Thus goes the wonderful temporality of a World Cup: a first frantic half, with three or four games per day during the group phase, then a second which sees the intervals expanding and the teams disappear with Division by two on each turn.
Weaning is tough with this passage to the direct elimination phase. Six days between the eighth and the quarter -final, four between the quarter and the half. Now we have to wait for the next deadline, fill the vacuum of the days without program or verdict, speculate, with an issue that increases with each step.
This expectation is a suffering as much as a delight, for supporters whose masochism is known (they know that during their lives they will live more disillusions than joys). The in-between match is the moment when all hopes are allowed, but when all the anxieties grow.
The imagination gallops, because, unlike the players, we are allowed to “play the match in the head” before the time. And when the hour comes, the vertigo deepens before the uncertainty of a drama of which we are neither screenwriters nor actors. We would almost want to teleport to the final whistle to spare two hours of tachycardia punctuated by spawning spikes. And a deaf fear of disappearance.
Whoever experienced the experience of elimination has no desire to relive it. Or “as late as possible”, even if it means making it … even more painful. Of course, everything is not affliction: we also offer the wild joys of goals, some puffs of optimism, and a dose of serotonin if the victory is at the end.
This is another beauty of the World Cup: with the direct elimination phase, everything is played out on a match, and not on a round trip as in the Champions League. The official chronometer is the clock that will sound the death knell for one of the two teams. Even qualification offers only a brief respite: the next day, we put the little horse back on the first box of this trying, but obviously exciting game. Existence gains in intensity.
The wait has become rare in current football. This sport has passed in a few decades from a television rarity regime to a profusion and saturation regime, offering (paying) access to several games per day, every day of the week.
It is also an addiction regime of the spectator, put under infusion to the point that the international truces, reserved for selection meetings, are experienced as unbearable deprivations by the followers of club football which has become dominant.
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