I love listening to the English announce soccer matches. It's not just Martin Tyler, either, as so many of them exhibit a commentary style like brandy poured over gravel. It's almost soothing in its reservation, smooth and warm and biting in its wit.
Compared to the typical statistic-laden drivel that spills out of television sets during American sporting events, announcing in the beautiful game--at least for the English--is an exercise in understatement, in allowing the moment to take center stage while playing accessory to the budding storylines and building tension inherent in every game.
There's a naivete in the American coverage of this World Cup, with its reliance on rankings and pass completion rates and tackle win percentages. Call it Puritan nature rearing its ugly head again, but Americans are always trying to break games down into discrete moments, as though the entire game is merely a fraction to be reduced to its basic parts and measured.
You simply have to chuckle when something as obscene and foolhardy rolls across the bottom of your screen as "Paraguay have a 67.3% chance of winning according to some ESPN Power Ranking Index Formula."
While it may be comforting to some to think that this is a game that can be figured out by scientists in white coats in some Connecticut laboratory, that put a smile on my face.
In the wake of the United States' exit from the World Cup, there was the inevitable backlash of the Angry White Sportswriter against a sport they've never understood and yet, by virtue of their profession, have to address.
To paint with a pretty broad brush here, sports columnists are already a pretty crotchety bunch and most have little time or patience to learn about soccer, content to fill their requisite column inches with scorn for the game rather than appreciation.
It's one of the reasons why the sport has such difficulty finding purchase with American audiences. Soccer is a game expressed not in hard numbers and small moments, but as play acted out in multiple parts.
There are the crescendos, of course, but they're the result of a long series of moves and measures designed to flesh out the conflict at hand.
Americans love to rank things. It's one of our obsessions as a country. Perhaps it's because in most major categories, Americans find themselves at the top. Whether it's defense spending or medal counts, Americans love to be first.
Or, at the very least, to know who is first and try to beat them.
This game just doesn't work that way. Most fans know that the FIFA rankings are largely the errand of a group of unfortunate souls who would probably find better job satisfaction attempting to predict the weather than the precise hierarchy of world football.
There is no first. There are favorites, of course, and trendy picks and plucky underdogs. But the lack of discrete events in soccer--at least, as opposed to football, baseball and basketball--doesn't lend itself to statistical analysis.
There are no batting averages in this game, no playbooks. This does result in less scoring, of course, but every action is the result of not only each team's ability level and preparation, but their creativity.
It's why teams are so often ascribed a character as their performances on the field are the result of their passions, not just what they were trained to do.
Like a Chaucerian fairy tale, the World Cup plays out with each nation playing the part we as fans have come to know them as.
The buoyant Brazilians, the efficient Germans, the cagey Italians, the nervy Englishmen, the organized Greeks and the gritty Americans.
And yet, anyone who pays attention can clearly see that each nation, even those that seem to exhibit a universal style or organization, is made up of a complex prism of personalities, the history of each coming out in their play.
Still as fans we try to simplify things to attempt to fit them into tight little narratives, smoothing over the cracks as best we can and moving on until time pushes them so far away our eyes can no longer tell the difference.
In the end it's important to remember that each of these players, united by common goal here but rarely by common history, playing for millions in front of billions, came from some simple background.
But even that is now a cliche, to say that these are the once-impoverished boys made kings, granted the talent to elevate them from their days running through barrios and 'hoods and favelas and suburbs and ghettos and alentours.
So it's more important to realize that these cliches only hold a limited amount of truth. Or alternatively, they're merely a piece of the truth, a crime of omission.
The Brazilians, for example, play a beautiful brand of football. They enjoy inventing new angles, new flicks, new ways to entertain and score goals.
They're also an incredibly tough, physical group and always have been. The front players have always gotten the plaudits, but it's the steel of their sweeping, aggressive back lines that did the work to secure five World Cups.
The Germans, too, are not always the brutally efficient taskmasters that they are made out to be. While certainly tough, Franz Beckenbauer was still one of the most technically gifted passers of his day. Just because he did most of his attacking from a central defensive position doesn't negate the fact that he'd feel right at home in gold and blue.
so please, move beyond cliche.
You might just see the game you've been missing all along.
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