Just Kickin’ It
“Felices unidos, el fútbol del mundial.
Nos dan de comer goles en vez de frijoles…"
Patético cuadro, Tijuana No!
Sunday. For many football fans it’s nothing but a splendid day to sit on their couches and watch football. Forget the NFL or any other “weekend nation” you have in mind. It’s the one you actually play with your feet. Yeah, yeah, ok, soccer. But, as Brit comedian Eddie Izzard puts it, “This is football we're talking about here, which you [Americans] call bananas and you're reluctant to play it.” Let’s straight things out, how can you call football a game in which you handle the ball with your hands 99 percent of the time, huh? There’s already a handball, so refrain yourself from jumping to any deductive reasoning and face the facts.
Well, enough of that. And back to Sunday sunny Sunday and to the delicacies of world-class football that cable services around the globe cater, after a “reasonable” fee, to patrons in bars, in pubs, in cantinas, and in the “intimacy of your home,” just to quote many of the cheesy anchors and sportscasters on radio, TV, and the Internet. It’s not only the delight fans feel out of watching top-notch athletes in shorts doing magic with the ball on the screens or from the stands; to many, their tricks bring back childhood memories of games played in the street along all those faces and names they won’t see or recall ever again. Those were times in which team identities were created and every body shared the pride of being player number 12 in the roster of such and such squad. Children with the only purpose of enjoying the game and somehow thinking of once running on the same pitches our heroes did, defending the colors they defended, the tradition we shared with them, the team that made us one. Boys that ran on pavement fields behind the ball, turning into what Eduardo Galeano describes as the “dancer prancing with a ball as light as a balloon that flies away in the air and the ball of wool, playing not knowing that it’s playing, without a reason and without a clock and without a referee” (Galeano, 2002). It was primeval freedom.
