Somewhere this morning I saw Fernando Torres’s physique described as “centaur-like.” (UPDATE: It was here.) Too good not to pass along, in the spirit of the still-to-be-neglected Tuesday Portrait.
I feel like Euro 2008 is due one final reckoning before I turn full-time to covering Frank Lampard’s journeys over the Earth, but I’m having a hard time figuring out what to say. Most post-tournament wrap-ups boil down to determining which adjective triumphed over which other adjective, but even writing about spirits and memories right now feels too much like words about wine. What I’m actually interested in, I think, is the fact that the tournament is gone, and that split second of emptiness it leaves before everything else starts rushing in to fill it. Reading all the valedictions yesterday—including some by writers not known for soccer coverage, like Ian Buruma and Anne Applebaum—I kept imagining that people were throwing ropes into the ocean to feel connected to a ship that had already sailed.
But the absence of the tournament doesn’t make for a very interesting blog post. Or it does only to the extent that that feeling, that brief background hint that something is missing, serves to point up the basic unimportance of football: that even at its greatest, it’s one part of your daily life, something you make room for, something that fits in with everything else, and that as often as football makes us use words like “stunning,” “transcendent,” and “beautiful,” it’s ultimately an entertainment that’s never quite as unforgettable as it seems to be while we’re watching it. Of course, it’s those other things, too, which is the stupid miracle of it, in the end. Still: Euro 2008 was one of the most purely enjoyable experiences that I’ve ever had as a sports fan, but two days from now I’ll have stopped looking at the clock in the mid-afternoon and thinking there should be a game on. That hush of abandoned expectation; the sound of priorities going painlessly back to normal.
So there’s not much I can make of the fact that the tournament’s over, especially as I’d rather see this site err on the side of creating myths than use it to expose their transience. Certainly it was a tournament that embodied the mythic in a faun-faced, grinning, prodigal, audacious way, with the lightning and the comebacks, with the counterattacks, with the goals scored in the last 10 minutes, with the last-minute revelation that Spain was the truth from the start. Fernando Torres has the physique of a centaur, and that’s the only way I can understand his tournament-winning goal, when he stretched out at full gallop and somehow got past Phillip Lahm, then somehow beat the sliding Lehmann to the ball—and even if Lahm pulled up the simple fact that Lehmann was massively interposed between Torres’s dainty outstretched foot and the goal should have been enough to kill the chance, only Torres somehow flipped the ball over him and watched it scuttle over the line, spinning against itself. The deftness of slow-motion and the raw onslaught of horseback, only giving a completely different meaning to “pour of tor and distances.”
That’s one more rope in the water, I guess. Not that a metaphor from the time of the Armada can have a lot of relevance for a moment in which “remembering” is a hybrid act that marries suspicion to the consultation of an external repository (maybe more than one, if you read Arabic or know the difference between Dailymotion and Imeem). A substantial fraction of the goals scored at Euro 2008 are currently available on this site; hundreds of people found themselves here yesterday after doing a Google search for some variant of “best goal of the tournament,” and guess how many stuck around to read my sterling paragraphs? It’s hard to say the tournament is slipping away when there are fragments of it everywhere, isolated and repackaged as moments of discrete inspiration. I saw one this morning, rolling down the street through the back window of an SUV. An event reconfigured as a narrative reconfigured as a constellation reconfigured as a star. . .
I’m not complaining; Torres’s goal was great enough to rule your astrolabe. This is just another thing that’s happening.
Nevertheless, there’s a hiss, there’s a quality draining. Maybe it’s continuity, and the suspense that depends on it. Maybe it’s the sense of possibility that disappears with the influx of Top-5 lists. Maybe it’s just the ability to commit meaningful time to a project. It was an event around here, this tournament. I got mocked by the Guardian. (And Rafa—look whose team lost!) I posted unreadable excerpts from The Man Without Qualities, which people actually read. Fun was had. Watching the matches, I often found myself moved. I’m going to miss it, briefly, until I don’t.
One or two lingering orphans:
Read More: Euro 2008
by Brian Phillips · July 1, 2008
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I am addicted to your writing, Brian. My day is not complete without logging on.
Your wife and your dad must be pretty astute observers of the game. They’re the only people I’ve heard of who had confidence in the Spanish.
What keeps me going through this interminable in-between time (transfer gossip is the least satisfying substitute for action, although I look forward to your coverage, of course) is looking at pictures and committing the memories to, well, memory. But still, like you said, something is missing. Can’t we just sleep through July and wake up on the eve of club football’s return?
To be mocked by that buzzkill Rafa should be considered an honour considering how against the grain his remarks were to this tournament and its outcome. Here’s to those who err on the side of myth-making, which my blog let leash into these past few weeks.
This was one my favourite things of yours that I’ve read. It actually made me miss the tournament…I had a hard time fighting through my desk job to catch these wonderful glimpses of mad dash comebacks, but when they came it was worth. My contract at work is done now, and staring down July with no job and no football is food for thought indeed.
But then I found Masters Football last Saturday on Setanta. A blog post awaits…
Not me. International football is nice (especially when Spain and Torres are conquering all), but it’s got nothing on the domestic game, and the fact that the Euro’s are over simply means that we’re closer to the start of the new season.
A few weeks of transfer window madness and then preseason starts, and its about 5 weeks til the first friendly. In between that we’ve got the conclusion of wimbledon, The Open golf, and probably some cricket that i won’t even watch.
In the meantime i’ll be watching this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3HfpckA5bg
over and over again.
Richard — Glad you liked the post. AMSL has been on a tear lately and has been one my favorite blogs to read throughout the tournament. Here’s to myth-making indeed. Now if I could just work up the nerve to ask the guy in the sports bar to switch over to Masters Football…
Em — But then how would you know what color swimsuit Colleen McLoughlin is wearing?
FBM — I’d argue with your crazy opinions on international football, but I’m too busy fast forwarding to the part where Pepe Reina sings “The Little Drummer Boy” for the 380th time.