Reading Between the Lines

Erick’s post brings up some interesting issues that are not at all specific to European Football, but rather are universal complaints of sports fans. Ultimately we search for the fulfillment of a platonic ideal in our everyday viewing of sports; the events that captivate us and imprint permanently in our synaptic memory are those events that in fact approach this ideal. How many of us have replayed in our minds Chalmers drilling that three pointer or David Tyree grasping the football with sheer will power. On the other hand how many hundreds if not thousands of sporting memories have all but vanished from our minds mere moments after they passed. We can only rarely be satisfied with sports because we invest so much in their potential.

But. This is in fact the nature of the game, and raison d’etre of 2nd sport-dom, by adding context to every game, and subtext to every player, the dialogue created between the viewer and the event should surpass the otherwise subscendent reality of a lot of sporting events. And European Football offers this type of context in spades.

Turkey vs Germany screams for such a context, and the beauty of the game, or the utter lack, can be seen, less as a failure to achieve an ideal of the game itself, as a particular cultural iteration of a largely rule bound exercise. And in this unique manner of viewing the game we can watch with rapt fascination as a team trying to pry into the very core nature of Occidentalism via a base Oriental nature clashes with a cultural identity that is almost the definition of the former. While the Turks struggle to handle the game and chain their wild desires to a codified method, the Germans are masters of the set piece, turning subtle cracks into gaping holes. Watching them eviscerate the Portugese one set piece at a time was not ugly but a very different beauty than Ronaldo’s preening vanity.

Spain-Russia is almost the exact opposite, much as they inhabit opposite corners of the Continent, they are opposites that happen to converge on a very similar essence. This is anarchy via Liberation contra anarchy via Ultimatum. This is eating dinner at 1230am against drinking vodka at 830am. And these two teams gun at the goal like they burn their own capital in spite or live in the hills out of a crazy desire to live as they wish. I think anyone who loves attacking Football will love the way these two teams abandon convention for a unique vision of perfection.