Guest column by Aztore Irungarai, national team player 643-651
To be clear, this is not an indictment of Louis Vaudrail, his staff, the players or the FAF. The issue is not, I believe, in any one person’s hands. Yet the truth is inescapable: we suck, and my point is that this basic fact has not yet been accepted by an Astograthian public that is, instead, fed constant platitudes, “moral victories” and outright falsehoods.
Obviously, no one connected to the team will admit the team is bad because their jobs hinge on the team playing well. I do not fault them for that. I do fault the likes of Sustrai Estilarte and Lau Kanala, who have accustomed us over the years to fawning coverage of Olibondeka. This was well deserved in their surprising run of nearly reaching World Cup 85 and achieving a fourth-place finish at Cup of Harmony 77, but is completely undeserved today. Before then, the Astograthian press were quick to gloss over the unmitigated disaster that was the World Cup 83 qualifying run, which was judged to be so awful at FAF headquarters that an entire World Cup cycle was skipped in the process of rebuilding. And even before then we have long listened to fantasies regarding the merits of the Astograthian First Division, allegedly brimming with sublime talent, or the unshakeable success of our foreign-based players, such as Ager Alaba, Ugaitz Leskerre or, above all, Indartsu Lekea.
I do not mean to pick on Lekea, but he is a pre-eminent example of a player who is good but depicted by our hyperbolic press as an international superstar when he is not. He will never be a Galáctico; he has never been close to being one. AFC Corvistone will not win the Nepharim Premiership this year or the next or the one after that – possibly ever! And yet, from watching Astograthian news coverage you would guess they were Nephara’s Ituraitz FC, when they are far more Gortz United. He is a squad player at an upper-midtable team in the best league in the world. That is a fine achievement, in my opinion enough to earn him a starting place for Astograth and the captain’s armband, and it need not be inflated beyond that.
Why does this happen? Well, because we used to be good. Actually good. I should know, I was there for it! I personally was not a great star, mostly acting as backup goalkeeper, but I was there through four qualifying campaigns, three World Cups, our victory at Cup of Harmony 50, the thrilling ride to the semifinals of World Cup 61. I had the honour of playing in the third-place play-off of that World Cup against Andossa Se Mitrin Vega, and in the final of the first Brevity Challenge Cup where we defeated Polar Islandstates. At club level, I played for Sporting Iturributa and for Ousevale Borough in Krytenia.
The later years of my career fell right at the apex of Olibondeka’s history. We’d won a Cup of Harmony, we’d reached the semifinals of a World Cup, we would host the following one. And even though the team played poorly at 62, it was just when Urbizania Wanderers were winning the UICA Champions’ Cup, the first Astograthian club to do so, and with a world-renowned superstar in Laborious Hawk. The 640’s were the national team’s best years, while the 650’s were the First Division’s golden decade. This is consistent with the Lopez Principle (not to be confused with the Cabañas Effect or the Jaffacake Constant), whereby a stronger national team will tend to have a weaker league and vice versa. Press coverage of both was just as fawning as it is now, but it was correct. Our teams, whether international or domestic, were indeed some of the best in the world.
Now, of course, neither is true. In relative quality, our national team is poor, our league is poor. I would not consider either to be even “middling”, as I would expect a middling national team to occasionally qualify for the World Cup and a middling league to occasionally reach the Champions’ League group stage. So far, we haven’t proven able to do either, yet no one seems able to admit that we suck. The sport has grown and outpaced us, truly exploded in the amount of creative and unexpected variations of the game we all know and love, to the point where even reaching our prior level would not be enough to be competitive. With respect to my former teammates and colleagues, I firmly believe that if we were to transport that World Cup 61 squad, or the 654-55 Ituraitz FC team, into today, they too would suck to some degree.
Only after accepting all of this can we improve, because if we were already at our best then the future would look quite grim indeed.