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Did the U.S really only beat Angola 1-0 today despite being a man up for the final 70 minutes?

I previously used this influential forum to slag on the introduction to The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup. I've now read the book in its entirety and can happily report that it's a fabulously informative, deftly written collection. There are 32 essays, one for each participating county. Some of the authors are natives of the country they write about (Peter Stamm on Switzerland, Dave Eggers on the USA), while others have just the faintest of connections to their subject matter. Cressida Leyshon (deputy fiction editor of The New Yorker), for instance, develops an affection for Trinidad & Tobago after the country of barely one million people miraculously qualifies for the World Cup only to immediately see its prospects in Germany cavalierly dismissed by the media.

Many of these pieces are only nominally about soccer. Eric Schlosser utilizes his visit to a Swedish prison to ruminate on the country's legendarily laissez faire penal policies and its struggles to come to grips with a rapidly diversifying populace. Aleksander Hemon hilariously recounts his struggle to lose his virginity while simultaneously keeping, um, abreast of France's brilliant (but ultimately unrequited) run through the 1982 World Cup.

Strangely perhaps my favorite piece is something of an anti-soccer essay. William Finnegan writes elegantly about his love for the poor, isolated Portuguese island of Madeira, where for years he ventured to surf the fearsome Atlantic Ocean waves. Finnegan's surf paradise is ultimately upended by ill-advised development projects guided by cronyism rather than reason.

Then there's Ben Rice's take on Australia's often tortured relationship with footyball. The Aussies are perhaps second only to Americans in their skepticism concerning the world's most popular game. Here's a choice snippet:

A few years ago, in Lightning Ridge, I got into a conversation about the beautiful game with an opal miner who kept referring to it as "wogball" (in Australia "wog" is slang for a person of Mediterranean descent), and seemed convinced that the whole enterprise was up to its neck in drug dealing and mafia connections.

We were playing pool together in the bowling club, and he'd had more than a few schooners of grog. "Poofs, too, the lot of 'em, by the way," he muttered.

He came closer, his breath reeking, and mouth remarkable for its absence of front teeth. "Mean bastards too. Bloody rough bunch."

The miner was of Polish origin, but his father had been "decent enough" to raise him playing Australian sports, a fact for which he was extremely grateful. Otherwise, he said, he could easily have been linked to the mafia scum who were always rioting and causing trouble after wogball matches in that den of filth and corruption--Sydney.

Posted by Paul Demko at June 5, 2006 6:48 PM

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