well, in which case they wouldn't have had to play them, which they didn't want to do, because France always beats Spain." Now Spain, confident though it might be, would have to face down its historic nemesis because the French had only managed to come in second. Jan, who didn't give a damn about football, took it for granted that France would beat Spain simply because it always did, as surely as Brazil always beats England.

Another country that didn't want to play France was mighty Brazil. In L'Equipe, Brazil's egomaniacal left-back, Roberto Carlos, had predicted breezily that Spain would beat France, after which Brazil would beat Spain in the semi-finals. In the meantime (he claimed) Argentina would beat Germany in the quarters and Italy in the semis, setting up an all-Latin American final. Notably, Carlos didn't predict that Brazil would actually beat Argentina, because, like France in recent years, Argentina has historically played the role of Brazil's nemesis.

But Spain didn't beat France, and, in confronting Brazil, the French showed once again they had the Samba Kings' number. France has a footballing nemesis of its own, of course, in neighboring Germany, but fortunately for them, Italy disposed of the host nation in the semis. (Italy has long been Germany's nemesis.) Now France and Italy line up in a final together for the first time since France beat Italy 2-1 six years ago in the final of the 2000 European Championship. France has been the more successful team of late, but, in footballing terms, only the Italians can be considered true royalty. The French have won the World Cup once, and like England, were only able to do so when playing at home. As three-time winners, (and twice runners-up) Italy may not qualify as France's nemesis, but historically they are in a different category. Younger, fresher, and scoring superb goals from open play, they are likely to reassert their superiority on Sunday.

-- Brendan Bernhard

Last-minute Reprieve

It was a sublime ending to an engrossing match, with Italy deservedly beating Germany 2-0 with both goals coming in the final minutes of extra time. The 118-minute wait did more than make the goals worthwhile, it made them positively sensational. It also saved the competition from the embarassing sterility of yet another penalty shoot-out which the Germans would no doubt have won. With Italy also hitting the post and bar in the opening minutes of overtime, it might even have been 4-0. In any case, the more talented side triumphed, both goals were taken beautifully, and the effect was all the greater for being so long withheld.

Due to their lack of firepower up front, it's hard to imagine Portugal beating France in tomorrow's semi-final, even with Deco, their diminutive midfield general, back on the field after serving a one-match suspension. He's a superb player, but he's no Zidane, and Pauletta, the Portuguese center-forward, is certainly no Thierry Henry. France's biggest worry is probably the age of its team -- the second-oldest in the World Cup. If they do reach the final, they'll have had one day's less rest than their opponents, and, unlike the dreamy Brazilians, no Italian defender is likely to allow Henry to waltz into the box unopposed to volley home a free kick. On today's form, Italy are a good bet to win their fourth World Cup, putting them only one spot behind Brazil, who've won it five times. Unless, that is, Zidane can do something truly magical and seal his reputation as the finest player of the last decade, taking his place alongside Pele and Maradona in the annals of World Cup history.

-- Brendan Bernhard

How to Save Soccer

I don't know how large a goal (i.e., the space between the two posts and bar) actually is, but it's clear that goalkeepers, not to mention players in general, have been getting bigger and fitter for years. And the more important the game, the stingier the defense and the harder it is for strikers to actually squeeze the ball past a goalkeeper. Thus soccer, despite a profusion of great goalscorers, becomes a metaphor for impotence. The four quarterfinal matches netted a grand total of six goals, three of them coming courtesy of Italy's convincing 3-0 win over a gallant but obviously outmatched Ukrainian side that had all too obviously reached its level of incompetence. In the meantime, England-Portugal was 0-0, Argentina-Germany was 1-1, and France-Brazil, despite Zinedine Zidane's wonderful master class in midfield, came down to a single goal from a free kick and nothing from open play.

One could fiddle endlessly with soccer's strictures (loosen the offside rule, allow more substitutions, etc.), but one obvious change has been staring the sport in the face for decades now: MAKE THE GOALS BIGGER! If you simply added a foot in width and six inches in height to the goalmouth, balls that now skim the bar would go in, as would every shot that hits a post (of which there's almost always at least one a game) or whistles inches past. Shots that have virtually disappeared from the sport -- the artful chip over the goalie from distance, for example -- would enjoy a renaissance, and attacking tactics would be rewarded far more than they are now. True, there are teams -- Ghana's performance against Brazil comes to mind -- that would have trouble scoring even if you installed a goal the size of a WalMart, and presumably England will miss penalties until the end of time, but a lot of matches that now feature one goal, or none at all, would regularly boast several. Nothing essential about the sport would be changed, and enlarging the space between the posts and bar would certainly not amount to vulgar "Americanization," about which the footballing world is absurdly paranoid. All that would happen is that creative players would be rewarded for their efforts much more often, and inspired forwards like Wayne Rooney would have less reason to be enraged and frustrated by a sport that perversely hands an overwhelming advantage to the forces of negativity.

-- Brendan Bernhard