My heart broke in Omaha, Nebraska. I’ve dreamed of going to the Final Four for as long as I can remember. As all kids do, I dreamed of being the star player. I imagined leading my team through the tournament and hitting the buzzer-beating shot in the national championship game. I visualized confetti streaming down… Read More »
Watching last weekend’s African Cup of Nations Final reminded fans everywhere of soccer’s elephant in the room, penalties. The penalty shootout is the one glaring error in a beautiful, near-perfect game. After 120 minutes of battling for each yard and each shot, the game is finally decided by a combination of luck and some level of… Read More »
La violencia que viene con partidos de fútbol no es un fenómeno nuevo dentro y fuera de la cancha. Sin embargo, la magnitud de violencia en la semifinal de la Copa de África entre Ghana y Guinea Ecuatorial era estremecedor y en mi opinión, inaceptable. La semifinal tuvo lugar el 5 de febrero en el… Read More »
Courtesy of Grant Wahl’s twitter feed, here’s another take on one of the defining moments of the World Cup: the Ghana-U.S. game as viewed by Mick Jagger, aptly tagged “bad luck charm” by Wahl. You can read my account of this game as seen from Johannesburg here, and travel to the streets of Accra that… Read More »
Courtesy of the blog From a Left Wing, here’s some engaging footage of the celebrations in Ghana after the World Cup victory over the U.S.
Football, we learned last night during the Ghana-Uruguay game, is the most effective tool for mass torture every devised by the human race. A vast majority of the over eighty thousands fans in the stadium, and millions of viewers throughout the world, were left speechless and unwound by what we saw unfold. For me, it… Read More »
It’s alarming to even consider, but for the next two days there will be no World Cup matches. After gorging ourselves on football of varying quality for the past weeks, we suddenly have to think of others things to do. Read a book? Take a walk? But to what end and purpose, when all we… Read More »
Well, being on a different continent certainly changes things. After the epic flight from the U.S. to South Africa — 16 hours, including the required putzing around on the tarmac in Atlanta — I arrived just in time to catch the U.S.-Ghana game at a restaurant here in Melville, Johannesburg. I watched with Simon Kuper,… Read More »
Check out this preview for Stevan Lovgren’s documentary-in-progress on football in Africa. It looks like it will be a wonderful film, which should be ready sometime this Spring in the lead up to the 2010 World Cup. You can read a bit more about the film on an earlier post on this site and at… Read More »
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