La Celeste fans must pray for the start of a decade. Here is Uruguay’s remarkable record in World Cups that fell in a year ending with a zero.

1930: Winners
1950: Winners
1970: Semi-finals
1990: Last 16
2010: Last eight at worst.

The most heartening aspect of Uruguay’s current campaign is that they have reclaimed their football history. Eduard Galeano – the famous Uruguayan author who wrote Football In Sun And Shadow, the most romantic book ever written about the World Cup – suggested that since 1950, Uruguayans, “betrayed by reality, have sought solace in memory”. (Which other great football nation does that remind you of?)

Galeano pointed out that, in the game that decided the 1950 World Cup, Uruguay committed half as many fouls as Brazil. Yet in the decades to come, defenders who “mistake fouling for courage” disfigured the Uruguayan game.

As Galeano noted despairingly: “We have reached the point where nothing is more Uruguayan than playing around the edge of a red card.” Since 1970, Uruguay’s most distinctive contribution to World Cups was to have Sergio Batista sent off after 56 seconds against Scotland in 1986, the fastest red card in the tournament’s history.

Luis Suarez’s frabjous strike against South Korea – surely the goal of the tournament – was a reminder that it was Uruguay, not England, who really taught the world to play football. Their Olympic-winning side of the 1920s was technically and tactically revolutionary, a vision of futuristic perfection that entranced Europe in the 1920s in much the same way Holland’s Total Football did in the 1970s.


http://fourfourtwo.com/blogs/worldcup2010/archive/2010/07/02/zeroes-heroes-amp-hubris.aspx