`The Ball Is Round´

I was reading Marcela Mora Araujo's archived posts in the Guardian when I came across this line more than once. Araujo's credits her recollection of it to the opening line of the movie Run Lola Run. The quote which is a part of the German lexicon was originally made by Sepp Herberger, manager of the 1954 West German team, orchestrator of the Miracle of Bern triumph.

My most recent encounters with the phrase were during my trip to South Africa for the World Cup a few months ago. But it was spoken neither by my first companions, a pair of Irish, whose team were so disgracefully denied a presence by Henry's sleight of hand nor by the Argentines who might have been tempted to contemplate the shortness of cycles by the replay of the Mexico-Germany sequence from 4 years ago. In fact, it was the black South Africans I met who seemed to have a particular fondness for it. Each occasion involved the concurrence of an African defeat and a desire to perhaps forestall my eager analysis.

The sardonic smile and morose fatality with which it was uttered however gave me the impression that the metaphor, though freshly acquired, enshrined a familiar sentiment. It carried the spectre of hope crashing, the ebb and flow of emotion, the cyclicality of anticipation and disappointment as events continue their parallel unsympathetic course.

`After the game is before the game.´ `The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes. Thats a fact. Everything else is pure theory. ´ Herberger's intuitions are perhaps lost but the profundity of his words continue to grow.