Four weeks of pressure that make or break a man

Tom Humphries on the managerial winners and losers of Germany 2006.

The party's over and the great circus folds its tent for another four years. One of the pleasures of World Cups is their rarity: the mere fact of them being seldom goes some way to making them wonderful.

The four years between now and kick-off in South Africa will be filled with a million stories. Qualifying games in every corner of the earth, the common experience of watching football being one of the few things which brings us together as a species. And then a whistle will blow and the South African World Cup will hurtle by like an express train you were supposed to catch.

Four weeks. It seems like a decade since we sat in that crazy stadium in Munich and watched Germany feel out Costa Rica for a few minutes before Philipp Lahm curled a shot around the defence and into the net and pronounced that the World Cup was on.

Four weeks. The pressure pops rivets in the most unlikely places and pillars of steam issue from men who were employed once specifically for their calm and their serenity. When all the world is losing its head, these are the guys who should be standing tallest.

Four weeks. How can it possibly be over? You see that question asked on the face of every losing manager, all the way along. Sometimes it finishes after three matches. Sometimes the journey is longer. Thirty-two men start out, some of them finish with their reputations cruelly smithereened, only one stays aboard for the full ride.

Not many end up like Juergen Klinsmann did on Saturday night, watching his side win a game in his home town and then being smothered in love and adoration for a full half hour after the final whistle. And this for a German team finishing third.

Klinsmann is not just the most romantic story among the knights of the managerial cavalcade, he is perhaps the most instructive. The sunny personality and the witty way with the media are the happy by-products of an incredible mind.

Klinsmann has done what nobody thought possible. He has done the German job on his terms. He has forced the mighty bureaucracy of German football to come into line with him. He commuted from California, he employed American fitness coaches who had players dragging weights down running tracks, he used a sports psychologist, he stared down the country's most popular newspaper and he took on the big names.

And then he got the German team playing the sort of football he believed in. He told German clubs to catch up. He gave players work to do on their own at their clubs. He stuck with the plan after a 4-1 trouncing by Italy that almost cost him his job last March.

His certainty and his conviction would make him the managerial story of most tournaments. But this one has been special.

Thirty-two managers. It's a short, cruel season. Jose Pekerman, the Argentinian boss, drove a taxi in Buenos Aires during a downtime between his playing days and managerial career. He may return to the wheel in the future and bore passengers with the story of how he had the World Cup in his hands, the most talented side at his disposal, the greatest young talent in the world on the bench. He may tell how his guys had scored the tournament's two best goals, played the best football, found a seam of confidence which seemed eternal - and then, he, Pekerman, lost his nerve.

Could have been a contender, he'll say, but I sold myself out. My team died for the cowardice of my convictions. When extra time came, I glanced behind me at a bench with Crespo, Riquelme and Messi sitting on it and . . . Just here at the corner all right for you folks? Need a receipt?

Pekerman's disintegration was tragic and theatrical. Sven-Goran Eriksson's more comical. Brilliantly derided all through the month in the Guardian as Amarillo Sven, the World's Greatest Gambler, his tenure came to an end far more insipidly than it had started. Eriksson never cut it at international level. An innate conservative, a passionless suit, he couldn't handle the big set-piece occasions, couldn't puff himself out enough to fill the bigger canvas.

The decision to employ him was a brave and an expensive one. The FA spent £24 million trying to change English soccer culture from the very top and it didn't work. When England needed guts and passion in Shizuoko four years ago and in Gelsenkirchen some days ago, it was missing.

Worse for Eriksson is the knowledge that in the end he was neatly hoist by his own petard. The decision to bring just four strikers, two crocked, one a beanpole with limitations and one not old enough to vote, was unjustifiable, but in the end needed to be underpinned with bravery. Eriksson didn't have the guts to play Theo Walcott, and set a talented kid up as the butt of more jokes as a result. When Wayne Rooney attempted to mash Roberto Carvalho's meat and two veg, England lost their chance of bumping off a limited Portuguese side.

Luis Aragones, that charming man, talked a fine game on behalf of his Spanish side all the way to their first tough game. Given the lead against an ageing French team, Aragones's young side with its triple-pronged forward line went looking for ways to lose.

Carlos Parreira. It is the fate of every Brazilian manager to come to the World Cup as manager of the favourites. When you come with Adriano, Ronaldo, Robinho, Kaka and Ronaldinho on the bus, there's no point in even talking yourself down.

Parreira never got the orchestra playing. Brazil looked like a side hoping that their totemic jerseys would make them great. Clearly all the focus and responsibility was on Ronaldo, and somewhere in the shadows Ronaldinho made himself scarce.

Ronaldo added a couple of goals to his overall World Cup tally but somehow his performance graph over three World Cups has been so jagged that it seems a surprise to see him out there at the top of the all-time scores table. He looked a little doughy here, but Parreira's failing was the inability to choose. Robinho looked to have the appetite for the fray. Ronaldinho needed stirring up. Parreira let Ronaldo be the story.

Overall, though, we've seen some fine managers do some fine work over the past month. Guus Hiddink brought a workmanlike Australian team and their sunburst of fans out of the first round and could argue that a little luck would have brought them further.

Big Felipe Scolari, having enjoyed a long run of never having lost a World Cup match, goes back to Lisbon having lost a couple back-to-back. Oddly, in Portugal's moments of defeat the weight of Scolari's achievements with them becomes more evident. Portugal are a limited side, Figo is a spent force and Pauleta has never been an international striker. Yet Scolari has brought them to the end stages of the two tournaments he has managed them through. The Portuguese want him to stay. They are right.

Finally, last night we were down to two. Marcello Lippi and Raymond Domenech in the spotlight. Both men have came through the tournament with the knowledge that eyes were mostly elsewhere and the audience just needed to note their response.

Lippi and Domenech are an odd pair for us to have ended up with. Opposite ends of the spectrum and two very different stories. Lippi has held the Italians together through the force of his personality and the depth of his experience. In the past month it is difficult to think of a bad call he has made.

Domenech may have had noble ideas when he came into the French job, but somewhere along the line he bit down hard on a bullet and handed the side over to Zinedine Zidane. The body language, the responses of the players, the patterns on the field all betray the cold truth of Domenech's situation. A hard choice, but who could blame Domenech?

Being in Berlin last night was better than being with the fallers and non-starters who gathered under the qualifying tape over two years ago.