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Monday, July 10, 2006
Amante: Missing out on the beautiful game
By Isolde D. Amante
Peryodistang Pinay
TODAY, football fans can sleep again. I'm more of a World Cup fan--it's only every four years that I like to watch "the beautiful game"--but even so, I happily stayed up for several 3 a.m. games in the past four weeks. As for the real fans, the ones who can rattle off every match highlight for Juventus since 1924, I can only imagine their exhaustion.
It's not just the time difference that torments the football fan who finds himself in the Philippines during the World Cup. There's also widespread indifference, of a degree surpassed only by the Americans (but certainly not the Latin Americans). Lack of access is a pain. Major broadcast networks here pay football no more than token attention, five sentences and a video clip on the late-night news. You could get pay-per-view, but the cable operator will charge you the equivalent of two months' electricity bills.
So, we run for the venues where the similarly afflicted can meet, such as resto-bars and the lobby lounges of some hotels. As this morning's finals approached, most of these places began raising their entrance fees. But then one thinks: Potentially, there are five billion other people in 188 other countries who are watching the spectacle too. An entrance charge of P150 to P300 seems a fair price to pay for the chance to believe again in universal brotherhood, if only for a little while.
For 90 minutes, the pitch is the level playing field made real, where nations with their economies in tatters can give players from richer countries a real run for their money. Here, cunning and skill trump brute force and superior numbers. Here, the only superpower is Brazil, yet even a team billed as its strongest in two decades has proven itself vulnerable.
In its issue on the World Cup's opening day, The Economist voted it "the world's greatest sporting event," eclipsing even the Olympics. "The World Cup has its own hierarchy, which is pleasingly divorced from the global pecking order," its editorial said. I liked how Dirk Kurbjuweit of Der Spiegel waxed lyrical about how football mimics life: "Football is closer to real life than basketball or handball, sports dominated by stubborn confrontation between attackers and defenders. It has a midfield, and the midfield is where it's at, where victory and defeat, triumph and despair play out. You can get bogged down in midfield; there football can be a waiting game: the ball is pushed idly to and fro, until an opening appears. But as in life, goals often remain elusive."
The Philippines' absence from the game's global stage we can pin on several reasons, including a lack of sustained official support. More worrying, however, is the possibility that we are merely echoing a former colonial master's indifference to a sport they do not happen to dominate yet. Its implications would be tragic: a severely limited worldview whose borders begin and end with America.
(http://www.peryodistang-pinay.blogspot.com)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (July 10, 2006 issue)
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