As the climax of World Cup competition approached, it seemed that the momentous events strained conventional reporting techniques of factual description and analysis. What was required instead was the imaginative reach of a fiction writer. TIME asked British Novelist Anthony Burgess, from whose eclectic mind have sprung such novels as A Clockwork Orange and Enderby, to comment on the Cup. Burgess watched some of the early action in Germany. Here are some of his thoughts:
In West Berlin, the restaurant of the Kempinski Hotel was serving a World Cup Cocktail—equal parts of curacao, vodka and orange juice—at 5½ Deutsche Mark a throw, or kick. On the Kudamm you could buy a record of the West German eleven trolling "Football is our life . . . King Football rules the world." Democratic Germany, as opposed to the German Democratic Republic, was taking the footballworld-mastership to her uncorseted and friendly bust. The spirit of internationalism was stretched so far that even selected chain gangs from the workers' paradise over the Wall were clanked into the corruptive world of blue films and blue jeans, then—on the final whistle of the match they witnessed—knouted off again. Frankfurt airport, with team supporters looking for planes to Dortmund, Munich, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf and Hannover, was a Brechtian fantasy of chauvinistic headgear and rosettes. Among the major nations unrepresented in the jostle there seemed to be only the Americans, who have never taken to the game, and the English, who invented it, but whose team lost out in elimination matches.
To any Englishman who happened to be caught up in the crowd and whizzed off to one of the stadia, there was the bittersweet sensation of seeming to hear, sung by millions, a song he had composed himself and for which he was getting no royalties. Not that England ever forced football on anyone except savages who had to be weaned from bloodier sports: the game has sold itself to civilized countries as effectively as whisky or Coca-Cola. Indeed football is the only international language, apart from sex.
Rudyard Kipling, England's national, not to say nationalistic, poet, dismissed England's two national games very scornfully: "The flannelled fools at the wicket, the muddied oafs at the goals." There was a flavor of sour grapes there. Though most will admit the gentlemanly folly of cricket, the imputation of oafishness to football was, even in Kipling's own day, a bit anachronistic. Kipling seems to have had in mind the ancient bloody kickaround of the village green with a dead dog or severed head for ball, not the modern game that started to shape itself in 1863.