SIDELINE CUT:In years to come, the sound of the vuvuzela will be instantly associated with South Africa 2010, writes KEITH DUGGAN

THE VUVUZELA overshadowed the Jabulani football as the chief controversy of the World Cup but, now that the tournament has reached its crescendo, the sound of silence will return unless the horns find their natural home among our elected representatives in Dáil Éireann.

Blaring vuvuzelas – FG would favour the ramrod straight instruments, the FF’ers would go for the twisty ones while the Greens would blow vuvuzela fashioned from the wood of the kigelia tree – across the chamber might not solve the problems of the country. But it would be a hell of a lot more dignified than simply bellowing at one another.

Love them or loathe them, the vuvuzelas made a universal impact over the past month. Many of the world’s best football players – accustomed to doing their stuff to a backdrop of pop music riffs, poisonous chants and X-rated insults – declared the monotonic sound to be a terrible distraction to their game. The most vociferous complainants were the Dutch whose normal World Cup form has been so disrupted by the vuvuzelas that they have qualified for the final for the first time since 1978 in Argentina.

Television audiences were even rattier in their reaction. The BBC controllers must have felt truly influential after they received hundreds of calls from viewers complaining about the din the South Africans horns caused in their living rooms, as if the Beeb somehow had the power to do anything about the stadium behaviour of fans at the other side of the world. People are creatures of habit and they did not like having to tune their ears to commentary through the background buzz.

They certainly created an unusual football atmosphere, replacing the usual lulls and groans that reflect the play on the field. Sometimes when goals were scored in South Africa, there was no discernible change in the stadium noise other than a slight increase in the volume of the vuvuzela chorus.

In the early weeks of the tournament, it drove people slightly daffy and methods to combat the noise were shared, with aeroplane and swimming ear plugs the most common device. It must have been the first sports tournament where fans went to matches determined to hear as little as possible.

Sepp Blatter, that noted protector of individual cultures, decreed as early as the Confederations Cup that the vuvuzela would not be banned at the World Cup, arguing that it would be wrong to impose European customs on what is Africa’s tournament.

But there was a reason why the vuvuzela overwhelmed both the stars and audience of this World Cup: the fans enjoyed using them. It was not simply local people bringing the vuvuzela to games. People from every nation in the tournament got in on the act and clearly found trumpeting their way through matches to be highly enjoyable.

From old men to youngsters, they produced the same delighted reaction. They would stop on the street, bulge their cheeks like Louis Armstrong, produce a flat and mostly God-awful sound and look around for a reaction, delighted with themselves.

Tomorrow night’s final will be the last hurrah for the vuvuzela. Even as the controversy began in South Africa, organisers of future tournaments made hasty pronouncements to ban the instruments from their events. In years to come, the sound of the vuvuzela will be instantly associated with South Africa, just as the image of ticker-tape scattered across the pitch definitively belongs to Argentina and 1978.

In fact, the chances are that people who have been moaning about the vuvuzela are suddenly going to find themselves missing it. The World Cup is about to end and for the past month, that low drone has been the constant sound in millions of homes around the world.

It is not an exaggeration to say many fans are going to feel a small sense of bereavement after tomorrow night. It may not have been a vintage tournament, with muscle and organisation the abiding qualities, but it has lacked nothing in drama.

The departure of France from the tournament already seems like a distant memory and the indignant comments emanating from French political leaders in the immediate aftermath have led to nothing at all. All of France felt a burning shame at the way the team exited the World Cup but then the tournament moved on to the second round and it was soon forgotten about. Soon, it was England’s turn to engage in a day of introspection, to examine the shortcomings of the national game and the national character.

And then Argentina, the charmed team of the tournament, were forced to accept a lesson in international humiliation from Germany and before we knew it, Diego Maradona was back in Buenos Aires threatening to resign.

Brazil, too, were bounced out after 45 minutes of football that repudiated everything that had been said about the team and Felipe Melo, fingered as the chief architect of Brazil’s demise, is reportedly “in hiding” this week. Such are the extreme passions that World Cups evoke. But the tournament keeps shifting and Brazil’s pain, too, will ease as they settle down to watch tomorrow night’s final, after which either Spain or Holland will be plunged into a deep if temporary period of disappointment.

Watching Holland almost win the World Cup is supposed to be a rite of passage. The shimmering genius of Johan Cruyff and company has become so overblown through comparison that when you see the highlight footage now it is almost a surprise to see that the Oranje teams of 1974 and 1978 weren’t holding glasses of champagne in their hands as they performed their own brand of football cabaret.

The big surprise that the South Africa World Cup produced has been the steady resolve of Spain and the Netherlands, the perennial disappointments of the former tournament, into winning forces.

To do so they have discarded much of their traditional approach to the game, with the Dutch almost rejecting the purist approach of their predecessors in favour of a more uncompromising and pragmatic game.

Even the Spanish, for all the effortless flicks and passes that Xavi and Iniesta decorate games with, are workhorses when it comes to closing teams down and harrying opposition teams into mistakes.

Spain v Netherlands is such an interesting pairing that it almost seems like an illusion. There will be veteran Italian and Englishmen out there yet to be convinced that it isn’t all one big trick and that the Germans, after everything, will win the whole thing.

But the sight of Bastian Schweinsteiger lingering on the pitch after his team were defeated by Spain said much about the tournament.

The Bayern Munich player is 25 now: he has gone from being the bright young thing of Germany’s fabulous run as hosts in 2006 to the leader of his team in this tournament. Already his chances of winning a World Cup medal are running out. Germany ought to be peaking in four years’ time but it does not always work out that way.

The reason the World Cup enthrals is that it crams so much into its five-week period and then vanishes. By the time it comes around again, so much has changed.

Glory, then, for the Netherlands or Spain and after the final whistle and the euphoria, Brazil and 2014 becomes the distant dream for all footballers and the sound of the vuvuzela will be locked into the treasure box of yet another World Cup archive.