***A lot of hearts were broken here in Bangladesh when the team lost. You could see it on all those morose faces, all rendered morbid by a calamity they had never foreseen. It was an entirety of Bangladesh that was left beating its chest in despair.****

PRIME Minister Sheikh Hasina thinks that the World Cup is over as far as Bangladesh is concerned. You know, she could well be right. For her, as she confesses, or nearly, the game was over when her favourite team crashed out of the series. And that was Brazil. You tend to wonder how she must have reacted when Brazil lost, rather inadvertently, to the Netherlands.

A lot of hearts were broken here in Bangladesh when the team lost. You could see it on all those morose faces, all rendered morbid by a calamity they had never foreseen. It was an entirety of Bangladesh that was left beating its chest in despair.

Football is much like politics. It arouses some of our most sublime, and sometimes some of our basest, passions. Weeks before this year's World Cup got underway, the degree of emotion that often gets the better of our reason began to manifest itself through all that hoisting of foreign flags, fundamentally Brazilian and Argentine, all over the country. Not a street could be located that did not willingly lose itself in a flood of these flags. And they came in all

shapes and sizes — tiny, not so tiny, big, large and gigantic.

On some streets, Bengali football aficionados made it a point to let citizens know that they were behind all that tough job of putting up the flags across the street. Their names were on the flags. They ran from post to pillar and horn pillar to post, looking for pillars on which to post the flags and for posts from which they could proudly proclaim the imminent triumph of the teams of their preference at the World Cup. Those teams were for them pillars of unbridled strength.

Bengali journalists flew all the way to Johannesburg to file their on-the-spot despatches about the historic goings-on at the tournament. Here at home, at their desks in their discrete offices, they got into animated discussions on the stars who would emerge even more brilliant from the Cup.

People talked of Messi, endlessly. They speculated on the many ways in which he would storm into history, of the halo that would transform him into a beatific face in football's best traditions. Not one among those philosophising souls even remotely considered the chances of Messi ending up being part of a messy performance at some

point.

Bangladesh's former and present footballers spoke with all the wisdom at their command of how the Argentines and the Brazilians would end up ruling the world of football. Ronaldo, Kaka and Messi, it was drilled into our humble little imaginations, were the wave of the present and the tsunami of the future. Woe befell you if you so much as voiced a quiet note of dissent.

And then began the stream of defeats. Shock and awe, we soon came to understand, did not have to be terms only the American military employed in battle. It was also something that could floor star footballers and, with them, their fanatical followers.

The English went down speedily. The much-vaunted David Beckham watched in despair from the stands. Not many tears were shed when England lost. There was a reason. Over these past many years, England fans and the British media have tended to look upon their players more as pop stars than as footballers. Beckham and his wife Victoria have been glorified beyond the reasonable.

Much the same kind of praise was showered on this year's England team. And then it lost. You were not surprised. And then Brazil lost. Its fans were shocked. You were not, for you had recalled all along that in football, as in politics, nothing is taken for granted and unpredictability is the great certainty.

All across Bangladesh, Brazil's flags came down. Some Brazil lovers wept, copiously. Others remained stunned. And some

quietly prayed for the fall of the Argentines. And they did that because Argentine supporters, in misplaced sentiment, had thought that with Brazil now out of the way, it would be their team that would fly home to Buenos Aires with the World Cup.

They forgot the ferocious precision with which the Germans might cut their team down. And cut it down they did. It was brutal, it was fast, it was surgical. At times it was hard watching Argentina take all that bruising and battering. Brutality was at work. Football, you realised, had turned into a blood sport, with the blood oozing from the battered remains of what was once the Argentine squad. When the mauling ended, Bangladesh went eerily quiet. Not a soul spoke, not a heart beat in happiness.

There is a silence that reminds you of the smouldering ruins of Troy. Life, you tend to think given the gaping holes which today define the hearts in Bangladesh's Brazil fans and Argentine loyalists, has lost much of its meaning. The sepulchral is what you now hear in place of the animated reflections on how Brazil or Argentina or both would change the world as we have known it.

The Germans are coming. Or is it the Spaniards? It does not really matter. You see no flags that will make you think of Berlin or Madrid. The heart in the Bengali has cracked. There are echoes of Miss Havisham nearly everywhere. Cemeteries crowd your imagination.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, CurrentAffairs, The Daily Star. E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk