the feast

It starts early, in the 50th minute of Italy-Slovakia. The ball is out of play, half-way between the box and the side-line. Mucha, the Slovakian goalie, takes his sweet time getting it—evidence that his team is going to defend their one-goal advantage with delay. The Italian Di Natale runs to press him on. They bump into each other and the goalie falls hard to the ground, with no shame, stealing liberally from the Italian repertoire.
Two minutes later, Fabio Cannavaro, Italy’s captain, tries to teach Mucha how to bring a yellow card to life and dives as soon as Hamsik challenges. But Howard Ebb, the English referee, isn’t playing along.
Slovakia scores a second time and the commentators are ready to dismiss Italy from the tournament until Di Natale shows himself again and scores for the current champions.
Thereafter it’s 16 minutes of total opera, only it’s Slovakian opera. Mucha, inside his own goal and tangled up by the net, is the overture. The coach magically eats up time with his substitutions, and the players follow suit with delirious dives, doubled up from nothing whatsoever—happily gathering a new collection of yellow cards. In between tumbles each team scores once more, turning the whole affair into a beautiful, wild carnival, the best of the World Cup so far.

the stretcher

Second half of Italy vs. Paraguay. After the tying goal, Italy takes control of the field and pushes Paraguay back to its own half. Six minutes before the end of the match, the Paraguayan midfielder Jonathan Santana is lying down, near the side-line. No idea why. He’s waving his hands, and the referee stops the play and approaches him. We all approach him. Santana says something. He also gestures in a very peculiar way. It looks like he’s asking for the stretcher. He points to his leg and conveys, sure enough, that he would like to have the stretcher.
When a game is about to end and your team desperately needs to keep the score as is, and the opposing team is attacking at full swing, there’s nothing better than watching the referee lift his arm and order the stretcher to come in. "Let’s hope the injury is nothing serious," one thinks immediately, "but thank God!" Because between the emergency team getting there, seeing what’s wrong with the player and getting out, two or three minutes can go by and, more importantly, the game cools down.
Santana’s request is interesting because nowadays players know that referees won’t call in the stretcher unless they’ve witnessed a really tough tackle or a nasty-looking cramp.
In the late seventies, however, when I used to go to the stadium with my father, the stretcher coming in to the field was a very common occurence; what’s more, our stadium would have the four shortest, heaviest guys they could hire carrying it. They’d come out of some corner of the stadium, and even though they were running, it looked like they didn’t gain any terrain. It was a moment from the circus. The followers of the visiting team would see that and head straight to the exits.
The referee of Italy-Paraguay, Benito Archundia Téllez of Mexico, of course rejected Santana’s request, and the Paraguayans had to keep on protecting their goal with the ball in play.