Cannavaro still can

Canna! Casa Lippi scored a crucial victory against Bulgaria. 3 goals, tigol. Forza Azzurri!

After that heartbreaking loss from Ireland and the brutal punch of Brazil, people easily dismissed Italy's chances to defend the World Cup.

I am still not thinking of victory. One match at a time. What is more important is that Canna is playing and slowly getting back to form. Never mind his stint with Real Madrid. Playing for the national flag is different.

Cannavaro, one of heaven's factory's best walking this earth.

Wenger Wings it Good

If it is not snobbery oozing from Arsene Wenger's patrician nose, I will not take a bath for a week.

Slamming down the lucrative sheets of Real Madrid and a chance to remove himself from the gloom of England to relocate to Spain where the sky is in perfect blue (just my wild imagination, I have never been to these places obviously), he rationalizes that Real Madrid leans towards football-spectacle. Ouch! Again, if this is not snobbery coming out from the pores of his skin, I will starve myself for a week.

The Wenger further elucidates, "football has another dimension: the success of building a team with style, a know-how, a club's own game-culture." Again, if this is not snobbery...but no more sacrifice on my part.

Hats off for standing up for a football philosophy slowly eroded by nouveau-financiers with their mountain of wealth to spare and nothing else. I respect Wenger for being old school and yes, classy.

While I was Sleeping.....

The Ayatollah Khamenei addressed the multitude in Iran. Did anyone miss Cardinal Sin? Images of Bishop Tutu flashed. In the 21st century, there is no indication that the fusion of religion and politics is suffering recession, its collapse not forthcoming, I'm afraid.

In sports, Shahid Afridi’s Pakistan wrestled the ICC World20 trophy from Sri Lanka.

A separatist mutiny over at Formula One against perceived inconsistencies of FIA rulings, the last straw being the 60M expense cap set, seen by many to lead to further deterioration on the quality of the races. I once asked a priest-friend whose driving speed matches a Grand prix winner, if it’s the man or the machine that spells the difference in racing. He said it’s both the skill of the racer and the superiority of the machine. Whatever it is, it is better - cars than horses.

Now for the heartbreaking – Italy bowed out of the Confederations Cup, courtesy of the 3-nil massacre of Kaka’s Brazil. This stings. It was Cannavaro’s 126th cap and he got trashed for not being mentally adroit. When one allows an opponent to score 3 goals – not just one, not just two, but “tigol,” you gotta make your main defender culpable somehow. Even with Brazil’s arsenal, sure, the team’s barrage of talent is a cause of envy but 3 goals is too much of a poor defense from Team Italia.

This news bleeds. I am upset for the Azzurris. Playing for the Confederations Cup is a good tune-up as any for the World Cup. Maybe, it’s the huge philosophical shift to play more fluid, progressive football in Serie A, crushing the impression that Italian football is snore-inducing. Cantennacio is forsaken for a high-octane, high-scoring brand of football associated with South America, particularly Brazil. Even Canna relinquishes the dominance of defense but is hopeful that “in 5-6 years, defense will make a comeback”. By that time, he will not be part of Forza Italia. Sad.

Still with football, the Philippine national football team (yes, we have one) is currently quarantined in Singapore due to this swine flu hullabaloo. I texted Yaye he should feel relieved his son Kewell is still too young to be part of the team. Otherwise, he would have gone berserk with worry by now.

Hmm…if I were quarantined (God forbid), I wish it would be with Real Madrid, er, make it Juventus. Canna is returning to his former team, Ole!

Barcelona, Raising the Bar Higher

When I’m toothless and in gradual state of decomposition, I shall recollect over a cup of ginger ale when jurisprudence elected to follow the footprints of the mighty dinosaurs into antiquity rather than walk in the shadow of light.

The law, in the case of gay marriage, is not an ally but savagely romantic that I am, I will say this like an automated robot: love is still the highest law. In the last second, love shall be triumphant.

Whew! And on the 10th and 70th minute, victory was in the lap of Barcelona, Ole! If it wasn’t Arsenal, the trophy should go to Barcelona, I wrote in the old blog. I will claim this triumph in behalf of what humanity lost in the suicide attacks, in the California ruling, and in the picketlines of farmers demanding genuine agrarian reform violently dispersed by water cannons.

Football is a commanding metaphor for life. You can’t bank on your 4-4-2 formation as if it were a choreographed dance that never shifts tempo. One day, your gameplan is a goldmine; the next, a dismal flop.

My friend T who plays FB (fullback, not fuck-buddy, wanker) ironically swears that football is won in midfield. Hmm, would Arsenal have enjoyed a dissimilar fate against ManU if say, Henry still wore the Emirates jersey? The talented Frenchman was hardly a factor in Rome.

It’s easy to say that the contest begins and ends in midfield. After all, you don’t win if you can’t score. Defense specialists like Cannavaro rock my world but in football, strikers are much heralded than defenders. So with life – the aggression of strikers, those who are on the prowl have the world for a price. The conquistadores claim and name territories, these architects of history. They write their own legends and we, the conquered, are just born to exalt them. As the cliché goes – no guts, you know the rest.

Obviously, I am not a player so to get my friend’s goat, I contradict by saying football is won by coaches, not players. Ravers think DJs are gods, excuse me. Lippi and Capello and Mourinho and Wenger, they are demi-gods.

Football’s major charm to me is that it’s a game of precision that demands flexibility. The strategizing, the proper adjustments, the timely reactions emanate from coaching. The players can provide the heart but the head, it’s got to be the coaching unit. Of course, when your players don’t suit up or play unmotivated, a coach can only do so much. Even God doesn’t have that much success in motivation – there are more sinners than saints, after all.

In life, we are the players. Who are our coaches? I pay homage to my own but it’s quite a kilometric list and unless somebody challenges me to come up with my Top5, why would I give myself a headache?

Palparan & Football

Just done re-reading Dave Eggers’ “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” because I vaguely remember that the primary characters, Dave and Toph, were fully orphaned. Now that I am on the same boat, I wanted to check if I could form a kinship.

Picking AHWOSG again reminded me of Eggers’ account of his gym teacher launching into a tirade against communism and rationalizing why soccer never became popular in the US. According to this jock, soccer is a game that communists favor and not an American invention like basketball and baseball. Furthermore, he says that Americans should suspect a game introduced by Germans and Italians and does not employ hands. I find the account hilariously pathetic. Look Ma, no hands.

Yup, it is widely perceived that the US government played a crucial role in killing the sport in America. And if you survey past World Cup winners – Uruguay, Galeano’s home-country and the first to win it, has 2; Italy and Brazil have 4 a piece; Germany has 3. The World Cup is dominated by countries where the Communist Party enjoys recognition and support.

Come to think of it, soccer is intensely played in the townships of Africa, in the shanty-towns of Brazil, and even in refugee camps in the Middle East. It is played by the poorest of the poor and in some cultures, children play to momentarily escape the misery of poverty. In my hometown of Tacloban, streetchildren do rugby. Not the sport, dummy. That sticky solvent that momentarily solves problems. Kuno.

When I was working with a human rights organization (Task Force Detainees of the Philippines), I had the privilege of going around Samar, helping out in para-legal training and in some remote villages, the locals played football. At that time, I didn’t wonder how the locals learned about soccer (no TV and no soccer on TV then), much more play it with joyous abandon.

With Eggers’ account, I connected the dots. Maybe, those frigging soccer-loving Communists that Gen. Palparan loves to hate introduced soccer aside from Marxist-Lenin Maoist Thought to these farm communities. It is not hard to imagine a cadre squeezing in soccer games as breaks from discussions of feudalism and bureaucratic-capitalism which are oftentimes monotonous. Take my word for it.

This elementary logic is quite comical (for more comic relief, go to Fox News): Communists love football and if you love football, you must be a Communist.

Would I die of shock if I learned that Palparan actually plays football?

Emyat and Football

“I am an Arsenal fan first. Football, second.”
Nick Hornby, “Fever Pitch”

As a nominal fan of football, it’s inscrutable, the amount of football I am absorbing at the moment. The devil of it, I don’t even like the Premiership. This simply means one thing: TV is so intolerably ghastly, the sports channel has become enticingly appealing or that I have so much time in my hands, 90 minutes swift by, unfelt.

Normally, I don’t watch football on TV except when I have trouble getting sleep or I am reading deep into the dark hours and I can’t play loud music (as music should be played) in noble consideration of souls at rest. The din of football as a background enables me to concentrate on readings that would normally shove me into stupor.

When my mother was alive, she would often sneak up on me, “Why are you still not in bed?” Then a follow-up question: “What are you watching?” probably suspecting porno.

“Football,” I would indulgently answer. Knowing her, I anticipate her next question: “What do you get from it?” With my mother, it’s all about the bottomline and cost-benefit. So I would turn to cliché – “It’s food for the soul.”

It always worked – “food for the soul” is something my mother considered legit probably because it’s unquantifiable, therefore, not within her realm.

Maybe I am consuming football more than what is healthy in the hope of my mother’s apparition. This time, I would change the scenario – I would put down the book I am reading and invite her to sit with me for a while as I convince her how football’s metaphors have instructed me about life in general and how this game has made me understand the horrors of capitalism and the awful truth of globalization.

Knowing my mother, she would be more amused than dazzled. Tell me, how many children can amuse their mothers with pompous talks on globalization? I truly miss her. For all our friendly disagreements, I have no doubt that she understood me, truly understood me in a way mothers rarely do. Tell me, am I lucky or am I lucky?

Yes, we are talking about football.

Soccer as we called it then was very popular in highschool. My dear friend Tox would talk about 4-1 formation and I would space out. At that time, Diego Maradona was the only player I heard about. I was not interested in soccer per se as much as watching my male friends, my homeboys play and cheering them on.

In college, I continued watching my batchmates from the field. Football on TV was unheard of and now that it has invaded all our waking hours, I can still say that I prefer watching my highschool or college batchmates play in the school grounds. Well, except for Italy or Real Madrid, as long as Cannavaro is asserting his claim to the kingdom.

Cannavaro, hay! If I had the savvy, I would create a website for him. A sports-commentator summed it up: “If ManU pays Rio Ferdinand 120,000 pounds a week, Cannavaro is worth at least a million a day.”

Football became a curiosity when a player that committed a costly error during a World Cup game was fatally shot when he got home (Colombia, I think). What is this game that fuels fanaticism and snatches out the monsters in humans?

Then a coach in one of the South American teams tried to explain: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. It is more than that.”

Goosebumps! Shivers down my spine! It took me a while to “grasp” that cryptic remark

A sportswriter warns: “Intellectuals should embrace football for its art, not for its soul.” Not in agreement here. More than rudiments and techniques and strategies and skills, football is a mirror and a celebration of life. Besides, if one were to embrace football, one has to embrace its metaphors and mysteries, its beauty and squalor.

I don’t play football (which makes me a fake by some standards) unless you count kicking ball with Georgelablab, the uber-askal (who says uber in this day and age except the Germans?) but I have had conversations with young men whom you could categorize as football players when I was a paid employee at UPTC and we were not exactly on the same paragraph.

To them, football was about great athleticism and mental agility, in short, the art of it. On the other hand, I talked of magical moments, of gods descending to play with mortals, of my own spiritual dilemmas pacified by football. Those kids must have thought: “Our teacher is nuts.” In complete agreement here.

That sportswriter could be right. Intellectuals should stick with the art of football, not its soul. But I am no intellectual.

I am a partisan at heart. So when I rant about globalization using football references and parallelism, you know where I am coming from.

P.S. Nick Hornby has a new book out (Slam) and the right-wing claims it is pro-abortion. Hay, these right-wingers - They don’t fail to humor me on a humid day.