I came late to soccer. I never played it, aside from whacking a ball around in friends’ yards, until I got to college, where it was more an excuse to get out and enjoy the fall than it was anything like an athletic pursuit. But because I didn’t grow up with it, I tend to analogize things for myself using the prism of baseball, which is the sport I did grow up with, and which still holds a place deep in me. Players and teams in soccer become baseball teams: Real Madrid is the Yankees. Barcelona is...
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Mea Copa – Group C: Days Late, Dollars Short
One of the simultaneously great and awful things about being a soccer fan in the US is that the games are on early Saturday morning. Matches from England and Germany have replaced Captain Nintendo and Saved by the Bell in my life. I wake up, make coffee and settle down in front of the TV to watch a game taking place in a different country, featuring players from all over the world (though rarely the US). I’ll sit there from 745 until — on some glorious Saturdays — 4 or 5, taking in not only matches from...
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Yesterday, I wrote about the incomprehensible moments of success amidst the drudgery of failure that make up a game of soccer (or baseball, it’s very difficult for me to separate the two games, which is its own incomprehensible moment). And, indeed, those moments make for transcendent moments, when strangers will leap from their chairs and embrace a stranger, simply because they happen to also be standing. Case in point: In October 2007, Spurs and Aston Villa played a match in which Spurs went down 4-1. It was a Wednesday afternoon match in Boston, so I was at...
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I have been told that some folks (which can only mean, like, 3 people I don’t live with) miss my postings. I have been remiss — blame poor educational services in US urban areas — and plan to make this up with more than quick hit videos. Therefore, beginning this very moment, and continuing every workday (various deities permitting) through next week, you’ll get a short post on one of the groups in the upcoming World Cup.* I’ll try to talk about every team, but I’ll admit, I don’t know much about half these squads. If they...
Continue reading...“The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.”
It’s like bringin a knife to a gunfight, pen to a testYour chest in the line of fire witcha thin-ass vestYou bringin them Boyz II Men, HOW them boys gon’ win? – Jay-Z, The Takeover When I moved to Boston, I lived in East Somerville. It’s a working class neighborhood full of Brazilians and Portuguese, and in any other soccer story, any other match preview, I might write about the sounds and sights of East Somerville in June 2006. But this is a story about tomorrow’s match, the first US match of this World Cup, against England. So it’s...
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