The Fifa World Cup has been taking its leave of US cities over the past week, and you could feel a sense of mourning – and relief – in its wake.
Any city that takes on a global sports event, such as the football festival or the Olympics, willingly submits itself to a kind of heist where it pays a lord’s ransom for the privilege of years of construction projects, logistical planning and then, during the actual event, traffic jams and road closures and the sense that the place has been taken over. Most locals seemed to love it. “We’re never going to see anything like this again,” one Kansas City resident told me mournfully.
Even in the urban sprawl of Arlington, where France played Spain in the home of the Dallas Cowboys, the stadium staff were on a kind of last-day-of-school high. They’d been through an epic, demanding few weeks – and the non-stop pipeline of football games featuring far-off teams and exotic cultures had been a distraction. The World Cup landed.
Or for those of us 33,000ft in the air during the Argentina-England game on Wednesday, it took flight. Through typical doziness, I’d managed to book a flight that departed Dallas Fort Worth just as the second semi-final was kicking off. Through a cosmic stroke of good luck, the United flight had a live television option which included the channel showing the game.
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The following 100 minutes were the strongest evidence yet of how deeply the World Cup has registered in the United States. My seat was at the rear of the aircraft. Twenty minutes after kick-off, I glanced up, and every single rear-seat screen was tuned to the events on the pitch in Atlanta. It was an extraordinary thing.
The flight was bumpy, and before the pilot gave the chillingly detailed weather report in which US pilots specialise, he began by saying: “Folks, sorry to interrupt, I know there’s a big game on.”
Then the same ritual: the screens froze, and passengers began to shake their heads impatiently through the information about air pockets and suspended cabin service. The game, even on a tiny screen, was, it seemed, too compelling for anyone to care, with the conspicuous exception of a guy sitting two seats over who wore a Spain jersey, turned on his screen and immediately fell into such a deep sleep that you could tell the air stewards were worried that he’d expired.
Our mutual row companion kept looking at him in disbelief.
“He thinks it’s all over,” I said.
But that’s the thing about staging a World Cup across a continent. It’s exhausting – for fans and players. And now the tournament was reaching its riveting small-screen reveal: it’s football equivalent of the who-killed-Laura-Palmer moment. Maybe because everyone on the flight grasped the likely answer – Lionel Messi – a collective tension took hold. Through the crunching tackles of a first half, low male grunts of appreciation. After England took a sudden lead 54 minutes in, a few screams – male and female – “oohs” and “aahs” and a ripple of applause. The audience was predominantly American. They had no patriotic skin in the game, and they like to see scores.
Then came the final 20 minutes when the South Americans seemed, on those tiny screens, like figures possessed as they came at the tiring, besieged Englishmen. This was part football match, part horror movie. The pilot announced an initial descent just as Hernandez was about to let fly from 30 yards, freezing ball and shot to deliver instructions about tray-tables and seat-belts.
“Who cares, man?”, someone yelled, breaking the tension. When Argentina equalised, a collective howl of appreciation – proper terrace cheering – broke out in the cabin.
“I want extra time,” someone shouted happily. But everyone knew that this was wishful thinking. The match was being manipulated by greater forces and demanded an unforgettable conclusion. Then came Messi’s cross and the point-blank header from Lautaro Martinez. The cabin was filled with actual screams of disbelief. A little girl sitting across the aisle from me threw her arms in the air in despair. “Argentina always does this, dude,” she announced to everybody.
The flight landed during injury time. It was late. Passengers chasing connections rushed up the aisle – the terror and inevitability of “connections” missed is buried deep in the US psyche.
In the terminal, people were studying the closing minutes on their phones, and a huge bank of people stood outside a bar showing the game on six different screens. The English despair suddenly displayed on gigantic flat-screen televisions seemed like an obscene intrusion on national grief.
An hour later, I stood chatting with the security officer at a parking garage. He was from Ethiopia, he told me, and although he had been in the US for many decades, he spoke with that beautiful East African phrasing.
He was pleased with the result but shared some dark rumours he’d heard about how Middle Eastern interests wanted Argentina to win it all. As I prepared to drive off, he offered a final thought: “You know, the English gave football to the world. And they also gave us this language. Otherwise, you and I, we would not be having this conversation. But today, they lost.”
He offered a delighted laugh at this and disappeared through the rear-view mirror.
It was 36 degrees in Washington and England were out of the World Cup.
Football, bloody hell.
