| 25.11.2009 |
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| After the sad news of Robert Enke's suicide and the unfolding betting scandal, football fans needed some comic relief, and they got it last weekend with a number of laughable blowouts. Hoffenheim and Bremen both humiliated opponents in the Bundesliga, while Tottenham (boy, does it hurt an Arsenal fan to write this) made a mockery of Wigan in the Premiership. Thrashings, thanks to some deeply sadistic impulse deep in football fans' subconscious, are always fun. While games that end 3-nil are really boring, matches' accrue a perverse fascination once the fourth goal has been scored. Everyone loves a blow-out. Everyone, that is, except goalkeepers. I know whereof I speak. When I was in seventh grade, I manned the posts one season for my junior high school team. We were a decent squad with one fatal flaw. A kid named Matt scored all of our goals while the rest of us just ran around kicking each other and behaving like clowns. And one dreary day about this time of year, Matt was sick or on vacation or something, and we had to go it alone. I seem to remember our opponents that day putting eight past us - or, more precisely: me. I fear, however, that the true tally could have been closer to fifteen. About ten minutes into the match, the rest of the team decided they couldn't be bothered tracking back any more, and I was left to face a series of four-on-one situations. And it didn't help that we were playing on a converted baseball field so shots were coming at me from the acutest of angles after careening of the pitcher's mound and home plate. When the referee mercifully called time, I was bruised, scratched, muddy and thoroughly humiliated. One of my teammates came up to me and offered the following words of consolation. "You sucked." On the trip home, I was left alone to ponder the import of those words in the back of a Blu-Bird bus, the kind with sticky green naugahyde seats, a corrugated aluminum floor and vaguely noxious fumes wafting in through the back door. To this day, I think about that bus ride every time I see some team getting hammered five or six nil. So Simon Pouplin, Fayrd Mondragon and, above all, Chris Kirkland, I felt your pain. |
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