The African Drought… and it’s not even in the Sahara

By Darshan Joshi, writing from Australia

It probably isn’t an understatement to say that the first few days of the World Cup have been slightly anticlimactic. For all the hype that was aroused in the build-up to ‘the greatest event on Earth’ (which is still undoubtedly is, and it’ll be explained shortly), the lack of goals and points, as well as the lavish of empty seats narrates to us a totally different story.

We’ll run through a few statistics first.

We’ve now had eleven matches (at the time of writing, the latest match was Italy-Paraguay), which represents a maximum total of 33 points. However, we’ve had four draws, along with, obviously, seven conquerors. That doesn’t sound to shabby, but, of those victories, only three have been won by a margin of two goals or more. Only South Korea (2-0 vs Greece), Germany (4-0 vs Australia) and the Netherlands (2-0 vs Denmark) have had relatively resounding victories so far.

The remaining four have ended in 1-0 victories for Argentina (vs Nigeria), Japan (vs Cameroon), Ghana (vs Serbia) and Slovenia (vs Algeria). Of the four draws we’ve had, though, only one has ended goalless (France vs Uruguay). The rest have ended with a goal apiece (South Africa vs Uruguay, England vs USA, Italy vs Paraguay).

Football is about goals, arguably. In these eleven matches, we’ve witnessed a mesmeric total of 18 goals. That’s just about 1.6 goals per game, and it’s probably worth noting that if it wasn’t for the Germans (or should I say, the Australians), we’d be looking at an average of 1.4 goals per match. To put this into perspective, Italia ‘90, which is currently the record-holder for the lowest goal average at a World Cup thus far, oversaw an average of 2.21 goals per match. That’s still well clear of this year’s barren drought.