Bliss, and a Belgian Spared

By | June 23, 2010

It has been a beautiful day. It was a perfect match, offering up everything that draws us to football. The devastation of the goal-that-was-not, the relief as the team, rather than fumbling into frustration, kept carefully building up excellent plays, defending beautifully, and pushing, pushing, pushing. Raïs M’Bohli, the Paris-born Congolese/Algerian goalkeeper — who, I imagine and hope, will be moving on rapidly from his professional team in Bulgaria after this showing — stopping the goals relentlessly, seemingly on his way to becoming Algeria’s new national hero. In perfect if sadistic form, the team kept us all in suspense until the very end, when in a beautiful, invincible run, scrappy, a little enraged, bringing together Donovan, Altidore and Demsey in a gorgeous one-two-three, and here in Durham and throughout the country and the world there was that explosion of joy that can only come when it has been long-deferred, seemingly unattainable, and perfectly plucked from out of nowhere.

Plus — and really this is just as important — the goal meant that the Belgian referee Franck De Bleckeere was spared a treatment that would have been even worse that of Koman Coulibaly last week. Had it not been for that last minute goal, I’m sure that some enterprising web-hounding dudes would already have dug up proof of a dangerous Belgian conspiracy against the U.S.  We might be asking: did that Belgian guy speak English? Do they even play football in Belgium? Well, doubtless there will be some of that, but at least now we’ll hear a little less about it than we otherwise might have.

Belgians may have many flaws, but they mostly love the U.S. Those of my father’s generation, with slight provocation, will effuse about the liberation of their country by the U.S. during World War II. Indeed my dad describes how, as a child seeing this big guys with tanks, oranges and chocolates arrive in Liege after years of Nazi occupation, he said to himself “I don’t know where these guys come from, but I’m going to move there some day.” And he did. Many younger Belgians, meanwhile, have an attraction to the U.S. in part simply because it’s really no fun living a country divided by perhaps the most tedious civil war in the history of the world — Belgians could import their model of ethnic conflict, perhaps, to other regions, for it involves endless vitriolic bureaucratic and no killing.

Which is to say, I really don’t think De Bleeckere, or his linesman, actually had it out for us. Though actually, while Coulibaly’s call was marginal but in the slightest sense technically justifiable, today’s was just crazily wrong. Part of the pleasure of the last few days has been talking to many people who aren’t really following the World Cup and are not particularly into soccer, but are urgently interested in whether the foul called against us last week was, indeed, justified. Today’s call, and what followed, gave U.S. fans the opportunity to feel at aggrieved and triumphant — a heady cocktail — and, more to the point, provided the team to truly show us it’s soul.

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There, deserving fans of a team that brought us to the brink of hell and then saved us through it’s 94 minutes of play, we were precisely — for the briefest of moments — in the right place, glowing in a moment that only this oddest of human inventions can create. We’ll carry that with us for a long, long time.

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About Laurent Dubois

I am Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University. A specialist on the history and culture of France and the Caribbean, notably Haiti, I am the author of Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France. I founded the Soccer Politics blog in the Fall of 2009 as part of a Duke University course called "World Cup and World Politics," whose students helped me develop the site.

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