Before this match, we saw the mascot of the World Cup, a ghost, and Ecuador walked the hosts just as easily.
While the Qatari players lingered in the tunnel of the great stadium of Al Bayt, preparing to leave for the moment part of this super sporting spectacle, we saw two or 3 of them making a small face, rubbing their eyes, the air, it must be said, a little beaten for the moment.
No surprise. The overwhelming moment. Not to mention the unreal, fabricated, thin, exhausted and bordered on ghosts and garbage. Welcome to the opening night of Qatar 2022, an instance that felt, through a varnish of color and borrowed warmth, like the end point of something.
It is the global game in its ultimate form, a show of personal strength to gain advantage from a very small organization of very wealthy people; It all unfolded on a disposable illuminated hanger on a beautiful, dark winter plain 20 miles from Doha.
Qatar’s players didn’t feel the moment. They were winning 2-0 at halftime, betting on a point above their capacity, using all that weight, and exposed here, held sweetly by the fact that while people, presidents and slogans may lie, elite play rarely does.
These players are not just android specimens from Qatar Aspire Academy. They are, like everyone outdoors, the elite here, necessarily an organization of workers, looking for opportunities.
Qatar played poorly here. The players froze, ate the moment and were defeated without problems by Ecuador. Prior to this tournament, there were fears that Qatar would be the worst host team at the World Cup. This is not the case. Rather, they are the worst World Cup host team so far. In the moment, caught off guard, this flicker of tension felt comforting and reassuring human.
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Because the rest of the evening was, frankly, an insistent and noisy functionality of unreality. But then, of course it was. Like so many things on this supercharged peninsula, Qatar’s national team is something of a screenshot of reality. Strolling through this position with gleaming generic structures, it can be misleading for this sense of unreality, a kind of Warhol World Cup, all pastiche and limitation on shiny paper, the whimsical buildings made to look like “whimsical buildings”, the large illuminated stadiums planted in an empty area because the screen demands it.
The Al Bayt is designed to resemble a tent in the desert on a giant scale. And so it is, a huge, trunkless thing that emerges from the lonely, flat sands. This thing is a small miracle of engineering in its own right, a green plateau of the best. Surrounded by parched undergrowth. But it is also a kind of monstrosity, built beyond any moderate scale, a hideous and monument to human vanity.
In addition, like all those structures, there will be a kind of illuminated mausoleum for the lives lost along the way. At one point in the opening ceremony, you can barely notice a giant white ghost emerging from the tip of the field, spectral, sad, hunting lost. Of course, it was La’eeb, the sprite mascot of the house, an inhabitant, it is said here, of the airy mascot of the verse. It is still complicated to deal with this. Qatar’s mascot, the animal spirit of those blood-stained structures, is a ghost.
No more inauthenticity. Before kick-off, the domain was filled with a troop of specially dressed Qatari ultras, who descended as they spent the entire training shouting and clapping with what sounded like genuine, genuine, choreographed emotion. excitation. Maybe even genuine emotion. The picture is the same.
There was a genuine ovation before the start of the match for the former emir, who waved from his dressing room and then shook hands with someone who looked a lot like Mohammed bin Salman, and indeed Moemn. Relations have heated up. Saudi Arabia is, after all, Qatar’s former protector, the regional big brother. But a handshake here is a big deal.
Soon after, the wonderful Gianni also appeared, his eyes wide open and radiant, and his back looking as surprised as anyone to stand at the top. Infantino uttered random words that referred to love and peace and that everyone got along. dark purple tone. The dancers turned and the drums redoubled. Morgan Freeman, former member of the U. S. bid teamHe said things about peace and love.
And almost immediately, Ecuador scored, scored and then returned the goal on a penalty kick shot to the corner through Enner Valencia. Disco soundtrack.
Qatar has been terrible this era of openness. Scared, clumsy, inconsistent in their passes, with a goalkeeper who seemed determined to make the wheel in a frenzy of bare eye. But then imagine, if you can, that pressure, construction. This game for a half-life.
Imagine all this when you’re not very good, when your fundamental lifestyle is a fierce PR and soft power project, doomed to get seasick at an unforeseen moment. The largest screen in the world. He expects to be amazing: he expects to be incredibly bad at football.
The colors were good, the awnings of the Fifa purple, yellow, red, dark green grass. Qatar did not have to return to the field.
Faced with the task of scoring twice against an Ecuadorian team that had yielded in five games, at least they produced more spectacle, more sense of life in the midst of all this artifice.