Best Way To Cure Post-World Cup Blues
Ben Knight
writes and publishes Onward!
It’s always soccer season somewhere
I remember standing in the back row of a rickety, bare-bones soccer stadium in – of all places – Venice, Italy.
Venezia. La Serenissima. A town where, on many of its winding, warren-like alleyways, the average building is a 16th-century palazzo.
It was 1997. I hadn’t come specifically for soccer, but I wasn’t going to let this dream vacation pass without attending a match.
Enjoying Watching Captain America
Ben Knight
writes and publishes Onward!
The Donovan effect
t’s insidious, it’s real – and as of noon Wednesday, Eastern daylight time, it’s entirely justified.
In the wake of the America-Algeria climax, my pal Rudi Schuller Facebooked in from South Africa his puzzlement that he’d found himself cheering for Landon Donovan … again.
I know how he feels – and the disorientation is a tricky adjustment.
With his last-gasp winning goal that won Group C and kept Uncle Sam’s World Cup stumble dance alive, Citizen Landon Captain America Donovan has cemented his place as the uncontested outward face of Yank soccer. It’s one of the biggest goals in the nation’s footy history, and should prove to be a huge boon to popularizing the world’s most popular game in the world’s most traditionally reluctant soccer nation.
Looking Brave, Clever And Comfortable
Ben Knight
writes and publishes Onward!
Snapshot of a moment: South America
On the morning of the opening of the third go-round of opening-round games, all five South American nations are leading their groups at World Cup 2010.
Uruguay is up on goal-difference. Paraguay and Brazil are up by two clear points. Argentina and Chile up by three. All five are clearly favoured to advance to the round of 16.
At a time when the six-team African challenge has all-but-pancaked. Ghana is leading Group D, but is far from safe. Everyone else save Cote D’Ivoire in last place, and Didier Drogba’s Elephants need Portugal to lose to Brazil, and have nine whooping goals worth of goal-difference to overcome. If Ghana falls to Germany, and the Serbs get a result against Los Socceroos, the entire African contingent could be extinct by Friday.
Africa’s woes have been well-discussed by now. But what is up with the South Americans?
Today’s Boo Yay
Ben Knight
writes and publishes Onward!
France! Boo! Korea! Yay!
Into the second batch of World Cup matches, and random thoughts rule.
As the matches blur by, and every clearer pattern could turn out to be a murkier one by nightfall, here’s an early list of things I love – and don’t love – about whatever in the blessed name of heck is actually transpiring on the sacred soccer pitches of South Africa.
LOVES:
- Goals! Suddenly, they’re coming. Get the opening-match jitters out of the way, and now we’re seeing some real attacking mastery. Uruguay! Argentina! Germany (who didn’t wait)! … Greece? The first rack of games taught us, basically, that every team in the tournament can play defence. Yeah, the Aussies got shred-ripped, but the Germans were exceptional against a side that generally takes better-than-decent care of its own fishnet. No surprise, really. Goals-against kill you dead in World Cup qualifying, and every team except the hosts qualified. The telling moment, for me, came when Brazil were held off the board for an eternity by the game and enigmatic North Koreans. They couldn’t find any space to run stunts, and were basically caught standing around, waiting flat-footed for the ball, for the entire first half. But then Brazil’s Maicon ripped home the first marker – from down the goal line, beside the goal! I think this entire World Cup is going to come down to open runs, brilliant passes, and odd-angle bomb jobs. The team that can be most creative in attack – Brazil? Germany? Argentina? … Chile? – could easily be the one that wins it all. I truly hope so – because good, grim defence is everywhere, and the human spirit is always better served by brilliance.
