"Some believe football [soccer] is a matter of life and death - but it's much, much more important than that."

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- Legendary Scottish football philosopher, truth-teller, player and manager Bill Shankly

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What a fabulous pageant the World Cup is proving to be! Your already football-bewitched columnist has scarcely missed a televised moment of it. And everywhere one hears hitherto football-indifferent folk rhapsodising about how this World Cup tournament is leaving them giddily engaged.

How are we to explain this phenomenon, this delirium? Let a million ideas bloom!

Football among national teams (this World Cup involves 48 national teams) allows fans some warm, thrilling, generally harmless expressions of patriotism.

Those of us who love our countries with all our hearts but who find swaggering, jingoistic, wrapped-in-the-flag, xenophobic stop-the-boats sorts of patriotism sickening really love to express our patriotism through love of our nations' sporting teams.

The fact of this World Cup bristling with the teams of 48 football nations gives the tournament a grand, geopatriotic, multinational, multicultural sweep.

There's a sense (however impossible the dream) that this really is the way - playing football against each other - nations should relate to one another, their rivalries expressed and settled through a beautiful ball game rather than through wars, invasions and menaces.

And so this World Cup gives us a glimpse of our dear species' better side, of the possibility of a better world. On TV the crowd scenes of the excitement and joy and despair on multicultural faces of all colours are sweetly humanising to see.

And following the World Cup intensely, at every match picking a team to barrack for, qualifies one for a kind of guest patriotism. So far in this World Cup, glued to my screens, I have at different times been passionately Scottish, Senegalese, Haitian, Paraguayan, Panamanian, Portuguese and Norwegian, and, for Belgium's match against the deplorably Trump-assisted USA,........

© Canberra Times