In the end, the violence wasn't a landscape spectacle and didn't come from the fans or terrorists, marshalled and threatened into submission by ultra-police pressures, it came from the players - Zidane's moment of rarefied brutality - and, more desperately from the organisers.

Jürgen "Mister WM" Kießling, the man who put together the fandango free-for-all that was the Berlin Fan Mile, acted as speaker for the twelve World Cup cities, and who spent the final two years of his life putting together the various events that surrounded the tournament, crowned his World Cup achievement last night by shooting himself in the brain. It is a lesser mystery than the one preoccupying the media at the moment (what did Materazzi say - lip readers are shamelessly hiking the rates for their rarely-sought powers) but just as potent in its emotional impact. What does this tournament do to these people?

Even those that hate and barely understand football ended up getting caught in the fascination of people around them. To them it is a relief that the World Cup is over, but perhaps no-one can be as glad as Kießling. He did everything he could to foist it on our lives, and now he's gone - preoccupied by the nothingness of it all.