A moment when the numerals on the giant electronic scoreboards at the new Stade de France assume far more importance than the hieroglyphs at Dow Jones become more significant, in fact, than the Asian meltdown, Security Council resolutions, Madonna's love life or peptic ulcers, for that matter. So let the festivities begin. Bring on the dancers and skaters, the inflatable mascots and the acrobats on stilts and let only superlatives lace the air -- for there is no doubt that these 64 matches to be played over 33 frenzied days will together constitute the greatest sporting spectacle on earth.

Football may have a hoary tradition, some say dating back 2,000 years to the days ofChina's Han Dynasty, yet it has had the power to reinvent itself over the years. Today, it has become something of a metaphor of the times, generously lending its language to globalspeak, its purse to a thousand causes, its spirit of universalism to humanity at large. It is this spirit that Jules Rimet, an early president of FIFA, wished to utilise and further through an international series that could celebrate the glory of the game.

When 1994 champions Brazil play Scotland to kick off the 16th World Cup in Paris, it will be as much a salute to Rimet as a tribute to the all-time greats of the game, from Pele and Maradonna to Cruyff and Beckenbauer.

There's also something about the game that resists the status quo, that carries with it a whiff of rebellion, the ever-present possibility of instability.

Perhaps this is because it is a game that thrives on uncertainty -- a soccer second can truly invert a pyramid. England's medieval monarch Edward II discovered this vexatious quality about the game earlyand expressed his forebodings in no uncertain terms in a proclamation: ``Forasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may arise, which God forbid; we command and forbid on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in future.''

In hindsight, there was some reason for this kingly caution. Edward's 20th century descendants proved how clear-headed he was by taking it upon themselves to introduce football hooliganism into the lexicon of the game.

Yet, at its best, it is the same glorious unpredictability of football that makes Maradonna attribute a goal to divine intervention, Brazilian spectators dance a samba to the strides of their heroes, Italians paint their faces in the national tricolour and prisoners in Bangladesh threaten riots if deprived of a television during the matches. Vive la World Cup!