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.
