If, like myself, you find yourself in the vicinity of the modern corporate workplace where bureaucracy, politicking, and corporate doublespeak are more important than getting things done, you know there’s a certain dialect that must be spoken. ‘Take ownership’. ‘Steering committees’. ‘Finding synergies’. ‘Dynamic methods of delivery’. Great stuff, all of it, and I'm sure it makes you sound really smart.
Here’s another one - ‘Managing expectations’. In a nutshell, this means someone has realised that your product or service isn’t going to live up to what customers expect - or more often than not, what sales and marketing have promised - and now you must proceed to distort the truth and ‘shape’ customers in such a way that they’ll be accepting of your mediocrity.
Looking at South Africa 2010, it is going to be interesting to see just how each team deals with the expectation placed on them by their own fans. England, for example, are a classic case. At every World Cup, European Championships, or Backyard Subbuteo Title, the English public (largely via the English press) are convinced that they are the team to beat - or at the very least, that they’ve got a red hot chance. Yet every single time, something inevitably goes wrong and shatters the dreams of the Barmy Army. It’s all rather amusing. A handball. A penalty shootout. Drawing the South Americans in the knockout stage. There is always something to lump into a pun-laden post-mortem of British failure.
‘Why does it always happen to us?’ they cry. ‘Oh, woe is our team! Our blasted luck!’. Rubbish! Luck has very little to do with it. Your team wasn’t good enough; and you lost. To quote a certain meerkat, “Simples!”
England, your expectations do not match up with reality - the fact is that while you may have the richest (and arguably the best) football league in the world, your national team has not won a major tournament since 1966. That tournament was at home, and you very nearly didn’t even win that. The only other things you’ve won were two Olympic golds from before World War One and 54 ‘British Home Championships’ - a competition limited to the might of yourselves, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Island.
Yet again in 2010, the English public are expecting big things. ‘Semi-finals!’ they cry. ‘- at least!’. While I certainly give England a better chance this tournament than I have at the last few - if only because of Capello, a man with a mind like a steel trap - I’ll still be laughing if they get bundled out in the first game of the knockout stages.
Meanwhile, Back At The Game Reserve...
South Africa certainly knows where their expectations lie - try their hardest, and have a great time whilst doing so. Hell, why not? The World Cup is a global party - and if the vuvuzelas used during the Confederations Cup are any indication, they better have free tickets ready for the local residents who’ll complain about noise pollution in a very Claremont-like fashion. Bafana Bafana know that they’re up against it in their group, but they are also safe in the knowledge that the country has brand new infrastructure and an unprecedented level of global coverage - both in a social and in a footballing sense.
This is in stark contrast to Spain and Brazil, both of whom enter South Africa’s tournament with the expectations of the world resting heavy on their shoulders. Really, we should have been treated to a Brazil-Spain final at the Confederations Cup. Instead those crazy American kids got high on something and crashed the scriptwriter’s party, beating Spain and nearly knocking Brazil out too. Still, this is just seen as a minor hiccup - and the expectation remains there for both the reigning European Champions and the perennial favourites. The question becomes - how will they deal with it?
On one hand, you could say that Spain have the biggest fall awaiting them. Perennial disappointments, they haven’t won this tournament despite having a plethora of talented stars at their disposal over the years. Now, with a wily coach and an incredible array of talent in their current squad, this is surely their year. The rest of Europe certainly seems to think so - not a day goes by without the media mentioning Torres, Villa, or the magnificence of Barcelona’s core of Spanish players.
Then again, we’ve seen that South Americans don’t cope well with failure in major footballing tournaments. Lives have even been lost over this game - something which seems staggering until you see how football is not just a sport in that part of the world. The Brazilian public are already struggling with the idea of Dunga’s ‘efficient’ football, as opposed to the joyous, attacking play that they’ve traditionally been renowned for. Would a World Cup failure mean the end of his career with the national team?
Hubris
Finally, whilst the British are boasting about how well they’ll do, Australia seems to be facing the opposite problem. Far from saying how good they are, many commentators (and many self-appointed ones) are talking about how poor a job Pim Verbeek and his Socceroos did during qualifying - and how the Aussies are going to lose out badly in their group. What, like this is a bad thing against a team who has won the World Cup three times? Not to mention a team which out-qualified former champions France and another which is playing a tournament in its home continent?
One brilliant, if not lucky, run under a mastermind of a coach with a golden generation of players, and all of a sudden we demand to flog China and Bahrain like we did Samoa and PNG? Do we now demand World Cup second rounds as standard? Forget qualification Mr Manager, let alone the fact we’ve only been there twice before - we demand you win the bloody thing. And with style! Forget about the fact that we’ve not got two quality strikers that can play together in anything resembling a coherent formation - we demand to play with attacking style and verve, even if our country excels at producing sturdy, defensive-minded players!
Who do we think we are here? Australia have been to just two World Cups; this will be our third. We’ve never won the Asian Cup. The tournaments we’ve won have less meaning than the British Home Championships - and that’s saying something! I’m not for a second saying that we should accept mediocrity in our national team, and I’m definitely not saying that I agree with every decision Verbeek makes. But I recognise that he’s not Guus, and nor does he have Guus’s squad. Therefore, I don’t go in with Guus-sized expectations. We are Australia. We are proud of our football - but we must remember our place. We are the scrappers, the underdogs, the team with the heart of a lion. But we are not a big-time team yet, and nor should we expect to be for some time.
The English may have issues managing expectations at every World Cup - but this time around, it looks like we need to keep ours in check too.
