HWBC: The Thinking Fan's Guide...

Now that I am reading for pleasure again, I can finally recommend books that aren't exclusively about fin-de-siècle and interwar Europe. I love ontological phenomenology as much as the next graduate student, but sometimes you need a bit of a breather from das Man.

The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup is a collection of thirty-two essays each orbiting around football as it relates to one of the qualifying countries (sorry Greece, maybe next decade). The title is a bit of a misnomer; the actual mechanics of the sport are rarely discussed, usually only in reference to the inexpressible beauty and grace of the game. Instead, a majority of the essays are personal narratives written by English non-natives of their respective countries.

As such the book is fairly uneven.

Eric Schlosser's essay on the Swedish prison system, while fascinating, barely mentions soccer. I skipped William Finnegan's long account of a Portuguese surfing village - if you happen to read it, let me know if he ever got around to Luis Figo.

Still, the book is enormously entertaining. It is most successful when the writing focuses on the moments of bisection between the sport and the socio-political (such as the Barça role in Catalonian resistance) and when it describes former soccer greats (like the great Brazilian chain-smoking doctor Socrates).

Or when it manages both -- like the peerless Argentinean Diego Armando Maradona whose own handball in the 1986 match against England (and in the shadow of the Falklands Conflict) he described as,"A little bit by the hand of God, another bit by the head of Maradona." A decade later, Diego would write, "Now I feel I am able to say what I couldn't then... Bollocks was it the hand of God, it was the hand of Diego! And it felt a little bit like pickpocketing the English."

Added bonus: the book includes a comprehensive list of each country's performance in prior World Cups and how they fared on the path to qualification for the 2006 event in Germany. While this information may not be useful in divining bracket winners, the anecdotes contained in the thirty-two essays should help in deciding which teams to flippantly support:

Who knew Australian football fans actually sang Men At Work's "Land Down Under" as a victory chant?

"Can you hear can you hear the thunder?"