Every Four Years, This Consumes the World

This is the first year in a long time where I've found myself being pretty woefully negligent with following club level football in Europe. A couple solid reasons (excuses) can account for this. I no longer have television, so I couldn't watch the matches if I wanted. I've tried the whole getting up ungodly early on Saturdays and Sundays and heading to the few bars and burrito joints that feature about five or six televisions showing matches from all across the world, but for some reason the last place I'm in the mood to be at that hour on the weekends is in either of those places when I could instead read in bed with a cup of warm tea. Liverpool, the English club I normally follow, has suffered through a pretty ungainly year, failing to even make the UEFA Cup for next year. Additionally, finding Spain's La Liga matches on television is plain arduous work, as in scour the Spanish and Italian speaking enclaves (and the enclaves within enclaves, like honeycombs inside of honeycombs) and trying to find which one in particular shows Barcelona's matches and then struggle and squeeze my way into a seat, not a chair, but a spot on the floor to sit, as in this is San Francisco and that's a hell of a lot of work to watch a game, and given that I had my trust placed firmly on the shoulders of Leo Messi to carry Barcelona all the way to the end, which he did, I wasn't extremely desperate to watch. I haven't been totally absent, as in I've been keeping up with scores and developments, but I haven't been as ardent as in years past. In a lot of ways this has good thing. My early morning weekend focus was thus unchained and allowed to shift elsewhere. Nobody ever really needs to follow sports as closely as they allow themselves.

Now, however, with the kickoff for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa a diminishing and anticipatory one (one!) day away, it's time to get back in gear. If there's any time undeniably appropriate for football fanaticism, it's the World Cup, a time in which the entire revolving, three-quarks-away-from-losing-its-collective-mind globe in some cases literally shuts down to watch its darling. Maybe the Euros could rival the World Cup, whose occurrence comes in the halfway point between each World Cup serves as but an appetizer, but the fervency is a tad watered-down. Despite all Americentric delusions, this is, as far as the rest of the world is concerned (and that's a boatload of intelligent people), the time when the world's rightfully most popular and important and all-embodying sport takes center stage for a month and is just fucking supreme. A month of athletic jazz. A month of elegance and class, and no, not that the players involved are rigid symbols of either of those two things, but the game itself: watching football is watching an elegant and classy performance. Even America experiences a tiny little peak in its y-axis of football spectatorship during this period, and why not? No other sport has as much nationalistic pride caught up and ensnared in its spikes, trampling up and down a wide open pitch. Check out the stands, the banners and the gonfalons threading trembling quilts across the mezzanines. Listen to the songs' roar before match play. It's an arrantly bewildering experience. For one month, what is globally recognized as the greatest sport on earth assumes its merited place. And football is just that, in every possible way, a game of physics, geometry, and philosophy: when to push, where to push, who to push, when to pull back, attacks and defense, the game an amoebic mucilaginous creature that changes with every decision a team, even a player makes. This is a tactician's dream, chess with living, moving, dynamic people. I will state without reproach: if a person does not enjoy football that is a deficiency on their part, not football's. There is something lacking inside of you, not the sport, something fundamentally absent.

Spain's Fernando Torres and David Villa doing what will, I hope, be a common occurrence: celebrating sensational goals.

As always, my allegiance goes to Spain, who will kick things off against Switzerland on the 16th. Rebounding from a few injuries some of their key figures suffered during club play, it should be interesting to see what they can pull off. The good news is Torres, Iniesta, and Fabregas are all three (putatively) healthy and fit. For a month my Europhilia is vindicated. With that: ¡Viva la Furia Roja!¹

The charge remains: it's all still children's games. Just damned good ones.












1. There was what may or may not border on an unhealthy and quite realistically offensive amount of hyperbole present in the previous paragraphs. My own personal, un-vulcan exuberance got the best of me. I don't apologize.