someone, something

Last Friday, at the end of the second half of extra time, Ghana attacked like a great team. They had Uruguay by the throat with a brilliant display of physical strength and technique, and managed to get a free kick near the box in the last minute.
The penalty that came about seconds later, from Luis Suárez’s handball on the goal line, has been thoroughly discussed in the last few days, but I still can’t understand how the portuguese referee Olegario Benquerenca was able to organize it so quickly.
A penalty given in the last second of a quarter final game that’s tied 1-1, with a red card given to one of the star forwards of the tournament, should’ve created at least several minutes of chaos.
That was not the case. In the blink of an eye, Suárez left the field, the teams lined-up behind the box and Asamoah Gyan and Fernando Muslera took up their places.
There has never been so much speed in organizing a penalty. Unfortunately, nobody had the sense to protect Gyan.
Ghana’s last minutes of play had been so fabulous, so out of the ordinary, that all the players were surely flying. Someone in the team should’ve thrown himself to the ground with a cramp or seen a camera gone wild behind the goal or asked the referee something stupid, I don’t know what, but something should’ve been done to allow Gyan’s head to cool down a bit.
Half a minute would’ve been enough. The penalty would’ve turned into a goal, the best of the two teams would’ve won and not much would’ve been said about Suárez’s ethical standards.
Ghana went out of the tournament because its players didn’t get theatrical when they had to.

the face

I spent a good portion of the Ghana-Serbia match thinking about Milan Rajevac, Ghana's coach. When the camera showed him for the first time, the commentator informed us that he is Serbian, which was news to me. In the world of international soccer, it's not rare to see an imported coach suddenly playing against his own country, but what came up on the screen at that particular moment didn't seem like the face of a professional of the globalized game but that of a contrite, almost defeated man.
I don't know how many times they had the camera on him, but on every occasion he looked as if he were oblivious to the match. It seemed to me that he was repeating the same thing in his mind over and over again: "Imagine my luck, to have to play my first game of my first World Cup against Serbia... My luck, to have to play my first game of my first World Cup against Serbia... To have to play..."
I did think for a while that it was an act. World-class coaches know a lot about camera movement and being able to juggle conflicting interests is a key requirement of the job. But I couldn't shake off my first impression completely.
As soon as the referee blew the whistle to end the match, the camera went back to Rajevac. A Ghanian player and a member of the coaching team jumped to hug him, but he pushed them both odiously and walked away. It was reported that later on he talked about how well Serbia played and about Ghana's good luck in winning the match.