The Beautiful Game

I had my first soccer practice in 9 months this week and I am sore.  Sore in a good, righteous way, not in a ‘my formerly shattered ankle joint is not liking this’ kind of way.  Actually, that pain was mostly muted during the 60 minute kick-around and I scarcely thought about it.  My teammates seemed more concerned about it than I was.

My concern is the beer gut I’ve accumulated in my 9 month layoff.  It’s not big, or even overly noticeable, but it’s there.  It doesn’t keep me up at night, but it bothers me.  And then it bothers me that it bothers me.  I feel silly and vain when I shouldn’t.  I walk lots and begun tentatively running since the snow has suddenly vanished, but the gut doesn’t seem to be shrinking much.  Soccer will sort that out, I’m sure.  Soccer has a habit of pushing and pulling you in all sorts of directions, demanding more out of you than you ever planned on giving, with teammates to potentially let down to keep you honest in a way that solo running doesn’t.  The trouble is I really like a glass of beer at the end of the day.  When I stopped drinking beer six weeks ago, I dropped a bit of weight.  But I really miss my beer.  And this boy ain’t drinking diet beer.  Few things in life top the pleasure of a loaded hamburger with a pint of frosty brown ale.  Whatever happens will happen.

My love of soccer has been a slow burn, simmering for over 20 years.  Like any good Canadian boy, I loved my hockey, and football (CFL football, that is) but nothing prepared me for the intoxicating buzz of watching Newcastle United play at St. James’ Park.  How could a sport that on the surface seemed rather slow and dull enrapture 50,000+ people?  It didn’t make sense to me.  The crowd cheered, booed and chanted on every play and even though they lost (1-0 to Nottingham Forest) not one person left their seat.

Two years later was World Cup ’90 and Paul Gascoigne’s heartbreaking yellow card and penalty kick loss to West Germany.  And the 90s saw witness to Newcastle United storm the league while managing not to win anything and nearly spending their way into bankruptcy while doing so.  They were heady, if ultimately unsatisfying and heartbreaking times.  I got married, and stopped following soccer, and it was probably just as well.  Underwhelming performances by England in Euro 2004 and World Cup 2006.  The so-called Golden Generation led by David Beckham was anything but.  The biggest memory I have of WC 2006 is Becks throwing up on the pitch in a match against Ecuador (which he scored in) in the grueling German summer heat.  And let’s not even talk about Newcastle United.  They faded out as the bills piled up, the lowest point where they were relegated to a lower league a couple of years back.  And especially don’t mention World Cup 2010, and the worst performance by an English team ever.  Tied the United States.  Tied Algeria (!).  Narrowly beat Slovenia.  Got destroyed by the Germans.  Ugh.

Things are getting better though.  Newcastle United are within a whisker of playing in the Europe for the first time in a handful of years, and on players they paid a song for.  England went undefeated in 2011 and went down, but gamely against Holland, probably the best or second best team in the world right now.

I’m probably labeled a soccer fanatic, even though I don’t really feel like it.  When non-soccer fans ask me why I like soccer so much, I tell them it’s a ridiculously easy game to learn.  You attempt to put a ball in a goal using any part of your body except your hands and arms.  There’s the offside rule, which seem to hang people up, but otherwise you can’t get much simpler than soccer.  It’s a lot like chess.  You can teach a four year old how to play chess.  Just like you can teach a four year old how to play soccer.  It’s pretty accessible.

The beauty of soccer (and chess) is its near infinite strategic complexity combined with an artistic imagination.  Much more so than any other sport, even American football, with its militaryesque playbooks.  Newcastle’s manager Alan Pardew trains his squad with GPS tags on them, which tracks every movement, which is then crunched into computer data.  A little sterile, but players’ movements can be corrected with surgical accuracy.  Couple that with a human flourish, a poetic turn that makes fans gasp.  Lionel Messi or Christiano Ronaldo can move with a ball at their feet in ways that put ballet dancers to shame.  David Beckham can strike a ball that seems to defy physics, so breathtaking that ‘bend it like Beckham’ has entered the popular lexicon. 

Soccer, like life, has its ugly side.  It’s a side that shouldn’t be ignored, but sometimes it is overemphasized.  Diving, making simple challenges seem worse than they are to get a free kick or a penalty is probably the one thing that makes soccer fans see red and non-soccer fans scoff.  It’s the one thing I cannot deny when scoffers declare soccer to be stupid.  My solution is simple:  caught diving?  Red card.  Piss off.  Off the field.  Let your team play the balance of the game short-handed.

That pales in comparison to a much worse and deeper problem in soccer, which an ugly form of tribalism exists, particularly in Europe and South America.  Racism is a rampant and recurring problem, particularly in Eastern Europe, but in every country (it is customary at some grounds for black players to have fans make monkey noises at them and have bananas thrown at them).  Many teams have ‘firms’, the division of fans that engage of acts of violence, vandalism and intimidation.  Usually, this ebbs and flows with the rise and fall of unemployment and poverty.  This is what most people think of as soccer hooliganism.  It is horrible, but thankfully it appears in most places to be on the decline.

But I believe in the inherit goodness of people, and I firmly believe that the good drives out the bad.  And most footy fans are the tops.

My muscles ache.  But in a good, satisfying kind of way.  Knowing that I’ve done something good.  I’ve much more to tell in my two weeks of silence, but I think this is all for now.  I crave a beer.  I think I'll have one.

- PW