Brazil 2014 is the World Cup We’ve Been Waiting For

For the past quarter of a century at least, the World Cup has been a lie.

Anyone under the age of 30 could be forgiven for having felt cheated at some point by their own year of birth and the stories about the competition's classic tournaments of old.

Pelé, England's wingless wonder, Total Football, the genius of Diego Maradona; these great happenings of the past are so distant to those who never experienced them that they may as well be clichéd myths.

Their hyped-up regurgitation every four years only helps to establish a standard for World Cups that has no longer seemed obtainable. Entering into a new tournament off the back of these highlight reels felt like football's equivalent to all those novels and films set after the main thrust of their own narratives has been exhausted.

Who wants to be thrown into some largely inconsequential scenario after all the big players and proper action have been dealt with in some great or other meaty pre-history to sort out all the interesting stuff? It felt like a cop out, as though those too young to know a proper World Cup had already missed the boat. Yet 2014 feels different. This could very well be the World Cup we've been waiting to be alive for.

The football so far has been immaculate. Not one game has properly disappointed or let down the momentum of the spectacle, and goals have been plentiful. Brazil may have already witnessed this year's greatest finish barely a week into the competition, such was the gravitas of Robin van Persie's salmon-flop header against Spain, and if it were to go on to win goal of the tournament, its billing wouldn't be a slight on the quality of the other landmark strikes that are surely to come.

It was so unexpected and unusually brilliant, given the context of the game and the strangeness of the striker's movement that it instantly took on the sheen of a great World Cup moment. You knew that what you had just seen had instantly crystalized into a fresh reference point in the all-time footballing canon.

Beyond the goals that have been scored, the matches themselves have been enthralling. Even the teams expected to bring down the occasion due to their apparent lack of calibre have added great vigor to their group games. Honduras' threatening resistance versus France not only amplified their opponent's skill but was also pretty entertainingly brutal in its own right.

Mediocrity has been purged and odds have been overturned, with Costa Rica summing up this tournament's early disdain for the pedestrian and insipid by punishing Uruguay for assuming they could get by on reputation alone. Their three goals were slick, decisive, and arrived in the back of their betters' net like the jabs of a wildcard playing a tune on the ribs of a complacent former heavyweight.

Argentina's opening game against Bosnia may have started slowly, but rather than settling for a turgid 1-0 win, their coach Alejandro Sabella threw on a playmaker and striker in the second half to liven things up, and was rewarded with a Lionel Messi goal and a 2-1 victory.

There's been a sense of cosmic justice at play too. Common sense reigned as Paul Pogba got away with kicking out at an opponent, retaliating as anybody would after receiving a few swift boots and stamps from his aggressor while on the floor. On the home front in England, tax-dodging Tory-pop bastard Gary Barlow's World Cup anthem was quietly pulled, allowing World In Motion and Three Lions to flare up uncontested. The England team itself for once looks dynamic and exciting largely thanks to a new-found faith in youthful promise and attacking talent.

On the field of play, the stilted dominance of tiki-taka has been crushed, not by a rival bureaucracy of possession stats and sideways passes, but by an unheralded Dutch team with the pace and individuals to smash the establishment. Now it feels almost as though Spain's grip on the shape of football to come has been broken, giving way for everyone else to have a go at stamping their style of play on the tournament. If any result has encapsulated all that has been good about the opening days of Brazil 2014 it was indeed their 5-1 defeat.

Yet all this has happened in a tournament beset by protests on the street over FIFA corruption and the diverting of public funds away from services and into the coffers of corporate sponsors and Swiss bank accounts. Surely such controversy should temper the excitement surrounding a World Cup, no matter how brilliant the football might be?

Perhaps not. In fact, the pre-tournament trouble may have even helped give Brazil 2014 the edge that it has been so very lacking since the shady back drop of 1978 when the Argentinian junta hosted the World Cup; or 1986 when Colombia had to forfeit their right to host to Mexico. Many of the greatest tournaments came to life in surprisingly dark circumstances or settings, and furthermore Brazil feels like a fully-fledged football nation, too.

This year hasn't been a hand-out to boost the appeal of the game across a new frontier. Nobody is in any doubt of their authenticity or suitability as hosts, besides the concerns aired by the protesters. The Brazilian heat has so far only helped to strip teams back to the foundations of their technique and open up defenses through lapses in concentration, which has made the action all the more watchable.

Before 2014, the closest the under-30's got to a truly, historically great tournament was USA 94 or France 98, and both had their fair share of immortal moments, from the magic of Roberto Baggio and Argentina vs. Romania, to Dennis Bergkamp's goal in Marseille, and Lillian Thuram vs. Croatia. Compared to the legendary retellings of Brazil between 1962 and 1970, Total Football in 1974, and the purity of Mexico 86, these seem to shrink under scrutiny. They had great matches and great players, sure, but somehow the weight of history still seemed out of equilibrium in favor of the earlier events.

Yet that could all be a trick of the mind, brought on by rose-tinted revisionism and hindsight. That still wouldn't alter the fact that Brazil 2014 has begun with such aplomb that it is already being spoken of in a way that South Africa 2010, Germany 2006 and South Korea and Japan 2002 never were. This isn't the shock of the new. It's something more than novelty.

If all those old tournaments really did benefit from some generous nostalgia, then maybe this year's tournament is special. Already it stands out from its modern equivalents and, if it continues along its current trajectory, it really could be the greatest World Cup of all-time.

Greg Johnson is a freelance writer based in London. He has written for The Blizzard, Squawka, FourFourTwo, Drowned In Sound and The Mirror amongst other publications. Follow him on Twitter.