‘…a feast for the eyes that watch it and a joy for the body that plays it. A reporter once asked the German theologian Dorothee Soelle: “How would you explain to a child what happiness is?”
“I wouldn’t explain it,” she answered. “I’d toss him a ball and let him play.”
Professional soccer does everything to castrate that energy of happiness, but it survives in spite of all the spites. And maybe that’s why soccer never stops being astonishing. As my friend Angel Ruocco says, that’s the best thing about it — its stubborn capacity for surprise. The more the technocrats program it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, soccer continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs, the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bow-legged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.’
–Eduardo Galeano, Soccer In Sun And Shadow
Surprises: Kaka getting a red card in today’s game; Italy tying New Zealand rather than trouncing them; the Jabulani ball not resulting in more goals, but less. The last one is perhaps not a surprise, when you think about the hubris (and idiocy) of technocrats who see nothing but the machine of televised money (yes, that’s you, FIFA), rather than the poetry of choice, the risk of play. Here’s to all the players who delight in the play, rather than in the flash of the gold pan. After all, the play’s the thing.
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