Ballet With The Ball: A Love Story

Why do we fall in love with soccer? What happens? At some deep level the reason soccer snags us is that good soccer is beautiful, and it's difficult, and the two are related. A team kicking the ball to each other, passing into empty space that is suddenly filled by a player who wasn't there two seconds ago and who is running at full pelt and who without looking or breaking stride knocks the ball back to a third player who he surely can't have seen, who, also at full pelt and without breaking stride, then passes the ball, at say 60 miles an hour, to land on the head of a fourth player who has run 75 yards to get there and who, again all in stride, jumps and heads the ball with, once you realize how hard this is, unbelievable power and accuracy toward a corner of the goal just exactly where the goalkeeper, executing some complex physics entirely without conscious thought and through muscle-memory, has expected it to be, so that all this grace and speed and muscle and athleticism and attention to detail and power and precision will never appear on a score sheet and will be forgotten by everybody a day later—this is the strange fragility, the evanescence of soccer. It's hard to describe and it is even harder to do, but it does have a deep beauty, a beauty hard to talk about and that everyone watching a game discovers for themselves, a secret thing, and this is the reason why soccer, which has so much ugliness around it and attached to it, still sinks so deeply into us: Because it is, it can be, so beautiful.

No country tries as hard or as consistently to play beautiful soccer as Brazil. It's an ideological thing. That is why Brazilian players are so loved. Not in South America, of course, where they have the status of a regional sporting superpower, but by pretty much everyone else in the world. In fact, the Brazil soccer team is unique in sports in being an example of a beloved overdog. In general, sports fans, and especially soccer fans, hate the overdogs (Real Madrid in Spain, Juventus in Italy, Manchester United/Chelsea in England). But Brazil, the only team to have won five World Cups, the only team to have won it playing away from its own continent, is loved. So a great many soccer fans have, at the national level, two teams: their own, and Brazil. It is the only favorite that's a favorite.

John Lanchester

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Joga Bonito

Yo

Hey, here is another update.  Tim just got back from Bandon for his family vacation and he said that he was really bored.  So we're playing frisbee tomorrow because he has minor surgery on Wednesday.  On Tuesday I might work for Mrs. VanderVelde and my soccer cleats come from Eurosport.  On Wednesday we get ready and leave for Family Camp at Canby Grove Conference Center.  Thursday and Friday are spent at Family Camp and then Anna come home.  Woohoo!  So that's kinda what my week looks like for now.

John

 

P.S. I got talked to by the pastor for taking cookies for from the kitchen that weren't mine.

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Impossible Is Nothing.

World Cup Soccer

The tournament is over and Italy has earned their 4th world cup title.  I really wanted Germany to win but by some fluke Italy beat them.  All in all the experience was enjoyable though.  In a way this was my first world cup as a true fan, and what a cup to start on.  A month things that weren't supposed to happen.  Ghana beating the 2nd in the world Czech Republic in group play, uncalled for red and yellow cards by the refs, and the "invincible" Brazilian team finds out that even the sissy French can beat them.  Nevertheless,  I really had a good time following all the matches and upsets of the tournament.

 

In 2010 the FIFA World Cup will be played in South Africa, and then the USA will rise to the top.  And then the world will know that Football/Soccer is an american game.

 

John