Plácido Domingo – Granada

La Roja: Campeones Mundial 2010

USA 1 Ghana 2 (aet )

Africa’s time is not yet up. For all the dismay and despair at the performance of the host continent in the tournament in which the gap between football’s first and third world was supposed to close forever, Africa’s involvement will last into a third week. At least Ghana’s Black Stars are still shining.

Thanks to wonderful goals from Kevin-Prince Boateng and Asamoah Gyan, Milovan Rajevac’s side edged past a dogged, determined United States to set up a quarter-final clash with Uruguay, equalling the best-ever performance at a World Cup by an African side. …

Postulates Of the Pitch

Soccer and Philosophy
Edited by Ted Richards

In a blissfully funny, vintage Monty Python sketch, there is a soccer game between Germany and Greece in which the players are leading philosophers. The always formidable Germany, captained by “Nobby” Hegel, boasts the world-class attackers Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, while the wily Greeks, captained by Socrates, field a dream team with Plato in goal, Aristotle on defense and—a surprise inclusion—the mathematician Archimedes.

Toward the end of the keenly fought game, during which nothing much appears to happen except a lot of thinking, the canny Socrates scores a bitterly disputed match winner. Mayhem ensues! The enraged Hegel argues in vain with the referee, Confucius, that the reality of Socrates’ goal is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, while Kant holds that, ontologically, the goal existed only in the imagination via the categorical imperative, and Karl Marx—who otherwise had a quiet game—protests that Socrates was offside.
And there, in a philosophical nutshell, we have the inspired essence of the delightfully instructive “Soccer and Philosophy,” a surprising collection of essays on the Beautiful Game, written by soccer-loving loonies who are real-life philosophers, whose number includes the book’s editor, Ted Richards. Soccer purists, incidentally, who were born in England (like myself) prefer not to refer to soccer as soccer. It is football—as cricket is cricket. Even so, there is something for everyone in this witty and scholarly book.

For those of you who remain bewildered by the mysterious global appeal of the world’s most popular sport, for example, I can guarantee that this book will bewilder you even more—but in a good way! Attend to the enduring dictum of the working-class Sophocles of England, the legendary former manager of Liverpool Football Club, Bill Shankly. One of the book’s essays quotes from his line: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed in that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.” …