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COMMENTARY
July 14, 2010
Horrid little game
The idea that I know nothing about soccer, and therefore should not write about it, occurred to me just before starting this sentence, but I will not let that slow me down. The journalist who entertained such morbid doubts would soon collapse into a heap of neuroses.One might love what one does not understand (men have been known to love women, after all), but here again, the reader should find no reason to trust me. I hate soccer; and my hatred of it is compounded with bitter personal experience. At the age of seven, I was first tackled in soccer -- by the ball itself, there being no other player near me -- and the memory of that humiliating experience (people were watching) lingers still. Like any red-blooded Canadian, I cannot remember having played, since, except under compulsion. Not that I am against risking injury in sport. My opposition is, instead, to pointless injuries, such as those I obtained playing this unpleasant sport in a Canadian high school. I scored. At first this fact made no sense to me, I had merely kicked the ball into a crowd of players outside the enemy net, to get it away from me. It must have passed through a dozen pair of legs before beating the keeper. As the match progressed, I scored twice more, for I had by now analysed the game and discovered the secret of scoring goals. You just kick the thing at the net blindly, from any distance, regardless of obstacles. (Check first that it is the opponents' goal, not your own.) And that net is so ridiculously large, the ball will likely as not go in. It was after the third such goal that I came to regret what I had discovered. For I was suddenly piled upon by an over-enthusiastic mob of my own teammates. For weeks afterwards I was limping from the injuries sustained in that melee. Another World Cup has come and blessedly gone, and the matter can soon be retired as a topic of North American conversation, for another four years. One hopes; though I was discouraged to learn that record audiences in the United States had been watching this tournament on TV. It is not a sport for free men (I will return to this point in a moment), and we might reasonably fear that this growing interest is symptomatic of the spread of Eurosclerotic socialism, in our neighbour to the south. Soon, Canada may find herself alone in defending the values of western civilization. Yet I can't be sure about here, either. For weeks, until Sunday, it was impossible to get a beer in most cities without having to watch the gnats move about on some soccer pitch in South Africa. And one could not but wince at the triumphalist displays of "multicultural" chauvinism, blocking one's progress on the road home -- the horns honking, the flags waving that are not our own. For soccer itself would be harmless if ignored; it is these "fans" who gratuitously enlarge the carbon footprint. A Swedish acquaintance once explained why "ice hockey" (his term, not mine) is an infinitely superior team sport to soccer. He said, a hockey game that ends zero-zero will almost certainly have been a memorably exciting, brilliant and competitive affair. Whereas, a soccer match that ends zero-zero is almost certainly cataleptically boring and quite possibly fixed. He added that, "Most soccer games seem to end zero-zero." And indeed, if an octopus in a German aquarium could successfully predict the result of all eight World Cup matches on which he was consulted -- the evidence for this has been captured on YouTube and is not refutable -- why would anyone bother to watch? I made my own, almost equally successful predictions, by working from a very simple tactic. I long ago discovered that any professional sports team I supported immediately crashed out of anything like a playoff. So, before each elimination match, I resolved to support the team whose fans would make more noise on our streets afterwards, thus guaranteeing that they would lose. And while I have to admit I was not rewarded with a final between New Zealand and Switzerland, I will claim credit for crashing out Italy, France, Portugal, Argentina, and Brazil along the way. I must take credit for the final match, too. I was going to root for Spain, thus assuring a Netherlands victory, but on public transport earlier was annoyed by a bunch of orange-shirted Dutch hooligans, so decided to root for them instead. It was a very ugly match, that might have ended in penalties had a referee not interceded with the red card, in extra time, that was required to finally cripple the Dutch defence. Really one should watch just the referees, in soccer. They're the ones who decide who will win, when the teams can't agree between themselves how to fix it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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