Who cares if nobody is scoring in the matches as long as there’s plenty of action elsewhere and so far this World Cup has delivered.
There is the controversy over the new ball, the vuvuzelas, the concern that the South African infrastructure was going to collapse and the fear that the citizenry would butcher and pillage their guests.
We have the quadrennial reminder that nobody in FIFA’s tower can be bothered about whether the matches are refereed properly and that if the players, coaches, media and fans want answers they can shove a Jabulani where even Beckham can’t bend it.
The French are having an epic farcical collapse, the Italians are one loss away from joining them, and don’t fly into Heathrow without a parachute if England falls to Slovenia tomorrow (What if the sodding Yanks get in??!!).
Which brings us to the universal language, the only hierarchical need that approaches soccer these 31 days. Who’s getting it from whom and who’s upset about it? Who’s deprived? Will the English dames arrive in time?
Will John Terry need a scorecard? How does a celebrity romance become an international incident? Enter here and here and here and here and if you aren’t otherwise occupied you can keep doing it all day and night.
Ray Lewis heads up the tax consulting business, Tax Therapy, based in Boulder and San Francisco. Ray writes about everything from finance, taxes, business and technology to sports, travel, politics and music.
He was formerly a technology consultant at The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and served as a faculty member of The Sawtooth Writers Conference in Stanley, Idaho, an annual event dedicated to teaching fiction and poetry to gifted teenagers.
