Friday Football Frenzy

From Crooked Timber comes a post with two pieces of World Cup history, or atleast World Cup commentary history. As Kieran Healy writes :

...here are two terrific bits of World Cup commentary, both much better than the now-hackneyed “Gol” guy: a clip in Arabic from Kuwait vs Czechoslovakia in 1982, and one in Dutch from the last minute of Holland vs Argentina in 1998. Both commentaries are out there in the realm of religious/sexual ecstasy.

Watch the video clips (thanks YouTube !) and you'll see what he means.

First the Arabic, and then the Dutch.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to decide on which team to back. I'm tending towards Angola --- for mostly non-soccer reasons. I'm hoping they'll do a Senegal.

More difficult is going to be the incorporation of the phrase "Dennis Bergkamp !" into my World Cup watching experience. Maybe I'll make it my new all-purpose exclamatory phrase.

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