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| THURSDAY, JULY 8, 2010
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
Sports
world cup
Despite loss, Uruguay’s Forlán shows he’s a winner Rob Hughes GLOBAL SOCCER JOHANNESBURG The Dutch are back
where their history and their two modern-day goal poachers, Wesley Sneijder and Arjen Robben, deserve to be. But in every semifinal there is deep and piquant regret for a man who did not deserve to lose. On Tuesday, that man was Diego Forlán. A leader, a striker, a man who nearly lifted his team to the pinnacle of this World Cup, Forlán would have merited a place on any of the three other teams left in the Cup. But in defeat, what courage Forlán and his depleted Uruguayan team displayed in Cape Town. Without Diego Lugano, the team’s injured captain and defensive organizer, the team was open at the back. Without Luis Suárez, the suspended running mate of Forlán in attack, it lacked a second striker of cunning and movement. Yet, in a 3-2 loss, Forlán looked technically and temperamentally among the best players on the field. Forlán had seen his opposite number, Giovanni van Bronckhorst, score from about 40 meters with a searing left-footed shot that caught the Uruguay goalkeeper, Fernando Muslera, flat-footed. But Forlán summoned his own remarkable technique to equalize. The distance was not quite as far, but Forlán’s goal was better. He used a body swerve to shake off a marker and create space for himself. Then, with marvelous disguise, with the merest of back lift from his left foot, he propelled the ball at startling velocity. So it was 1-1, with a howitzer from one captain and a curveball from the other. Not for the first time in this tournament, Uruguay took heart from its leader. Not for the first time in his life, Forlán, 31, showed what a player and what a man he is. His life and his career have been extraordinary. He follows in the footprints of his father, Pablo, who played for Uruguay in the 1974 World Cup. His maternal grandfather, Juan Carlos Corazzo, played for the Argentine team Independiente in the 1930s and coached Uruguay in the early 1960s.
RODRIGO ARANGUA/AFP
Diego Forlán after scoring on Tuesday.
But it isn’t merely as a player in the family trade that Forlán impresses. He was 13, undecided about pursuing soccer or tennis as a career, when his older sister, Alejandra, was paralyzed in a car crash. The young Diego told her in the hospital that he would become an important soccer player and earn enough to ensure that she had a good quality of life. True to his word, he began in Argentina at 17, moved to Manchester United, then to Spain where, at Villarreal and now Atlético Madrid, he has been among the most prolific goal scorers in Europe. The Manchester period, from 2002 to 2004, was both the most difficult and the most revealing of his career. He played his heart out. He won three consecutive Premier League titles, yet his scoring ratio was by far the lowest in his professional career. Everywhere else he has gone, he has scored at least a goal every two games, but at United he managed just 17 in 98 matches. Just why, nobody has ever figured out. His coach, Alex Ferguson, would select Forlán every time because of his character, but in the end both men realized a move might help Forlán regain his scoring touch. It did, and how. Ferguson is the veteran of European club managers, and he was not at all surprised to see Forlán’s class at this World Cup. Four goals in five games, all of them with quality. So Forlán, who didn’t pull it off with United, is out of the final. Sneijder is very much in it. But if ever you wonder what motivates Forlán, it isn’t just about playing and trying to conjure goals. He works with dedication for his sister’s foundation aimed at preventing car accidents in Uruguay, and he represents Unicef, also trying to help the disabled. A loser? On Tuesday, maybe, but not in this tournament, and surely not in life.
NIC BOTHMA/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
Eljero Elia, left, and Arjen Robben celebrating their semifinal victory. ‘‘This is great, but the thing is we’re not there yet,’’ said Coach Bert van Marwijk, looking ahead to the first World Cup final in 32 years for the Netherlands.
A flurry of style, and then Dutch stay firm CAPE TOWN
Holding off Uruguay, 3-2, Netherlands reaches its first Cup final since 1978 BY CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
Although simply saying ‘‘the Dutch’’ will bring a smile to the face of many a lifelong soccer fan, the reality is that the Dutch have made a national rule of faltering in the World Cup’s decisive phases. They have been perennial fan favorites with their orange color, flashy players and legacy with the catchy name: total football. But for all the Ruud Gullits and Marco van Bastens and Dennis Bergkamps through the years, they have not been back in a World Cup final since 1978. That paradoxical state of affairs ended Tuesday night in this city that the Dutch helped build. It ended with a threeminute flurry of ball movement and finishing in the second half, as this team’s stars lived up to their name recognition. The playmaker Wesley Sneijder manufactured a goal in the 70th minute with a shot through heavy traffic, and the left wing Dirk Kuyt set up another in the 73rd with a cross that Arjen Robben headed off the inside of the left post. That collective burst of creative en-
ergy pried open a semifinal that had been as tight as a clenched fist late in the first half and early in the second, with Uruguay’s industrious midfielders sealing off the spaces and winning duels. The Uruguayans, true to their spirit throughout this competition, would not go quietly, even with a lineup deeply diminished by injuries and the suspensions of the fullback Jorge Fucile and the star striker Luis Suárez, whose handball on the goal line against Ghana in the quarterfinals in the final moments 2010 WORLD CUP
had led to his expulsion but also allowed Uruguay to still have the chance to win. But there would be no hand of God or Suárez or any other Uruguayan player on Tuesday, and despite a goal in added time from the Uruguayan defender Maxi Pereira that turned the closing moments into a scramble, the Netherlands held just firm enough to win, 3-2. ‘‘We survived, and we were just so relieved in the locker room,’’ said Bert van Marwijk, the silver-haired Dutch coach. ‘‘It’s quite something we’ve achieved after 32 years, and it’s something I thought about toward the end on the bench. This is great, but the thing is we’re not there yet.’’ The Netherlands and Spain are the strongest soccer nations never to win their sport’s ultimate title. Both are still
in contention here in what has turned into a European World Cup after all the early focus on Brazil and Diego Maradona’s Argentina team. In the final on Sunday in Johannesburg, the Netherlands will face the winner of the semifinal game between Spain and Germany on Wednesday. Whoever wins the final will become the first European team to win the Cup outside of Europe, which is no great surprise considering that the generally cool weather and similar time zone has made this competition feel less foreign than usual to Europe’s finest. The Dutch, though not on the list of clear favorites before this Cup with Brazil and Spain, are hardly a shock finalist. They won all of their qualifying matches and all six of their matches so far in South Africa, upsetting Brazil in the quarterfinals. Their players generally make their fine livings at Europe’s strongest clubs, and Sneijder has already won the Champions League and the Italian league and cup this year with Inter Milan. Although the Dutch continue to show occasional weakness on their back line and can lose their muse for extended periods, they have an abundance of weapons, a consensus-building coach in Van Marwijk and have clearly been a more explosive team with Robben, the Bayern Munich star, back in the lineup for the knockout round after recovering from injury.
The goal of the night was scored by a Dutchman who scores them rarely: Captain Giovanni van Bronckhorst. Sneijder has been the most productive team member throughout the tournament, however, and his goal on Tuesday was his fifth in the Cup, tying him with the Spanish striker David Villa for the tournament’s goal-scoring lead. But the goal of the night was scored by a Dutchman who scores them rarely: the defender and captain Giovanni van Bronckhorst, who was left free by the Uruguayan midfield to shoot about 40 meters out in the 18th minute and responded with a beautiful left-footed shot that the goalkeeper, Fernando Muslera, could only graze with his fingertips before it glanced off the goal post and into the upper right corner of the goal. Diego Forlán, Uruguay’s star forward and one of the top players of this tournament, responded shortly before halftime with a long-range, left-footed strike of his own that seemed to fool the Dutch goalkeeper, Maarten Stekelenburg, as it soared above him. Forlán later came close to giving Uruguay the lead after halftime with a curling free kick over the Dutch wall that forced Stekelenburg to dive quickly. But according to Uruguay’s coach, Óscar
Tabárez, Forlán was playing with an undisclosed injury, and Tabárez would later substitute for him in the 84th minute. By then the Dutch, with Rafael van der Vaart replacing the injured Demy de Zeeuw in midfield for the second half, had already gone on their three-minute run. Sneijder’s goal, like so many in this Cup, generated debate, with Tabárez claiming that the striker Robin van Persie was in an offside position when Sneijder struck his shot in Van Persie’s direction. ‘‘The second goal I think was decisive because you see it and now you see of course that it was an offside, and that the match could have been different,’’ Tabárez said. Back home in Uruguay, Tabárez’s compatriots curtailed office hours and reportedly postponed wedding ceremonies to watch this match. But this Uruguayan team, however valiant, will not equal the performances of the 1930 and 1950 teams that won the World Cup. The Dutch still have a chance to improve on their history, however, and they now have four days to rest for their nation’s most important game since the 1974 and 1978 finals. The Netherlands, led by Johan Cruyff, lost both to the home team: to West Germany and Franz Beckenbauer in 1974 and to Mario Kempes and Argentina in 1978. But with their traveling horde of orange-clad fans, the Dutch may well feel more like the home team this time.
A journey through Africa with the focus on loving soccer CAPE TOWN
BY CELIA W. DUGGER
Jessica Hilltout, a nomadic, Belgianborn photographer, loaded sacks of deflated soccer balls onto the roof of a battered yellow Volkswagen Beetle last year and began a seven-month road trip across Africa to document the continent’s love of the game. She found it in villages where children played with joyous abandon on dusty patches of ground, sandy beaches and lush fields, far from the stadiums where Africa’s first World Cup would be held. She captured their sense of play in lyrical images hanging now in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Brussels galleries. Gleeful little boys in Burkina Faso leap in exultation as their team scored. A young fisherman goes airborne as he hits a header on a beach in Togo. Barefoot boys in Ghana lope gracefully across a field as their slender, elongated shadows chase them. As the World Cup draws to a close on Sunday, with international teams playing on fields edged by ever-changing, digital advertisements for the likes of Adidas, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, images of the highly commercialized, FIFAsanctioned soccer will not be the only lasting ones. ‘‘The beautiful game exists in its purest form in what I saw — people playing for the joy of playing,’’ Hilltout said during an interview here. The most oddly soulful of Hilltout’s images are of objects — the homemade balls fashioned by children from plastic bags, old socks and rags, tied up with string or strips of tree bark.
Some children inflated condoms — commonplace and free on a continent beset by AIDS — wrapped them in cloth to make them heavy, then in plastic bags to seal them and finally bound them in twine. These ingenious, improvised balls bounce like real ones for a few days before the air escapes. Hilltout, 33, accepted these balls, each like a small, hand-wrapped gift, from the children who made them when she gave them the factory-made kind they longed for. She then photographed their balls resting on cracked earth or cupped in hands with nail-bitten fingers. The people she met in some 30 villages stretched across west and southern Africa had no organized support — no free uniforms, no corporate sponsors, no subsidies of any kind. The walls of the gallery exhibit their feet — often bare or in flip flops, or mismatched slippers with a toe peeking through a hole. ‘‘So many people have so much and do so little with it,’’ she said. ‘‘The people I met had so little yet managed to do so
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSICA HILLTOUT
Many play soccer in Africa by any means necessary. Left, a homemade ball in Cape Town. A ball in Nhambonda, Mozambique, above, and a player’s shoes in Beira, Mozambique.
much with it.’’ The exhibition and an accompanying book, titled ‘‘Amen: Grassroots Football,’’ were actually a fatherdaughter project. She and her father, Mark Hilltout, 64, an Englishman who got out of advertising a decade ago after working for Ogilvy & Mather during most of his career, were both first captivated by Africa on marathon drives. Mark Hilltout took a road trip from England to South Africa when he was 23 and ‘‘fell in love with the place,’’ he said. Jessica Hilltout studied photography at the art school in Blackpool, England, and took her own African sojourn in her mid-20s. She subsequently paid for her
personal photographic journeys in Africa by saving what she earned working in advertising and taking portraits in Europe, among other jobs. As Africa’s first World Cup approached, Mark Hilltout, who lives in Cape Town, gave his daughter an idea. A couple of years earlier, he had driven the length of the continent to Ethiopia. ‘‘You go into the bush and you find these little villages and football is the center of everything,’’ he said. Why shouldn’t his daughter photograph the game as it’s played by Africans — the homemade balls, the raggedy shoes, the crooked goalposts made of tree
branches? She liked the idea and last year hit the road in her dad’s 1976 Volkswagen Beetle, pitching a tent where there was no other accommodation. She told her subjects, ‘‘I want to do an exhibit in South Africa and while all the big stars are in the stadiums, I want you guys to be the stars of my show.’’ Her father designed and financed the self-published ‘‘Amen: Grassroots Football,’’ now displayed in the windows of independent booksellers here in South Africa and available on the French-language Web site fnac.com. The pictures are also on display at the João Ferreira Gallery in Cape Town through July 24, the Resolution Gallery of Digital Art in Johannesburg through July 31 and the Botanique gallery in Brussels through July 18. ‘‘She really does have a wonderful feeling for texture and space and communicating an idea,’’ said Ferreira, owner of the gallery here in Cape Town. ‘‘And with the World Cup coming up, I thought it would be perfectly placed.’’