You know it's World Cup time when England's most ferocious soccer fans are ordered to turn in their passports so they can't go to the games in Germany. “They drink until they vomit, rage bare-chested and pick fights with rival fans,” to quote the Washington Post's characterization of 3,300 identified “hooligans” not allowed to leave the island. To further ensure that the misfits won't do a reverse-Dunkirk and cross the channel in bathtubs, hooligans also must report to a local police station whenever England plays.
As to what punishment awaits cretins who disobey orders, no one has said.
Public beheadings, I'd suggest.
Just kidding. I'd settle for medieval torture of a cruel and unusual nature.
The world's game, the simple game, the beautiful game - soccer is all that, and for the next month we'll see it at its best. The World Cup is the one sports event that needs no explanation anywhere, save, perhaps, for the left field bleachers at Wrigley Field.
The game's lovers love it without inhibition. The author Robert Coover believes there are “only two universal games, war and soccer.” The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a newspaper column that compared a goal to “an orgasm by which a player, a team, a stadium, a country, all of humanity suddenly discharges its vital energy.” Which may explain why the late Mexican broadcaster Angel Fernandez so enthusiastically shouted, “Goooooooooal!!!”
I know zip about soccer. I do have eyes and ears, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up when standing up is called for, as in Barcelona on a summer day in 1982. That day a World Cup second-round game matched Italy and Brazil. Eight hours before, neighborhood streets around a little stadium teemed with Italians and Brazilians. They sang, played horns, hammered on steel drums. They stopped 10 hours later at game's end.
Maybe 40,000 people came to “La Bombonera,” the Candybox, an ancient place with plank seating for less than half the crowd. Coover was there: “Invested with his team or national colors, making strange aggressive noises with airhorns, whistles, trumpets, drums and firecrackers, crying out the holy name ('EE-TAHL-YA!') or singing repetitive liturgical chants, falling out of historical time and geographical space into a kind of ceremonial trance, timeless and centripetal, he does not seem a spectator so much as a participant in a sacramental rite ... ”
Such a fan often doesn't see the game at all, Coover suggests. Instead, he experiences it “at a level that is blind, irrational, profound, innocent. ... He has come, not to reflect or spectate or be entertained, but to participate, to surrender, to suffer.”
The Italy-Brazil game was breathtaking in its pace, both teams relentless on the attack. Italy won, 3-2, all its goals scored by Paolo Rossi, who had been suspended for two years on charges of bribery and game-fixing. How convenient, cynics in the Candybox press area muttered, that Rossi's ban ended just in time for World Cup play. The next week, Italy and Rossi won the championship.
Blind, irrational, profound ...
That, too, is soccer around the world.
Thousands of deaths in soccer stadiums - caused by hooligans, by stampede, by substandard construction - have occurred in countries from Argentina to Zambia. Were baseball the cause of even the tiniest fraction of those deaths, Americans would be aghast. The soccer world mourns and moves on with business as usual.
Even now, Italy again comes to a World Cup on the dark wings of scandal. Three players, all from the nation's most famous club, Juventus, and the national team coach have been implicated in game-fixing and illegal betting. Those stories have gone mostly unnoticed in the United States where, had they been about football, there might well have been public beheadings.
Meanwhile, back on Hooligans' Island, all the talk is about the Manchester United prodigy, Wayne Rooney, or, more precisely, the injured fourth metatarsal in his right foot. Newsday sportswriter Chuck Culpepper says by e-mail from London, where he is at work on a book, “If I hear one more thing about that damned metatarsal ...”
All England awaits Rooney's healing in time for this World Cup in Germany. There is, after all, a history here. That history was noted most famously before the England-West Germany final of the 1966 World Cup. In an editorial, The Times of London advised perspective: “Fret not, boys, if on the morrow we should lose to the Germans at our national game, for twice this century we have defeated them at theirs.”
England won again, 4-2.
Kindred is a sports columnist for The Sporting News
Public beheadings, I'd suggest.
Just kidding. I'd settle for medieval torture of a cruel and unusual nature.
The world's game, the simple game, the beautiful game - soccer is all that, and for the next month we'll see it at its best. The World Cup is the one sports event that needs no explanation anywhere, save, perhaps, for the left field bleachers at Wrigley Field.
The game's lovers love it without inhibition. The author Robert Coover believes there are “only two universal games, war and soccer.” The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a newspaper column that compared a goal to “an orgasm by which a player, a team, a stadium, a country, all of humanity suddenly discharges its vital energy.” Which may explain why the late Mexican broadcaster Angel Fernandez so enthusiastically shouted, “Goooooooooal!!!”
I know zip about soccer. I do have eyes and ears, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up when standing up is called for, as in Barcelona on a summer day in 1982. That day a World Cup second-round game matched Italy and Brazil. Eight hours before, neighborhood streets around a little stadium teemed with Italians and Brazilians. They sang, played horns, hammered on steel drums. They stopped 10 hours later at game's end.
Maybe 40,000 people came to “La Bombonera,” the Candybox, an ancient place with plank seating for less than half the crowd. Coover was there: “Invested with his team or national colors, making strange aggressive noises with airhorns, whistles, trumpets, drums and firecrackers, crying out the holy name ('EE-TAHL-YA!') or singing repetitive liturgical chants, falling out of historical time and geographical space into a kind of ceremonial trance, timeless and centripetal, he does not seem a spectator so much as a participant in a sacramental rite ... ”
Such a fan often doesn't see the game at all, Coover suggests. Instead, he experiences it “at a level that is blind, irrational, profound, innocent. ... He has come, not to reflect or spectate or be entertained, but to participate, to surrender, to suffer.”
The Italy-Brazil game was breathtaking in its pace, both teams relentless on the attack. Italy won, 3-2, all its goals scored by Paolo Rossi, who had been suspended for two years on charges of bribery and game-fixing. How convenient, cynics in the Candybox press area muttered, that Rossi's ban ended just in time for World Cup play. The next week, Italy and Rossi won the championship.
Blind, irrational, profound ...
That, too, is soccer around the world.
Thousands of deaths in soccer stadiums - caused by hooligans, by stampede, by substandard construction - have occurred in countries from Argentina to Zambia. Were baseball the cause of even the tiniest fraction of those deaths, Americans would be aghast. The soccer world mourns and moves on with business as usual.
Even now, Italy again comes to a World Cup on the dark wings of scandal. Three players, all from the nation's most famous club, Juventus, and the national team coach have been implicated in game-fixing and illegal betting. Those stories have gone mostly unnoticed in the United States where, had they been about football, there might well have been public beheadings.
Meanwhile, back on Hooligans' Island, all the talk is about the Manchester United prodigy, Wayne Rooney, or, more precisely, the injured fourth metatarsal in his right foot. Newsday sportswriter Chuck Culpepper says by e-mail from London, where he is at work on a book, “If I hear one more thing about that damned metatarsal ...”
All England awaits Rooney's healing in time for this World Cup in Germany. There is, after all, a history here. That history was noted most famously before the England-West Germany final of the 1966 World Cup. In an editorial, The Times of London advised perspective: “Fret not, boys, if on the morrow we should lose to the Germans at our national game, for twice this century we have defeated them at theirs.”
England won again, 4-2.
Kindred is a sports columnist for The Sporting News
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