Soccer Politics / The Politics of Football

The U.S. Men’s National Team’s loss to Honduras on February 6 generated a small wave of surprise and recrimination. Coach Jurgen Klinsmann has come in for criticism for showing either a lack of respect for Los Catrachos or a bit of naïvete by playing a young defensive line with no cohesion. The surprise stems from the fact that while the Estadio Olimpico has been a difficult test for many national teams in the recent past, it has not been so for the United States—Honduras’ only home loss in the past two World Cup campaigns (2006/2010) was to the United States, which had won three straight in San Pedro Sula prior to Wednesday.

In fact, the loss should—and has been—put into context: away matches in the CONCACAF Hexagonal are always difficult, often due to the atmosphere in the host country. Typically, away teams confront sleepless nights defined by raucous crowds outside their hotels, see offensive graffiti on walls lining the route to the stadium, and face heaps of abuse—batteries and bags of urine, according to Jozy Altidore—at the hands of local fans. Matches themselves are scheduled to maximize the home team’s advantage.  For Wednesday’s game, the Honduran government called a national holiday in order to insure a packed stadium and streets full of supporters, and scheduled the game at 3 p.m. to maximize the mid-afternoon tropical heat. This is the case for all teams that play in Central America during the Hexagonal.

But soccer—especially international soccer—is rarely just soccer. Thus, the U.S. team often engenders more hostility than others, a fact that U.S. media outlets never fail to report. In the run-up to the February 6 match, however, journalists went beyond the usual commentary on hostile crowds. Instead, they highlighted the difficulty of play in a country as dangerous as Honduras, noting the “bleak picture of life in this beleaguered Central American country.”  Another recognized that conditions in Honduras were “much worse” than the last match between the two teams in San Pedro Sula, played months after a coup ousted democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya. (Of course, social conditions tend to affect journalists much more than players, who travel to and from the field under heavy police protection and are very rarely victims of random crime, but that is another story.) Telling the U.S. audience about crime rates, however, does little more than set the scenario for the match and reinforce two-dimensional pictures of Central American nations as violent.

Just as the U.S. loss needs context, then, so too understanding conditions in Honduras can help explain why the U.S. team faces greater hostility than other opponents. Even if U.S. soccer pedigree fails to inspire fear in Central American fans, U.S. economic and political influence raises the symbolic stakes in qualifying matches. Historically, from the mid-nineteenth century filibustering expedition of William Walker to early twentieth century occupations and late twentieth century support for unpopular governments, the United States has played an outsized role in the domestic affairs of most Central American nations.

In the specific case of Honduras, the heightened emotions surrounding Wednesday’s match stem from more recent concerns. The short version goes something like this: in June 2009 Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was forcibly removed from power and flown out of the country by the Honduran military. The U.S. government reportedly knew of the coup before hand, and in the immediate aftermath blocked the Organization of American States from suspending Honduras. It further legitimated the removal of the president by supporting new presidential elections. Since the inauguration of the new, more pro-U.S. president, Honduras has become a focal point in the U.S. War on Drugs, with increased funding and training for Honduran security forces.  But this has come at a cost. Some claim that 40 percent of the Honduran police are part of organized crime syndicates, while human rights abuses under the new government have skyrocketed. Indeed, the spike in the Honduran crime rate coincides with the 2009 undermining of democracy in the country. Little wonder, then, that Hondurans relish making the U.S. team as uncomfortable as possible.

While—given the present climate—San Pedro Sula is likely the hardest place that the United States will play in the Hexagonal, the team should expect a similar treatment in Panama later this year. Even in Costa Rica and Mexico, where U.S. interventions are farther in the past and influence-peddling seems less obvious, U.S. players should expect extra hostility. Soccer aside, the United States remains the regional hegemon. For the U.S. sports media, mentioning why the U.S. team is unpopular might help fans move beyond simplistic conceptions of Central America as violent or unstable to a deeper understanding of the politics at play in an international soccer match.

Note: This post was published originally on ¿Opio del pueblo? (http://soccerinlatinamerica.blogspot.com/)

An interesting story is shaping up in the CONCACAF World Cup qualifying games with two consecutive victories by Haiti. They’ve now followed up a 6-0 trouncing of the Virgin Islands with a 2-0 defeat of Curacao, and are at the top of their qualifying group.

Haitian football has, of course, been through a lot during the past years, including the death of key personnel during the earthquake, a harsh post-earthquake 9-0 loss to the U.S. women’s team in early 2010, and the quarantining of the men’s youth team in Jamaica. They didn’t make it into the Gold Cup this year. But the dreams of Haitian football are still there, always kept alive by the shared memory of the nation’s one appearance in the World Cup, in 1974, and of a particular goal made by Manno Sannon against Italy in their first game.

Haiti lost that game 4-1 and didn’t get out of the group stage: but no matter, Sannon was and is a national hero: one mural portrayed him alongside Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in a pantheon of Caribbean heroes. Might a new set of heroes emerge from the national team’s current roster? Already, fans have been delighted by the recent games, a needed respite and challenge to the discouraging news that surrounds them.

James Montague wrote a nice piece about Haiti’s recent trouncing of the Virgin Islands for CNN, alongside a second piece in The National.

Meanwhile Laura Wagner, our intrepid Haiti football correspondent, contributes this narrative of her attempt to see the game with her friends Claudine, G-Love, and a new friend named Jean:

Claudine, G-Love and I arrived at the stadium at about 1:30 pm for the 3 pm match, just as the rain began to pour.  We stood for some time under a street merchant’s tarp, where we bought a little bottle of cheap Roi de Coq rum and chatted as the rain poured down.  Fans wearing Haitian flags and red and blue jerseys streamed down the street, lined with tarp-and-sheet-metal homes, beauty salons, and businesses.  While G-Love ventured off to try to by some more tickets from scalpers, I went and checked out the line, and was stunned to find that it stretched all the way from the stadium entrance up past the Ministry of Public Health.

“We have to go stand in line,” I told Claudine.  She put a plastic bag over her hair, and off we went.

This was smart thinking, as it turned out.  After the rain let up, people moved en masse into the line.  It stretched from Rue de l’Enterrement all the way up Rue O. Durand, up to the Champ-de-Mars.

At least standing in line was not boring.  It was, rather, an active process requiring constant engagement and vigilance.  People wedged their way into any gap in the line, so everyone had to “kole” against the people next to them.  Claudine was pressed against me, while I was pressed against a chubby middle-aged guy in a red T-shirt.

“I’m all up against you and I don’t even know your name,” I told him.

He smiled, displaying a gold tooth.  “I’m Jean.”

“Pleased to meet you.  I’m Laura.”

The line moved incrementally.  Vendors hawked water, sodas, ice cream, conch in spicy sauce, fried plantain chips, Haitian flags (both on sticks and in bandanna form), red-and-blue banners with “Haiti Chérie” on them (five gourdes apiece), fresh coconuts, hot dogs, and so on.  “What do you want to eat when we get inside?” I asked Claudine.  Wet from the rain, I was thinking hopefully of a cold beer and a bag of salty plantain chips.  Claudine, G-Love and I bought Haiti flag bandannas, which we tied around our heads.

A smallish man appeared to our right.  “The back of the line is no good for me,” he said in a quiet reasonable voice.  “Let me in here.”  We all squished together again, immediately and instinctively, to firm up any gaps between people.

Claudine laughed.  “For whom exactly is the back of the line good, monchè?”

Soon after, we began to notice a lot of police cars, and people began to say that Martelly’s entourage would be arriving any moment.  Sure enough, within seconds the president appeared on foot, wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt and flanked by armed bodyguards.  People cheered and shouted “Martelly!”  He waved and headed toward the stadium.

A woman walked down the street, clad head-to-toe in the Haitian flag.  Her head was wrapped in a Haitian flag scarf.  Her dress consisted of two flags.  Her earring were flags.  Even her umbrella was red and blue.  I stopped her to pose for a photo.

A bunch of foreigners went straight to a metal gate alongside the main entrance and seemed to get in expeditiously and without hassle.  I was curious about these foreigners and their badges, and how one might get this VIP-blan access.

We moved closer to the stadium, glacially.  As we got closer, we saw men breaking the fence and sneaking through.  A bunch of people in line decided this seemed like a good idea, and hopped out of line to try this new tactic.  Claudine and I stayed in line.

In the end, we, and possibly thousands of others, never made it into the stadium.  As people on the streets said, “Our tickets died in our hands.”  There was so much upheaval and so much shoving that they locked all the entrances to the stadium and began beating people back with police batons.  We don’t know if too many tickets were printed, or if there were counterfeit tickets on the street, or if simply too many people pushed their way in ticketless, but in any case, an awful lot of people who paid for their tickets never made it into the game.  We stood outside as we heard the crowd erupt in cheers with each goal, and bitterly wondered what was going on.  Among that crowd were soccer fans who had gone without food so that they could buy those tickets — those ultimately useless tickets.

As the dezòd mounted and it looked like violence was likely, Claudine and I split.  We found a restaurant with a TV on Rue Capois and watched the second half of the game there.  “Pòdyab Îles Vièrges” we said, sipping our drinks and eating banann pese in peace.  “Poor things.”  6-0 is a pretty sad score.  We were happy not to be at the stadium.

Haiti’s changes of qualifying for the World Cup are, of course, pretty slim. They’re at the top of the group now, and might well hold their position there against Antigua, but the Round 3 of the qualifiers will pose a more serious challenge.

Still, these two victories are nevertheless something significant, and suggest something might be afoot worth following with the team. Last year at the World Cup I saw a few Haitian flags carried and displayed during the games in South Africa, and I know plenty of Haitian fans who would consider it about the highlight of a lifetime to go watch their team play in Brazil in 2014. There would be a nice symmetry to it if, forty years after Sannon’s goal, that happened. If there’s a bit of justice in this world, maybe it will.

Front page story on NYT regarding Egyptians reaction to the Algeria – Egypt playoff loss for a spot in the 2010 South Africa World Cup.  While my last final exam tomorrow precludes an analysis, the series of matches between Egypt and Algeria have served as a platform, a somewhat cathartic space, for all the ill-will to come out that these two nations harbor for each other. From a story in the popular sports blog, The Bleacher Report, before the playoff game:

The madness does not end there, as the press in both countries escalated the war of words. Algeria accused Egypt of “selling Palestine to the Jews” and “losing the six day war” with Israel. Egyptian writers responded with taunts of “France made you slaves”.

In a bizarre twist, a multi-national company like Coca-Cola has become embroiled in the media war, starting a campaign with the tag line “I was there in 1989″, and selling Tee Shirts and mass producing posters!

A simple Google search of the Algerian – Egyptian rivalry and an understanding the 1989 battle between the two countries for a spot in the 1990 World Cup will help shed light on the havoc taking place today between the two countries.

With the furor surrounding the France-Ireland game, and Thierry Henry’s decisive handball, dying down a little, it may be time to think through what just happened, and what it illuminates for us about the sport of football. After receiving a barrage of criticism, a not inconsiderable amount of it openly racist, Henry redeemed himself in some quarters with his declaration that the game should be replayed. Trappatoni, the coach of the Ireland team, made clear he didn’t blame Henry. Beckham came to his defense, seemingly a little put off by the tone of the criticism. Many wondered by Henry hadn’t immediately gone and told the referee what had happened. But, as some commentators have pointed, that seems a bit naive, to say the least. (See, for instance, the comments on Sanford Soccer net, notably those by Jackie Maniel). It’s a beautiful thought — ultimately, football wouldn’t even need referees, as players stepped over themselves to apologize one another and confess to any and all fouls — but it’s hard to imagine it coming to pass on this planet any time soon. And, as Christophe Lalo notes in So Foot, it’s also concretely hard to imagine Henry, surrounded by ecstatic teammates celebrating what was essentially a nearly-guaranteed ticket to South Africa, volunteering to the referee that there was a handball.

FIFA, however, has declared that the match will not be replayed, and the French Football Federation (F.F.F.) has declined to join the Irish Football Federation in continuing to demand a replay. Much of the vitriol surrounding the event is now being directed against the F.F.F. and the various administrators of football, including Michel Platini, who critics are calling hypocritical since they often call for fair play in football but are not willing to demand a replay of this particular game.

What to make of FIFA’s decision? It was, it seems to me, inevitable. To decide otherwise would have been to create a precedent with major consequences for the governance of football. Henry’s handball was particularly egregious and decisive, and yet it is just an extreme example of something that is a feature of many football games. Questionable calls by referees, often the result of intentional trickery or theatricality on the part of players, consistently shape the destinies of teams in professional and international play. Indeed, with rather impressive regularity, they  are often decisive in determining the outcome of games. Ask an Australian fan about the 2006 Italy-Australia game, for instance, and you are likely to get an earful about how refereeing can be cataclysmic. In the same World Cup, a convincing acting job by Henry against Puyol won France it’s 2-1 lead in the France-Spain game. Obviously some players, and some teams, are more guilty of this kind of things than others. But here’s the rub: they are often the most successful players and teams.

FIFA could have canceled the result of the game and ordered it played again, as they did a few years ago in the case of an Iran-Bahrain 2005 qualifying game that was bandied about as a precedent by those demanding a replay. But the furor likely instead sent FIFA representatives looking back to the 2005 decision with regret, and determined not to make the same mistake again. If teams knew that it was reasonably possible for a result to be overturned when a refereeing decision that was proven wrong had a decisive impact on the game, such appeals would obviously multiply. The Irish had pretty much an iron-clad case here, of course, but while such cases are rare they are not that rare. And there is always room for interpretation even in less clear cases. It’s well known, after all, that football fans are very good at identifying the ways in which the referee caused them to lose a game.F.I.F.A., I think, was just protecting itself, unwilling to set up an entire section devoted to hearing appeals for match replays.

While the F.F.F. can be accused of being partisan here, I’m not sure there is reason to assume the rulers of F.I.F.A. had a powerful stake in seeing France in the World Cup rather than Ireland. (Unless, that is, you believe those who claim that corporate and professional footballing interests who want to see more star players in the tournament in order to sell more shoes shape the body’s decisions). I think it is more likely that those who made this decision peered into an abyss: a place where they would regularly have to entertain requests for replays, and where people would always be able to say: but you did it for Ireland!

Then they decided they didn’t want to step off the cliff.

In the many conversations I’ve had about the handball in the past days, I’ve been reminded a bit of the incredible global conversation incited by Zidane’s “coup de boule” in 2006. With one group of friends, we jokingly decided that the handball was an act of resistance against the limited number of slots given by FIFA to Africa in the World Cup. A European team statistically has twice as much of a change of playing in South Africa as an African team, after all. There is, however, one team in Europe whose players are mostly of African descent, either from West Africa or the African diaspora in the Caribbean: France. Many of the players of the French team have, for some time, intimated that it was extremely important for them to play in 2010, not just to be in the World Cup, but to be in what is likely to be the only African World Cup for a long time to come. Maybe Henry and Gallas, both of Caribbean descent, just decided they had to get to South Africa by any means necessary? It’s hard to imagine it right now, given the low quality of play of the team in the qualifiers and the fact that Domenech, a disaster of a coach, is still in charge of the team, but maybe France will end up being a kind of representative for Africa in the tournament, as they were in the final stages of 2006 when only European teams were left playing. We’ll have to wait for December 4th to get a clearer picture of what match-ups are in store for us. While we’ve lost out on the possibility of an impassioned Ireland-England game, we can imagine we’ll be in store for a France-Cameroon of France-Algeria game. If the ghosts of empire will haunt the field in a particularly powerful way in the case of such match-ups, there will also be plenty of ambiguity there: the players of the French team whose players are largely children of the French empire, many of them children of recent African immigrants to France, and they’ll face off against teams representing former colonies many of whose members play professionally in France.

Many football fans, of course, will continue to lambast Henry,  and the event will perhaps go down in Irish footballing history as something akin to England’s loss to Argentina in 1986. Will French fans will ever find ways to celebrate the “Hand of God” of Henry the way many Argentinians do Maradona’s legendary act? Probably not. The French reaction has been largely apologetic and embarrassed — So Foot initially published a bilious and disgusted response to the whole affair as a reflection of how low France and French football has sunk — though of course French fandom and sports journalism traditionally involves an impressive amount of whining and complaining about the national team. And, as Christophe Lalo notes in So Foot, in 1986 Maradona went on, after his “Hand of God” goal, to score one of the greatest goals in the history of football, which helped some “swallow the pill” of his earlier goal. Henry, meanwhile, didn’t. Only time will tell how profoundly this incident ultimately marks his career. If he does as well this year as he did last for Barcelona, or for France next year in South Africa, many people will probably forgive and forget. Some won’t, of course, but but plenty of fans will probably come to see this as a pretty minor event in a largely spectacular career.

Unless FIFA, fans, managers and players are willing to transform football into something very different than it is today, and has been for decades, we are going to have to stick with a sport that is, often enough, totally unfair in its outcomes. What Jennifer Doyle, in discussing the Henry case, has described as the “moral ambiguity” of football is, though, a constitutive part of the sport, and indeed part of what makes it what it is — even what makes it great. Anthropologist Christian Bromberger has argued that particularly strong role the referee has in shaping destinies in football is part of what makes the sport such a powerful “terrain of interpretation,” and thus explains a significant part of the passion it arouses.

What football offers in return for the heartbreak of losing unfairly when you should have won is, however, a kind of consolation: there will always be another chance. And some day your team will probably win when it should have lost.

If football were fair in any way, Ireland would be heading to the World Cup in South Africa. Instead, after a largely weak performance, France snuck through thanks to a handball by Thierry Henry converted into a header by Gallas.  Irish fans, who packed in large numbers in the Stade de France, are surely reeling in shock and rage.

Some are already comparing the goal to the infamous “Hand of God” goal scored by Maradona against England in 1986. The commentaries on You Tube and elsewhere are already lighting up with curses against Henry, some of them openly racist. Henry, meanwhile, has admitted that he touched the ball with his hand, but added: “I’m not the referee.”

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What, as a fan of the French team who desperately wanted to see the team play next year in South Africa, to make of this? A renewed respect for how perverse football can be, certainly, especially since I can’t help feeling elation and relief at the fact that, after torturing its fans for much of the past year, the French team has somehow made it through. Maybe in Africa the team will redeem itself?

This was the title of an article in The New York Times yesterday.  The article discusses the rise and current fall of Diego Maradona and the Agentina soccer population’s general dissatisfaction and disenchantment with Maradona as the coach for the national team.  And while Argentina did just qualify last week for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, fans are concerned that Maradona’s magic has worn off leaving him with nothing but mediocre coaching and erratic behavior.

It is an interesting read.

USA Soccer has experience a wide range of emotions in this eventful week. The joy at World Cup qualification in Honduras was tempered quickly by the tragic car crash that has left Charlie Davies in the hospital, needing multiple surgeries.

I’ve tried to make sense of the entire situation in an article I wrote for my soccer blog, The Searching Cross. The link below will take you to the article.

http://thesearchingcross.blogspot.com/2009/10/tragedy-of-unknown.html

With final outcomes in FIFA World Cup qualifying often dependent more on the performance of other teams in a qualifying group than on one’s own results, the final matchday of CONCACAF’s hexagonal qualification round on Wednesday yielded an incredible example of how one goal thousands of miles away can dramatically alter another team’s World Cup dreams.

Going into yesterday’s action, the United States led the CONCACAF group with 19 points, Mexico stood in 2nd with 18, Costa Rica placed 3rd with 15 and Honduras was on the outside of automatic qualification looking in, sitting in 4th place with 13 points. Although 4th place in CONCACAF would allow Honduras to still qualify for a home-and-home playoff with the 5th place team from South America’s CONMEBOL, the Hondurans needed a win and a Costa Rica loss or tie to ensure automatic qualification.

With all three games in the group beginning near simultaneously, the Hondurans were first to draw to a result, notching a 1-0 win over El Salvador. Mexico and Trinidad and Tobago soon wrapped up their 2-2 draw, meaning all eyes were turned to the USA-Costa Rico qualifier underway in Washington, D.C. With the Ticos up 2-1 in the waning minutes of the match, it appeared to Honduran supporters that Los Catrachos would fall just short of 3rd place in the group. But when the United States’ Jonathan Bornstein headed home an equalizer in the 95th minute, in a game being played 7,847 miles away from the Catrachos’ match in San Salvador, Honduran qualification was all but sealed in a dramatic turn of events best articulated by this audio clip from a live Honduran radio broadcast.

Now that Argentina has (just barely) secured its spot in the 2010 World Cup after a tortuous and rocky qualifying run, fans of Argentina can breathe a little easier. One fan found occasion for an instant Youtube celebration of the last-minute goal against Uruguay, which shows an ecstatic Maradona jumping for joy. With his red scarf trailing behind him, he looks like a kid dressed up as Superman. He’s headed to South Africa, where as Peter Alegi writes, he hopes to fulfill a long-time dream: meeting Nelson Mandela.

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But of course, inevitably, the criticisms of Maradona (many of them justified) will no doubt continue. This is football, after all. And, more to the point, this is Maradona. If the player-turned-addict-turned-rehabilitated-coach is who he is, and what he is, it is precisely because he has always stirred up so much intensity among both his fans and his detractors. In Maradona by Kusturica, which we screened this past Tuesday at Duke as part of the Soccer Politics Series, the footballer seems to have met his match in the film-maker Kusturica, whose punchy and relentless style is as polarizing among viewers as Maradona’s playing was. But Maradona is, as the film itself hints, a better film character than any even the powerful imagination of Kusturica could have conjured up.

Here’s the preview, as well as a nice clip from the film of Manu Chao singing a celebratory song to Maradona in Buenos Aires.

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The film, though presented at Cannes, had a relatively subdued run in Europe, and a whiny tone shaped many of the English-language reviews published in the U.K., such as this one in the Independent. That’s not surprising, since — as Joaquin Bueno noted on this blog in a recent post — if anyone hates Maradona and can’t stop talking about how much they hate him it is a certain sector of opinion in England, for whom the 1986 “Hand of God” goal still registers as one of the great travesties in the history of football. In the film, Maradona joyously declares that with the goal, he felt liked he had picked the pocket of an Englishman, and explains that the Argentinian team went on the field with the idea that they were playing to avenge the dead soldiers killed by the British during the Falklands War four years earlier. And of course the film, complete with Sex Pistols-driven punk-style cartoons of Maradona infuriating Thatcher, the Queen, and Prince Charles, is not calibrated to ingratiate British viewers, though of course one can imagine that many of them would enjoy it precisely for this reason.

The film, which as of yet has no distribution in the U.S. — Netflix promises its release on DVD at some unspecified point in the future — is not tender with the U.S. either, though most of the hostility is directed at George Bush in tones that wouldn’t necessarily displease many a North American audience and would be right at home in a Michael Moore film. Critics of FIFA, meanwhile, will also enjoy some of Maradona’s barbs directed at figures like Havelange and Blatter.

Some critics have lamented that the film fails to find a coherent form, though I disagree. Ultimately what makes the film so great is precisely its irrepressible form as well as its uncomprimising celebration of Maradona. It’s not necessarily because I am as crazy about Maradona as Kusturica is — though the footage of his goals in the film is enough to win over more than one convert — but because it captures more closely than any other I know both the incomprehensible grace and the liberating madness of football.

As noted by a commenter on the previous post about the USA-Honduras qualifier, television coverage of the game in the United States was sparse.  Whether the motives for exclusivity were malicious or simply economic, the game was only available in about 200 bars and restaurants across the country (and only about a quarter of those were showing the game in English).

Thankfully, one of those bars was Honduras Bar, right here in Durham, North Carolina.  I ventured out there with 2 fellow Duke students – I in my New England Revolution jersey, Mike in his DC United jersey, and Chris more subtly dressed in a simple red polo – and we joined the ranks of approximately a dozen USMNT supporters in oversized Uncle Sam hats and American flag kerchiefs.  The 200 or so Honduran fans were not threatening, but were certainly overwhelming.  But as an American soccer fan, you come to expect to be outnumbered by opposing fans.

The following is a column I wrote about the experience for yesterday’s Duke Chronicle, our campus newspaper (permalink to the article here).  I did not have space in my 700 words to discuss the political situation of Honduras and it’s implication on the match (or vice versa), nor could I delve deeply into the upswell in emotion we experienced as we watched Conor Casey head home the first goal – silence sweeping the bar, and the cheers of us USA fans crescendoing as we slowly realized that no foul had been committed.  The column serves primarily to underscore that Durham, although it is a small city, has a number of unexpected resources – who knew that a place such as Honduras Bar would be here?  I encourage you all to scour your cities for opportunities like this one to share a game with the kind of mixed crowd that makes being an American soccer fan fun.

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Two weeks ago, my friends and I found ourselves in the parking lot of Honduras bar on University Drive. We had been heading back towards campus on Business 15-501, missed the turn for 751 and wound up in completely unfamiliar territory. We were still only a few miles from campus, and yet we had no idea where we were.

Saturday night, we were back at Honduras bar, but not on accident. Honduras bar was one of about 200 bars and restaurants in the United States showing the USA-Honduras soccer game. Team USA won a thrilling 3-2 match and secured a place in the World Cup next summer.

Honduras Bar was filled beyond capacity, and its energy was unbelievable. We congregated in the back of the bar with the dozen or so other American fans—a handful of Durham locals who have traveled the country following the U.S. team. We were certainly the minority, outnumbered at least 10-to-one, but that didn’t mean we were quiet. Our cheers during the American goals filled the silences left by the disappointed Honduran fans, keeping the place loud during every second of the match.

But when the game wasn’t tense, fans of both sides conversed, fighting the language barrier to discuss what an exciting game we were watching. One guy made me admit to the beauty of the first Honduran goal, but that was the most aggressive comment made to me the entire night.

I’m not trying to be another Chronicle columnist lamenting how much Duke students underutilize and under-appreciate the city in which we live. I’m just a senior coming to grips with the fact that I don’t know where I’ll be in 12 months, and that this may be my last year in Durham.

I’ve been compiling and completing my North Carolina to-do list (I refuse to call it a “bucket list” because I’m not dying). I’ve tried Biscuitville, Bojangles and Bullocks. Next week is the beginning of the North Carolina State Fair, which I have missed every year thus far. And I certainly don’t plan on leaving this state without attending a NASCAR race.

Honduras Bar was never part of that list. If it weren’t for the USA-Honduras soccer game (and Mexican-owned Circuito Cerrado TV for buying the rights to the game and keeping it off American cable), Honduras bar would have been just another address punched into the GPS and eventually forgotten. I never would have met the people inside: a vibrant cross-section of Durham’s soccer fans, both the rare diehard fans of our own national team and the Honduran community that was so passionate and yet so welcoming. At the end of the day, it was the perfect place to watch the game, with an atmosphere that made everything infinitely more exciting.

With the constant messages we receive from e-mail blasts about avoiding crime in Durham, we often lose sight of the positive aspects of the Durham community. But I think that ambivalence, more than fear, is the biggest factor keeping Duke students in our Duke bubble.

There’s always a speech, party or other event on campus, well-advertised and within walking distance. These events are also unbelievable resources worth taking advantage of, but sometimes the on-campus offerings can be so all-inclusive that they become insular. We can find almost anything on or near campus, so we fall into a rut and we never venture outside the bubble. Or we may just hole up in the library and miss out on all of the above.

But midterm season is winding down, the days are getting shorter and your time on campus is starting to tick away, whether you’ve noticed it or not.

Need a famous quotation to convince you? I’ll give you three. Twain once said, “Never let your schooling interfere with your education.” Horace once said, “Carpe diem.” Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast—if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” You get the idea.

Break out of your comfort zone and vary the routine. Discover all that this school, this city and this state have to offer. I’m not going to tell you what to do—the idea is that you find what interests you. Honduras bar is not for everyone, but there is something out there for you. Make the most of your time here. Durham may not be your hometown, but for a few years, it can be your home.