Book of the Month: Soccer in Sun and Shadow

The silence of 200,000 people as Uruguay stuns Brazil in the 1950 World Cup. cheap fifa 14 ps3 coins

Galeano brings a Zen-like blank sheet to his love of soccer, yearning for that special moment that transcends club and country. Unfortunately, the outside world seeps in. We see this in his approach to each World Cup, as he prefaces the tournament with the flashing headlines of the news of the world. Soccer cannot escape the times. In 1982:

“Egypt was recovering the Sinai Peninsula, occupied by Israel since the Six Day War. The first artificial heart was beating in someone’s breast. Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours. In Italy, the pope was surviving a second assassination attempt. In Spain the officers who had organized the attack on Congress were getting thirty years and Felipe Gonzalez was launching his unerring race for the presidency while in Barcelona the twelfth World Cup was getting under way.”

The world cruelly crept onto the pitch in 1942 in a moment when the Second World War stripped the symbolisms of war from the game of soccer, making the game part of the war itself:

“For the Nazis, too, soccer was a matter of state. A monument in the Ukraine commemorates the players of the 1942 Dynamo Kiev team. During the German occupation they committed the insane act of defeating Hitler’s squad in the local stadium. Having been warned, ‘If you win, you die,’ they started out resigned to losing, trembling with fear and hunger, but in the end they could not contain their yearning for dignity. When the match was over, all eleven were shot with their club shirts on at the edge of a cliff.”