a funny 0-0

I start watching Paraguay-Japan in the second half. There's a nice rhythm, a fast pace, and the two teams are playing honestly. There are no tricks, no diving.
The minutes pass and both sides show fear of having to leave the tournament. But there's also, weird as it may sound, a comedic quality in the match.
The ball rarely lingers in midfield. It rolls frantically from one box to the other, bringing about disorder and restlessness and stimulating all kinds of useless stampedes.
There are so many bodies bumping into each other, crashing, and falling down that they resemble routines.
Shots to the boxes aren't kicked back, they simply ricochet off the defenders' shins and torsos, adding to the confusion.
If two players jump for a ball, one of them will surely end up curled in the ground.
A Paraguayan forward has to duck and lift his hands to protect himself from an unexpected pass.
Endo stares ahead and conspires with a half-dormant eye every time he takes a free kick for Japan.
Gerardo Martino, the Paraguayan coach, can't stay still. He slaps his sides, grabs his hair, covers his eyes, lifts his arms...he seems invented by Molière.
The Japanese coach, Takeshi Okada, standing a few feet away, is a rigid mask of agony.
Both teams have an inept attacking game and that explains the 0-0.
Thank God for the silly tune that played throughout.

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.