Letters To An
Overseas Friend.

While watching a part of Algeria v Germany from a eatery/bar in Oregon:

Nadia notes the “normal” haircuts on the German players. No faux hawks or ponytails or Beckham’s (which might be a fax hawk or ponytail). Not a single lock spiked or a single tip frosted. Unusual look for a soccer team. I say you can set your watch to those guys. She responds with they just have conservative do’s. The German passing looks more precise and reliable than the Algerians’.

A German player looks to have legitimately injured a hamstring. Since no one was near him at the time, you’d think he’s not faking it. But who knows. He also didn’t instantly grab his face or the injured area; instead, he just goes down in a heap, suggesting the genuine stress of authentic injury. He eventually gets taken away on a hand-carried bright orange stretcher. He could kind of walk and certainly stand but I suppose the stretcher is standard practice. This is something I haven’t seen in American sports. Injure a leg in America (and Canada by extension) and you walk or hop off with help from a trainer or two or get carted off on a modified golf cart. Stretchers are reserved for suspicions of spine related injuries. This all feels about right in the soccer v North America context. Watching an athlete get carried away by a gaggle of people on a medical contraption can give that athlete an air of neediness to the American eye. That wouldn’t fly in America when the athlete could conceivably leave the field at least partially under his own determination. If taken away on a motorized vehicle, it only amplifies the danger and ruggedness of the sport. This fits neatly within American and un-American preconceptions and stereotypes and might play a small subconscious role in soccer’s inability to break through in The States.

A hand carried stretcher for a single leg injury makes sense to me. But I don’t know if I would take one if I could still hop on one leg.

At one point the Algerian goalie was physically standing on his head. That expression, then, might come from an actual observation, as opposed to “found another gear” and “110%,” which come from a place of misunderstanding physiology and mathematics, respectively.

Just saw an ad that has a boy and a girl enjoying each other’s company in various roadside locations. The ad ends with the boy dropping the girl off in his car. She tells him to not to get out, she’ll get her item from the trunk herself. That item is a gas can and you can now see her abandoned truck in the scene. Turns out they were strangers and he was just helping her out. Boy looks disappointed and drives away. He gets home and see’s that she had written her number in the dirty film on the trunk of his car. Close ad with tagline about how anything can happen when you drive a Ford, or Honda, or whatever. Or maybe it wasn’t even a car ad. I can’t remember.

Clever, exciting, and touching, I guess, but all I could think was: What if it rained?! What if he doesn’t look back there?! Because spontaneity is hot, that’s what. Well I find reliable means of communication and not leaving important objectives up to the vagary of weather, hot.