Vaclav Havel, the writer and first president of the Czech Republic after the fall of the Berlin Wall, talked in an interview this week about the fragility of the strong. "The end of Communism," he said, "contained a warning to humanity and especially to those who hold power of some sort, and who hold it with pride: nothing lasts forever; no political system, no power..." Havel's right. Go back thirty years:
the notion that Communism might fall, that the Soviet Bloc would cease to be, was simply inconceivable then. Go back 20, when Communism did fall, and if there was one thing that seemed the surest of sure bets it was that the United States would reign supreme as the unchallenged "hyperpower", in a phrase some Frenchman coined, deep into the 21st century. Yet the 21st century has barely begun and already we are talking about the erosion of US power, about the gravitational pull of power and wealth towards the countries of the Far East.
History is not exactly lacking in examples of the fall of empires yet the human tendency is always to believe that whoever or whatever is in the ascendancy at any moment will remain there indefinitely. Which explains in large part how badly we all stuffed it up with the global economic crash: we thought the boom would last forever, and acted accordingly. Well, it didn't, and we got bashed accordingly.
You see the principle in action in football too. Rafa Benitez, the autocratic coach of Liverpool football club,
appeared to have a very firm grip on power indeed. Yet his crown sits a lot more uneasily on his head today than you would have imagined three months ago.
Liverpool have gone from being serious contenders for the English championship to a team that will be lucky to make it into the top six at the end of the season. As for the European Champions League, where they have done well under Benitez, compensating for their failure to compete for the top spot in England, right now they have one foot out of the competition. At this rate, Benitez will not be eating Christmas pudding; he'll be eating turron, a sweet and nutty Spanish delicacy enjoyed over the Christmas season, with his mum back home in Madrid.
Then look at Barcelona football club, who last season played as well as any team I have ever seen anywhere.
Their star player, Leo Messi, is a shoe-in for FIFA World Player and European footballer of the year. His closest rivals for the biggest individual titles the game has to offer are his team mates Andres Iniesta and Xavi Hernandez. I imagined, as did a whole lot of people the world over, that Barcelona's dominance would last, if not for ever, for a very good while. A couple of seasons more, for sure. No one was playing football as fluid and as compact, as beautiful and as efficient as they were.
Now suddenly in the last three weeks everything has been thrown into doubt. Messi, after a fabulous first four weeks of the season, looks ordinary. He has done nothing for his national team (admittedly Argentina have a stupendously moronic coach right now, and a generally poor bunch of players) but he has also been ineffective four games in a row for Barcelona, where everybody is very good. Yet this week, they go and lose at home in the Champions League to a Russian team no one has ever heard of. (Wait a moment for me to go to the Internet to find out who they were....) Rubin Kazan, they are called. Sounds like the name of a New York hairdresser.
Apparently their best player, who no one had ever heard of either, was out injured, yet they beat a full strength Barcelona convincingly, in Barcelona.
Talking of mighty powers, Manchester United are looking pretty shabby these days too. Chelsea are not exactly convincing either. But, well, it was ever thus. The mighty rise and fall in football with a speed far greater than empires or political systems. On reflection, on second thoughts, what Havel says about power not being eternal might be news for people in politics, but for those of us who follow football,
it is the most obvious lesson in the world. As we philosophers of the game know, football mirrors life, an incurable disease marked by peaks of hope and troughs of despair that ends, unavoidably, in death.