It's only a Game. Yeah, right.

By WENDELL STEAVENSON

t boils down to this: every Brazilian knows where he was when Carlos Alberto fired home his country's fourth goal in the 1970 final in Mexico City; every Englishman has seen the black-and-white footage of Geoff Hurst flinging his right foot out to score against Germany in the 1966 final with the commentary: "They think it's all over--it is now;" every Cameroonian knows the name Roger Milla, the ageless striker who took a small, downtrodden African nation into the quarterfinals of Italia '90. Football transcends sport. It's that old metaphor-for-life cliche; a combination of struggle, anticipation, luck and heroics. It may be just a game, but the World Cup is an event where nation competes against nation before global audiences; it's a modern gladiatorial conflict.

This pride and prejudice has too often rendered the World Cup a stage for nationalist posturing. George Orwell, noticing cold war animosity freezing in the hearts of English football fans watching a visiting Moscow Dynamo team in 1945, concluded that "Sport is an unfailing cause of ill will." International matches have always grandstanded national emotion. My country is better than yours. My country will score more goals. It is tribalism that turns a mere football match into a matter of international machismo.

Ancient rivalries and long-ago wars are recycled and re-fought, making the field of play a metaphor for a field of battle. World War II is never over. It seems scarcely credible that a goal can heal the pain of occupation, but when the Netherlands defeated West Germany in the 1988 European Championships, millions of Dutch took to the streets to express something akin to national expiation. South Koreans clutch at victories over Japan as if some fleeting midfield dominance can exorcise the humiliating events of more than 50 years ago. English fans still shout, "Two World Wars and one World Cup!" at the German team--a chant that was all very well in 1966, but which ignores subsequent defeats in 1970, 1990 and 1996. Any old enmity will do. The violence unleashed by Serbian fans supporting Red Star Belgrade in a 1990 match against Dynamo Zagreb in the Croatian capital foreshadowed a splintering civil war.

The energy of the players infects the fans. Watching football could be a passive exercise, but it is not. There are flags to be waved, chants to be sung, police to be battled, pitches to be invaded. At times, the terraces do not just reflect history but create it. Rarely do players lose their lives on the field, but supporters often die. They are killed in knife attacks outside bars or in stadium disasters when stands catch fire or collapse, or fill so densely fans are crushed to death. In July 1969, El Salvador and Honduras went to war for a week shortly after El Salvador beat Honduras 3-2 in a World Cup qualifying match. The momentum of collective identity is a beguiling force. It offers community. As much as the rhetoric is full of words that divide--against, versus, defeat, victory--there are moments when football can make a nation stop and collectively examine itself. Success arouses triumphalism; failure brings introspection. When Argentina won the World Cup in Buenos Aires in 1978, the military junta which had delivered the victory was safe for a bit longer. When Andres Escobar was gunned down on a Medellin street after scoring an own goal to put Colombia out of the '94 Cup in America, national newscasters lamented that Colombia's violence had shamed her citizens in front of the world.

We need identity; we welcome tribalism. There's nothing so much fun as venting obscenities at the referee. There is patriotic joy in shouting the name of your country ("Ing-a-lund! Ing-a-lund! Ing-a-lund!") in glorious unison with thousands of fellow members of the tribe. The Palestinians, without country, cheer for the club Al-Wihdat in exile in Jordan. The Catalans pour into Barcelona's stadium, regional, separate and defiant. Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland cannot be reconciled into a single Britain for the purposes of football.

Football can say things that politicians cannot. There is a basic honesty about a football match. It is not tactful; the antagonism is as hard as the tackling. For most of us, that's all the conflict we need. On Christmas Day in 1914 soldiers from the German and English trenches on the Western Front put down their rifles and kicked a ball around no-man's-land. It seemed they didn't hate each other after all.

Wendell Steavenson is an Arsenal fan and a TIME reporter