Monday
Like much of the world, I’ve been riveted by the World Cup. It helps that my favorite team—France—is still in the mix. My love of French soccer goes back to my childhood when my family was visiting Paris (in 1962) for a summer of sightseeing (for my brothers and me) and of research (for my French professor father). I remember, upon a visit to the old Roman arena, watching five French school boys juggling a soccer ball during their lunch break. One lined up in the entryway and the other four, while munching on their baguette sandwiches, took turns with the ball, bouncing it on their feet before sending it spinning toward the “goal.” The goalie would grab the ball, roll it back to them, whereupon another would start juggling. I’ve rooted for France ever since.
But I like England as well and was torn as I watched the two countries play each other on Saturday in what many are calling the best World Cup game to date. The English played a wonderful attacking game but ended up losing, thanks to two magnificent French goals and a missed penalty by their all-time goal scorer Harry Kane.
Many are saying that England should have won. After all, they had twice as many shots (16-8), including shots on target (8-5) and corner kicks (5-2). They also had many more completed passes and dominated possession (57%). Nevertheless, France emerged victorious.
I think of a passage from Ralph Ellison’s invisible Man that seems to capture both the drama of the game and the outcome:
Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a well-digger’s posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent’s sense of time.
To be sure, defending world champion France is hardly a yokel, nor was it the long shot. In fact, most people were predicting that France would win. Nevertheless, there were times in the match where France’s back line appeared to be doing a version of holding up their arms in stunned surprise. The two penalty shots awarded to England were brought about by French players panicking. England’s Bukayo Saka was the very personification of “violent flow of rapid rhythmic action.”
Only—and this is where the comparison breaks down—some experts who understand soccer better than I do say that France maintained its composure far better than I realized. Even as the defense was swarmed by attackers, the fullbacks (for the most part) kept their composure as they parried the attacks. If so, they were less like the stunned yokel and more like Lizzie when attacked by the goblin men in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market:
Like a rock of blue-vein’d stone
Lash’d by tides obstreperously,—
Like a beacon left alone
In a hoary roaring sea,
Sending up a golden fire,—
Like a fruit-crown’d orange-tree
White with blossoms honey-sweet
Sore beset by wasp and bee,—
Like a royal virgin town
Topp’d with gilded dome and spire
Close beleaguer’d by a fleet
Mad to tug her standard down.
By the end of the match, despite wave-wasp-ship attacks, France still held its standard high. Like Lizzie, it was strong in its self assurance.
With former French colony Morocco next, will we need to shift to Casablanca to describe the next match? If France loses, it will at least be able to say, “We’ll always have Paris.”