Life and death and fate and football

Why does it matter so damn much? Why is it that every Nigerian with an ounce of nobility in his soul will have pledged eternal friendship to the Mozambican people in abject gratitude for the heroic deeds of their football team last weekend? Why would it have been so absolutely awful had fate granted Tunisia - or Kenya - an equaliser, thereby denying Nigeria the chance to participate in next year’s World Cup? And - sparing a thought for the losers - how do you think those Tunisians are feeling? And the Egyptians, deprived of a place in South Africa on Wednesday night by their bitter rivals (so we have learnt in the last week, though God alone knows why) Algeria, in a game that went right to the death and was won and lost by the narrowest of margins? What do you think their state of mind is, they who have fancied themselves to be Africa’s strongest football nation for quite some time now? De-vas-ta-ted is what the Egyptians are. Sunk, finished, thunder-struck. And the Russians? Prickly nationalists that they are, forever battling an inferiority complex with the dreaded “West”, how do you reckon they are taking elimination after defeat to one of their former Soviet bloc statelets, Slovenia? Melancholic at the best of times, they must be in deepest, deepest despond right now. As for Slovenia, can that nation of two million people (versus 142 million Russians!!) ever have experienced such joy? You, dear reader, sitting in Nigeria, weigh up the sum of happiness your team’s victory gave you last week, then multiply it by 70: that might give you a suggestion of a hint of the euphoric rush the good people of Slovenia are feeling right now. Had Nigeria lost, or Mozambique not won, a pall of gloom would have fallen over your sunny land, no doubt. But somewhere in your patriotic hearts you might have found it in you to acknowledge that, well, fair-do’s to Tunisia and, besides, our team lacked the organisation, the drive, the desire ...so tough luck to us. But Ireland??? Any idea how the Irish must be feeling??? Sick to the pits of their stomachs, and beyond. There might have been some glimmer of justice discernible in the event of Nigeria having failed to make it to the World Cup finals, but the Irish defeat, at the hands of France (yes, “hands” is the operative word), is an injustice so vast, so deep, so terrible that it will never be forgotten or forgiven by the men and women in green. If there were a World Cup for sheer pluck and guts you’d give it to the Irish right now. In the first play-off game against France they lost 1-0, at home in Dublin. Then they went to Paris on Wednesday and, against every odd, ended up 1-0 ahead at the end of the 90 minutes, having dominated the game and wasted rather more chances to score more goals than the French had managed to create. Then in extra time Thierry Henry controls the ball with his hand, then controls it a little bit more with his hand, then passes it to his team mate Gallas, who scores the decisive goal. Every person in the stadium, everyone watching it on TV saw “le hand of God”, as Britain’s Sun newspaper headlines it next day: everyone except the linesman and the referee. (Spare a thought for them, poor guys. They’ll never live it down. I’d shoot myself, or at the very least go into exile in deepest Borneo...) It’s actually a lot worse, as injustices go, than Maradona’s celebrated “hand of God” against England in the quarter finals of the World Cup in Mexico in 1986. First, because England at least made it to the World Cup; second, Maradona compensated for his cheating with the most fabulous goal scored in the history of the competition. In the Irish case, there is no consoling thought whatsoever; nothing to sweeten the pill. Nor is there any medicine on earth to remedy the guilt one would like to imagine that large parts of the French people are feeling. As France’s leading newspaper, le Monde, put it the next morning, “There is absolutely nothing to be proud of here...it was a hold-up”. Now, do I hear some voice somewhere, some little voice daring to suggest that, well, after all ....it is “only football”? Maybe not. Maybe I imagined it. After witnessing the joy, the sorrow, the euphoria, the despair, the mass guilt, the crushing sense of unjust fate that football games have provoked the world over in the past week, there cannot seriously be anyone left on the planet who still thinks in such terms, who so totally misses the point. What IS the point, then? What makes it all so life and death? I am not sure. Actually, I just don’t know. But life and death it surely is.