Gooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaalllllll!!!!! or Nil-Nil

MATTHEW A. KENT, ‘Aristotle’s Favorite Sport’:

 “...There’s a more complete way to explain why soccer is the best sport. Remember that there are four ways of answering the question “Why?”

First, there’s the material cause of soccer—what “stuff” is a soccer game made of? What’s the “matter” with soccer?

Think of the field, the ball, the eleven players per team, and the lone referee. Each of these physical components, in its own way, makes soccer able to fulfill the purposes of sports better than any other sport can.

A soccer field is much wider and longer than a basketball court or a hockey rink. The players are expected to cover an enormous area of turf. Yet, unlike other big-field sports (say, baseball or cricket), soccer demands almost constant running. The field’s dimensions never quite allow any of the twenty-two players to feel completely removed from the action. This produces more exercise and more recreation for all of them. A player’s physical exertion and mental attention are required by the game practically one hundred percent of the time.

The field, the ball, and the jerseys in soccer are also exceptionally suitable for the theatrical purposes of sports. The field is large enough to dominate a spectator’s view, including peripheral vision. The vast expanse of bright green grass is pleasing to the eye. But whether you’re seated in the back corner of the upper deck or next to the head of FIFA in a luxury suite overlooking midfield, you can always see what’s going on. The ball is large enough to be easily visible from a distance (unlike a hockey puck). The jerseys are colorful and graceful, with different designs from time to time for variety. All of this delights the senses. Aristotle indicates that such pleasures are very natural (Poetics, Chapter 4)…”

 

 Leon de Winter:

"Football is a form of insanity. You can express feelings that are normally repressed. You identify with top athletes as though they are warriors. We all want to be warriors and to kill the other team. Shooting the ball into the goal is ritualized rape; our archaic impulses come to the fore."

Simon Critchley:

"...Football is working-class ballet. It’s an experience of enchantment. For an hour and a half, a different order of time unfolds and one submits oneself to it. A football game is a temporal rupture with the routine of the everyday: ecstatic, evanescent and, most importantly, shared. At its best, football is about shifts in the intensity of experience. At times, it’s like Spinoza on maximizing intensities of existence. At other times, it’s more like Beckett’s Godot, where nothing happens twice.."

 
I love the world cup and consider myself plain lucky that I get to see it on TV.

I remember how my 8-year-old son started crying when the 2002 FIFA world cup ended on June 30. I too wanted to join him but I only hugged him.

Eduardo Galeano says "Tell me how you play and I will tell you who you are.". 

Mr. Galeano, Although my son is a football nut and plays it actively, I play football only in my daydreams, I have even attended some great matches there. And you are right, I am a day-dreamer!

  
Football originated in China and by women?

'Court Ladies in the Inner Palace' , circa. 1465-1509

Artist: Du Jin