It's tough to snip ... some of the best is undoubtedly to be found by reading the whole essay. This essay comes closest of all I've seen to portraying my own feelings. Enjoy.
The World Cup of ZidaneBy Eduardo Galeano
September 2006 IssueOn the stage of sanity, an attack of madness.
In the temple dedicated to the worship of football and the respect for rules, where Coca-Cola provides happiness, MasterCard grants prosperity, and Hyundai offers speed, the last minutes of the last game of the World Cup are being played out.
It is also the last game of the best, the most admired, the most loved player, who is now bidding farewell to football. The eyes of the world are upon him. And suddenly this king of the party becomes a raging bull and charges a rival, downing him with a head butt to the chest, and then walks away.
<snip>
It would seem that the Italian defender Marco Materazzi served up some of those racist insults that madmen usually shriek from the stands.
<snip>
But can one reduce to an insult, or a string of insults, this tragedy of the player who chose to lose, the star who renounced glory when it was brushing up against him?
Maybe, who knows, maybe his act of rage, without Zidane willing or even knowing it, was a howl of impotence.
Maybe it was a howl of impotence against the insults, the jabs, the spitting, the surreptitious kicks, the expert simulation of fouls and pain, impotence against the theater of performers who whack you and then act like they were never there.
Or perhaps it was a howl of impotence against the devastating success of dirty football, against the dishonesty, cowardice, and avarice of the football that globalization, the enemy of diversity, is forcing on us. In the end, as the World Cup went on, it became clearer and clearer that Zidane was not part of this approach. And his magic, his mastery, his melancholy elegance, deserved to be defeated, because today's world, which mass produces models of success, deserved this mediocre World Cup.
<snip>
Someone, I don't know who, summed up the 2006 World Cup as follows: The players behaved in an exemplary fashion. They didn't drink, they didn't smoke, they didn't play.
<snip>
In professional football, the kind on television, there is little joy to be seen. We seem condemned to nostalgia for the old days when there were five forwards, and to the sad recognition that now there is just one. And at the rate we are going, not even he will remain: one day there will be only defenders.
Zoologist Roberto Fontanarrosa has proved it: the forward and the panda are endangered species.
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