Football by @gnnr

A long-winded, but worth it, article on misery, the penalty shoot-out and unfairness in football. Best quote here:

The fact that the better team sometimes appears to stand a lesser chance of winning than the worse is something that most fans love. Most coaches and players too, I’d bet. It’s just so much more interesting in its many dimensions than the purely efficient conversion of good play into success. It allows for everything from the triumph of the strong to the subversion of supposed sporting justice by the weak. It allows for the flourishing of greatness and the deliciousness of the upset. It allows for an array of combinations of game and result, of process and outcome, which makes for the drama that keeps us hooked.

The shootout is the debt we pay for this. If this game means anything at all, it should be embraced.

Also, this:

Dread is also the sine qua non of the World Cup. Sure, it’s a carnival, it’s a global party, it’s scantily-clad women in the crowd that the cameraman always seems to be able to spot, it’s moments which appear scripted by the ad exec working on behalf of the shoe company, it’s moments which are scripted by the ad exec working on behalf of the shoe company, it’s indulgences and obsequiousness really getting the blood pumping through Sepp Blatter’s black little heart, and so forth. Above all, it matters (just because Bono says so doesn’t make it untrue) and nothing that matters comes without dread. It’s the dread of failure.

Norman Einstein’s has an issue devoted to the World Cup, although this is by far the best thing about it