should have mentioned

My apologies for not realizing how raw the Maradonna game still is for some of my English friends. And yes, the goal in the video below happened just 4 minutes after the infamous “hand of God” goal, which looks almost like volleyball when you watch it. Anyway, sorry– I wasn’t trying to rub it in. I was just admiring the goal.

Since I grew up in a country where soccer/football was of only the most minimal importance in the array of sports (it has since become big, but only among a small subsector of cognoscenti) I’m still not fully used to the sorts of passions it can unleash. The past week was certainly an eye-opener.

For instance, I just received a request (and from a university professor as old as my parents) to sign a petition to expel Algeria from the 2010 World Cup. I’m afraid I just don’t see any grounds for that whatsoever. Egypt is widely regarded as a better team overall, but Algeria had a great goal in that last match and Egypt just couldn’t get it going. It happens. Whatever violence occurred in Algiers and Khartoum is to be handled by criminal justice, not by FIFA. It didn’t affect the result on the field.

However, this is not something I can reason with people about here. There is a raw wound to the national pride that you either feel or you don’t feel, and that’s what makes the mood seem warlike. I wish they would look at it differently. (And I well remember something similar, and of course more serious, surrounding 9/11. Whatever one thinks about the U.S. response to 9/11, I remember realizing pretty quickly that non-Americans somehow just didn’t “get” the impact it had on the national mood.)

One point that has probably already been noted by someone… Among the factors that makes soccer so relatively stressful is the rarity of scoring compared with other sports. If you fall behind by 10 points in basketball, it can be a bit frightening, but your team is still going to be scoring fairly regularly and thereby not losing hope. All you need is a good run for 2 or 3 minutes to make up the 10 points.

But in soccer, to fall behind even by 1 goal in a big match can feel like a knife in the gut, due to the much greater difficulty of scoring than in basketball or American football. The mood-swings are much greater as a result.