Scoring with the Heart

Apparently, in other countries, they play football (soccer to you dimwits) on pitches like this. This particular example taken from the harbor of Montevideo. At noon. Too warm for even the laziest of penalty-kicks. And who would have chased the lost ball anyway? Not me. No, give me a covered grassy surface with dew on it. And nets. Solid green nets hung with precision, and tightly.

And then at half-time, some soft oranges and a sports-drink, isotonic, a real thirst-quencher. What on earth are they thinking? Running around on this piece of wasteland. The nausea of so much meaningless hardship.

One of our Latin-America correspondents once told me that nets are against a particular strand of Catholicism. Something to do with the Holy Ghost, he said, and not putting up barriers, like a net, or anything that would catch anything flying through a wooden structure. “The belief is,” he said, “that by keeping the goals open, it adds a certain spiritual dimension to the game, like: not only knocking the ball in with your foot, but also sometimes with your heart… And who would want a goal scored by the heart to be caught by something as flimsy as a net?”