Once more unto the balls and pots, dear friends. Around the world yesterday, people with a couple of hours to spare drew near their television sets to bear witness to the quadrennial magic whereby what is essentially a piece of admin that could be very easily delegated to someone in the Fifa office on work experience, and swiftly accomplished with a sheet of A4 and a pair of scissors, is meticulously inflated into an all-singing, all-dancing, 4,000-watt, hellzapoppin’ light entertainment spectacular starring Charlize Theron.
Who would have predicted the deftness of yesterday’s ceremony, with its dazzling mix of Oscar-winning Hollywood royalty (Theron, who turns out, by the way, to be a staggeringly loud air-kisser), sporting superstars (Haile Gebrselassie, Eus?bio) and world leaders on the political and theological stages (Archbishop Desmond Tutu, David Beckham). Not to mention all those other people in suits who are probably quite important, if we only knew who they were.
So, was this the best World Cup draw ceremony ever screened? Why not? It was certainly the longest. How long? Put it this way: in the time it took to sort those 32 teams into eight groups, you could have read every word of Beckham’s tattoos, twice.
What was abundantly clear is that these preliminary World Cup essentials are now almost unrecognisable from the modest try-outs of yore. In 1958, in Sweden, the results of the draw were simply dictated to the media, outside the room where the action had privately taken place (involving a sheet of A4 and some scissors, we don’t doubt). Incredible to relate, there was no official anthem and Charlize Theron wasn’t involved at all.
The first televised draw came in 1966 at the Royal Garden Hotel in London, but it was conducted entirely by men in suits, looked and sounded nothing whatsoever like the Eurovision Song Contest, as witnessed in a particularly clammy and troubled dream, and contained no video message from Nelson Mandela.
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The first draw to be televised in colour came four years later in Mexico City, though, even there, the colour technology was really only of assistance in discerning exactly how grey everybody’s suits were.
Since then, though, a number of technological developments have facilitated a massive shift — not least the deployment of the see-through plastic pot, ushering in a new, transparent era, far removed from the obscure fumblings of the “velvet bag and marbles” years.
The message is obvious. Fifa might be the kind of organisation that changes the rules on qualification, right at the last minute, when it sees that some of the richer countries are in trouble. But it’s not the kind of set-up that could tolerate association with a cunningly engineered or darkly doctored draw, and pots in bracingly clear Perspex, clean enough to eat off, are your guarantee of that.
The other great boon has been the arrival, in the late 20th century, of the screw-together draw-ball. Those Kinder-like capsules have revolutionised the way we think about group allocation in international football tournaments, entirely removing the small-stakes bingo aspect of the numbered-balls draw and allowing for wildly expanded dramatic business, what with the opening of the ball, the removal of the piece of paper, the unfolding of the paper and, finally, the holding of the paper in the direction of the camera.
If there is a drawback, it lies in the resemblance of those devices to Chinese fortune cookies — to the extent where it would have been no surprise if Beckham had looked up yesterday and, instead of saying “Honduras”, had announced: “You are going on a long journey.” Moreover, today’s lightweight draw-balls tend to move in the air a lot more and represent a nightmare for goalkeepers — which is presumably why we didn’t see any goalkeepers formally involved at the sharp end of yesterday’s ceremonies.
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No sign of Thierry Henry, either. Odd, that.
Nevertheless, exciting as it was to see Roger Milla crack a ball on a set that Noel Edmonds might have devised for a teatime quiz, the feeling lingered that, for all the lights and noise, this was still fundamentally a show without a clinching moment.
How about if, subsequent to the main draw, the hotel allocations had been decided by a round of “Mr & Mrs” involving the coaches and their significant others? Come out on top and you and your national association are off to the five-star luxury of the Treeferns Trout Lodge resort, complete with two-day safari.
Fail to nail it, on the other hand, and you would be lumping it on a half-board basis at Mrs Joy Kaffirbeshcer’s Angry Rhino Guest House.
Too much? But if a World Cup draw is meant to be light entertainment, it might as well not be half-hearted about it.