Well, since I will be in Europe during the last several matches of the World Cup, and since I'm rather enjoying the whole experience right now, I thought I'd post a quote from
The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup. It's rather long, I know, but if you read it breathlessly all the way straight through, it kind of adds to the effect and you can imagine you're actually watching the action. Trust me!
That's what you learn, as soon as you start to play and watch football: that football is difficult and beautiful, and that the two are related. Players kick the ball to one another , pass into empty spae which 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 thrid player who he surely can't have seen who then, also at full pelt and without breaking stride, crosses the ball at sixty miles an hour to land on the head of a fourth player who has run seventy meters 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 towrad a corner of the goal just exactly where the goalkeeper, executing some complex phsyics 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 and passion comes to nothing, will never appear on a score-sheet or match report and will likely be forgotten a day later by everybody who saw it or took part in it. This is the beauty and also the strange fragility, the evanescence of football.
