Erik Niva
This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer’s.
SEATTLE. The sport is called football, nothing else.
It can be attacked, it can be manipulated – but it still cannot be controlled.
USA-Belgium, 1-4.
A victory for football, a victory for reason.
Who are you going to call now? Will there be economic sanctions against Belgium already tomorrow? Or will the need to simply annex the Baarle-Hertog enclave be hinted at?
Uh, it’s close at hand to become both flamboyant and mocking, but there’s really no need for that.
When they go low, we go high.
Team USA has been outplayed, outclassed, eliminated. Nothing they say or do now can change that.
For my own part, I can hereby sum up a happy day as a football Belgian. If we ignore the Swedish national team, I don’t think I’ve ever come to a World Cup match with such one-sided feelings.
Painted me smurf blue
Neutral? Objective? Impartial?
None of the above. Absolutely neither.
I mentally painted myself Smurf blue and cut my hair with Tintin locks as soon as I got to Seattle. I crooned Jacques Brel chansons to Technotronics beats, I drank Leffe Blonde and peed it out with carefree Maneken Pis swagger.
After all, it was the Belgian national team captain Rudi Garcia who formulated that they were not only fighting for themselves, but for football in general, its integrity and ethics.
A lot of people bought into that slogan, that concept, and I was one of them.
On this day, Belgium was not just Belgium anymore, that slightly faded national team from the outlineless state. Instead, they were representatives of our football, the football that has grown organically over 160 years, the football that has become the world’s biggest cultural force.
End of the shenanigans
They played for all of us.
Seattle is both a beautiful and welcoming city, but today it had turned into enemy territory. Being there felt a bit like being sent on a mission behind enemy lines.
The Belgians were no more than a few hundred, the Americans felt like a million men. As usual, fighter jets flew over the arena just before kick-off, and as the crowd roared into action, the noise meter quickly reached over 140 decibels. “Can cause immediate, permanent hearing damage”my phone announced.
But then the match started, and then the shenanigans were over.
The American players were paralysed, while the Belgians were agitated to the point of frenzy. Complete overrun, total class difference.
Leandro Trossard and Dodi Lukébakio had a playhouse on the edges. Timid Charles de Ketelaere looked like a physical monster through his timing. Youri Tielemans owned an entire midfield, purely through game understanding and smartness.
Football, as we know it. A sport where it pays off how much you rush around if you don’t know what you’re doing, where the truth finally shows itself on the field.
For those who wanted a sample map of how a well-educated aristocrat might treat an upstart with delusions of grandeur, this was almost too obvious.
The Belgians calm, wise, structured. The Americans impatient, lost, scattered.
That FIFA has taken so many of us to the precipice of soccer radicalization is sad in so many horrible ways, but one of the negative side effects is that Team USA becomes what a certain type of American calls collateral damage.
I have liked that I liked them. Now it doesn’t work anymore, now it’s downright impossible.
Unclothed giggling schadenfreude
It’s a likeable group of players, driven by a greater purpose. They are playing to take soccer to a place it has never been before here in the United States, and were well on their way to succeeding.
Now it was sacrificed for someone else’s purposes, on someone else’s altar.
It’s not really that bad, but it’s a young and relatively inexperienced team that has already tried to shoulder a very big responsibility. Now they were placed in the middle of a sports political mushroom cloud immediately after the bombing – and they couldn’t handle it.
After his players lost on yet another blind spot, Mauricio Pochettino kicked a rack of water bottles in frustration. What happened, what was going on…?
Harvard smart goalkeeper Matt Freese behaved like the dumbest of the times, the leader Tim Ream turned into a sad old man.
Poor Folarin Balogun got nowhere against Nathan Ngoy – blowing away the few chances he did get – and was eventually substituted in front of silent, muted stands.
It’s not these guys’ fault that it turned out this way, but now this is how it had to be.
Humiliation through football. Romelu Lukaku swept 4-1, his teammates did the Trump dance at the corner flag and I felt pure, blazing and unadulterated Belgian love.
The football won tonight, and just the thought of how this result lands in the power room of arrogance fills me with an unclothed giggling glee.
The US is welcome back for another try next time, provided they collectively accept the rules of the game. Until then, they have to work hard and single-mindedly build on, accept that football still offers no shortcuts.
For myself, I will order a Belgian away shirt, hang some Magritte paintings on the wall, book a holiday accommodation in Ostend.
