World cup starts today

H ere it comes, then. After the storm: the storm. Brazil 2014 is finally upon us, a drama of ranged tectonic interests and
high-end chicanery now dissolved into the relatively simple matter of the world's greatest sporting event.

This has been the peculiar
trajectory of this World Cup , which already feels like a tale told in reverse, a seven-year,
continental-scale wrangle that has dwindled away now to this, a series of football matches over four weeks in summer, starting with the hosts' opening fixture against Croatia in São Paulo on Thursday night.

Brazil, naturally, expects. Although it must be said this has from the start been the most
disobedient of global extravaganzas, chafing relentlessly against its own outsized margins.

In the Brazilian government's ludicrously optimistic recent TV advert campaign – described by federal prosecutors as "absurdly
divorced from reality" – Brazil 2014 was styled not just a World Cup but as the World Cup: a
Copa das Copas – and this, at least, rings true.

There are World Cups and there are World Cups. And then there are Brazilian World Cups. For all the broader themes of vanished
infrastructure projects and social unrest, Brazil 2014 is at heart a genuinely thrilling prospect, a
pure sporting treasure to make even the most jaded observer drool a little.

When it comes to World Cups in the modern era only Italia 90 gets close as a return to one of football's grand sentimental heartlands.

USA 94 can match Brazil for sheer geographical spread. South Africa carried similar nation- building ambitions. The Copa das Copas, though, has the lot. There had been some talk
in the shemozzle over Qatar 2022 of a first winter World Cup.

But let's face it, this one already feels like Christmas. Although even here there are contradictions. Seven years ago there seemed little doubt about what this World Cup would mean to Brazilians. But prosperity and education tend to take the edge off a diet of bread and circuses
and the protests that have attached themselves to the edges of the World Cup are not so much an indication of concerted hostility towards the tournament itself – and certainly not to Luiz
Felipe Scolari's affectionately regarded Seleção – but a symptom of wider dissatisfaction with Fifa and an ingrained and horribly self-serving industrial overclass, a collision of old and new that is central to Brazil's wider future.

Plus the protests are another reminder of the indissoluble link between football, the World
Cup and Brazil's basic sense of itself. This is a nation whose progress can be measured against these four-yearly intercontinental encampments.