Sport and Society’s Updates

The Ninety-Minute Anxiety Dream

Image courtesey of Wikimedia Commons / Markbarnes

nybooks.com | Article Link | by Simon Critchley

Soccer is an oddly amnesiac activity, in the sense that spectators tend to look toward the next game rather than remember the last one or the lost one. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the chorus interrogates the chained Titan as to what gifts he gave human beings. In addition to fire and thus technology and civilization, Prometheus says he sowed in human beings blind hope, as a way of forestalling doom. There is something of this in the soccer fan.

I’m teaching ancient tragedy at Cornell for the summer, for which I am truly grateful, as it has left me with far too much time to watch the World Cup. I’m writing on day ten of the competition, which is important to point out, as what has been unfolding in Brazil is particularly exciting and wonderfully open-scoring, but also evolving very fast, hour by hour, day by day. So far, it positively glimmers in comparison with the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, defined by those irritating vuvuzelas. Aside from some dramatic high points (Algeria vs. the USA and Ghana vs. Uruguay stick sharply in the memory), 2010 was an oddly plodding, slightly melancholic affair. By contrast, I feel rather enlivened by much of what I have seen this time, with the exception of Spain and England, and maybe Cameroon.

The day after England’s sorry capitulation to Uruguay, who are far from being the best team in this tournament, despite the prodigious, indeed Promethean, gifts of Luis Suarez, fans were already fixated on the question of whether England might survive if Italy beat Costa Rica. They didn’t.

In soccer, it’s not the disappointment that kills you; it is the ever-renewed sense of hope. On May 30, I went with my twenty-two-year-old son to see England play Peru at London’s Wembley Stadium with pretty much the same lineup that started both World Cup games. Peru played like a pub team with hangovers and England won 3-0, but the writing was already on the wall for England: the lumbering style, the tactical cluelessness, the headless-chicken panic that sets in whenever the opposition gets the ball and dares to cross it into the penalty box, the porous, fragile defense, and the attempt to do the same thing in a kind of slow motion, over and over again and failing (Glen Johnson has two faults as a defender: one is that he can’t defend. His other fault is that he can’t attack either). But still, when I took the subway to watch the game with my pal Liam against Italy on June 14, my heart was full of hope. It didn’t last long.

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