Two goalies emerged scarred out of the drama of yesterday’s USA-England game. One injured but with pride intact, another perhaps irreparably damaged professionally. I remember well how, as a kid playing YMCA soccer in suburban Maryland, I learned the universal lesson we were reminded of yesterday: being a goalie is hell.
Perhaps the only goalie to have won the Nobel Prize for literature, Albert Camus (in the front row in the snazzy clothes below) wrote that what he knew most surely “about morality and the duty of man,” he learned from playing football at the Racing Universitaire d’Alger in Algeria as a young man. He also learned a lesson that Howard and Greene learned yesterday, one that you might argue actually distills the whole essence of the philosophy of existentialism: “that a ball never arrives from the direction you expected it.”
Adidas, it seems, is intent on making Camus’ point particularly true for this World Cup: according to a recent article their special tournament ball — the “Jabulani” ball, named after the Zulu word for “celebration” — is “by no means popular among keepers, with some complaining it is difficult to predict.” The company owes us thanks for making football a little bit more like life.
Meanwhile, courtesy of a tweet from Paul Gilroy, you can see that yesterday’s drama has already inspired at least one work of comedic art available at Youtube.
