Reykjavík Grapevine - 15.06.2018, Blaðsíða 27

Finally,
A Fucking
Game
Iceland’s World Cup for an American
Words: Hannah Jane Cohen Photos: Art Bicnick, Mink Viking Studio
There’s an unfair accusation in
Europe that Americans don’t know
anything about football. Actually,
we freakin' love football. Not only
did we invent football, but we’re the
best in the world at it, thanks to the
Brady brothers. C’mon, who doesn’t
love throwing around a pigskin with
their brochachos next to a Bud Lite?
Nobody. It’s the American Dream.
Wait—what? I just checked out
the Icelandic football team. What
the hell is wrong with all of you?
That’s not football. Where’s the
padding? The defensive line? The
quarterback? I knew this country
was backwards but I didn’t know it
was full of idiots.
IT’S CALLED SOCCER
I’m obviously joking. I understand
that outside of the freest country
of all time, they call what is clearly
soccer ‘football’. It makes no sense,
though. The word ‘football’ clearly
conjures up images of throw-
ing an oval-shaped leather object
with one’s hands,
not kicking a ball
around with your
foot. God, do the
Americans have
to Normandy y’all
again to save you
from this Tom-
(Brady)-foolery?
Once again, I am
joking. I have no idea
where the word ‘soccer’ comes from
and I understand that, like our Elec-
toral College, it makes no sense. So
go ridicule us on Twitter using your
iPhone in your Nikes. We’ll just be
over here with our AR-15s and meth.
The plight of the winner
Anyway, I was lucky enough to live in
Reykjavík during the 2016 Euro Cup,
so I got to experience that incredible
swell of national pride first hand.
That last minute Iceland-Austria
goal, the jaw-dropping smiting of
England—it was big. People ran in
the streets and hugged strangers. I
cried. It was unlike anything I had
seen in America. People actually
cared.
The thing about America is that,
like DJ Khaled and Donald Trump,
all we do is win. We win everything,
so much so that it becomes mean-
ingless and no one gets emotionally
involved. Unless you’re a one-in-a-
trillion athlete like Michael Phelps,
I would seriously claim that Ameri-
can society got more shook by
Kylie Jenner’s pregnancy than any
international sports victory. We’re
just used to being good at stuff. It’s
cocky, but true.
A big fucking deal
Iceland though, doesn’t always win,
so when a team makes an interna-
tional tournament, it’s a big fucking
deal. People get impassioned and
everyone—hipsters, loners, goths
and intellectu-
als, alike—stop to
watch. There is no
American equiva-
lent.
For me, I
love this whole
“getting into
sports” thing.
It’s wonder-
ful to have an
emotional attachment and actu-
ally care about the results and have
it intrinsically mean something.
Whether Iceland wins or not, this
is a watershed moment. This is
Icelanders showing their stuff
to their world. This is acceptable
nationalism, and I am here for it.
That said, I am still American,
so if Iceland loses, I will make like a
true MAGA peep and sue the moth-
erfucking pants off FIFA because
clearly the game was rigged. Like
our election.
27The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 10 — 2018
Football, The
Beating Heart
Of Brazil
A Brazilian perspective
on Iceland’s World Cup
Words: Juliana Iluminata Wilczynski Photos: Mink Viking Studio
When you mention football to
someone here in Iceland, you will
receive one of two reactions. The
first is of the “HÚH! I love football,
let’s go smite some non-viking ass!
Skál!” variety. The second reaction
is: “Football sucks.”
I honestly completely under-
stand both reactions, but being from
Brazil, I have a different perspective.
The first reaction comes from
fans of the hypermasculine sport,
and here in Iceland, it is mostly just
one big excuse to drink a lot and get
rowdy. The second reaction comes
from those who’ve maybe never
cared about sports, or have issues
with the fact that while the men’s
team is glorified, the women’s team
is neglected and forgotten. And
that’s not to mention the horrific
pay gap.
The beating
heart of Brazil
Whatever the reaction—I get it.
However, where I come from, foot-
ball is arguably one of the most
influential facets of our national
identity, and is ultimately the beat-
ing heart of our country—all 200
million of us.
Yes, like many of you reading
this, I hate how masculinist the
institution of football has become.
I hate how it’s just another excuse
to pile on the
Tuborgs. I
hate how FIFA
continues to
capitalise on
m o d e r n - d a y
slave labour and
people of colour,
and through its
accumulation of
wealth and capi-
tal by disposses-
sion. It’s no secret that FIFA has
evicted some of the most vulnera-
ble people in the world just to build
a football stadium that will host
maybe four or five games during
the entire World Cup.
Unlike Iceland, though, Brazil
is one of the most racially diverse
countries in the world. With that
comes great socio-economic
disparities between the wealthy
and powerful and the most vulner-
able and marginalised people in
our country. Football is one of the
few uniting forces in our nation.
It brings people together from all
walks of life, from the favelas to
the penthouses of Ipanema. Most
importantly, it has created a place
of acceptance for the people of
colour in our country, where they
are admired and revered. Football
has helped raise people out of the
cycle of poverty.
The purest democracy
This week, Brazilian news giant
Globo posted an article by Roberto
Damatta, a famous Brazilian
anthropologist, entitled “Foot-
ball and Brazil.” In it, he makes an
extremely important point: that
the game of football
is the place where
Brazilians experi-
ence democracy in
its pure state, free
of corruption, and
is a place where all
players are equal.
It is the true sweet
escape.
W h e n
football is mixed
with capitalism, however, we can
lose sight of the true value of the
game. Brazil has a reputation for
having some of the most corrupt
politicians in the world, resulting
in the abandonment, oppression,
and neglect of many people in my
country. Having come out of our
decades-long military dictatorship,
and everything else that happens
daily in our country, the football
arena is a sacred space where noth-
ing else matters. It allows people to
escape the brutal daily reality that
many in Brazil face. It’s easy to lose
hope in times like these, but foot-
ball keeps us full of hope. It allows
people to dream at night.
Pelé, grapefruits,
and hope
Pelé, undeniably the best football
player in the history of football,
used to practice his juggling skills
with grapefruits. His first football
team was named “The Shoeless
Ones,” because neither Pelé nor his
teammates could afford shoes. Pelé
had big dreams, but, most impor-
tantly, he had hope for his people,
and his nation. He wanted to make
them proud. Thus, football keeps
our nation dreaming, despite all
of our problems and despair. I’m
sorry, but it’s true: this is some-
thing that most Icelanders will
never grasp or understand.
It’s more than just muscu-
lar men running around, and it’s
more than huddling around a
TV set to shout at the top of your
lungs every time someone misses
or scores a goal. It’s way more than
that to me. If you hate football—
like I said, I get it. But you can’t
deny how important it is to the
people of Brazil, and how it helps
to keep our dreams alive.
Fifteen
Minutes
Of Horror
An Icelander’s
perspective
on the World Cup
Words: Valur Grettisson
Icelanders are afraid of two things at
some stage of their lives. First, it’s Grýla—
the baby-eating mother of the Yule Lads,
and owner of the Christmas Cat (some
weird-ass combination of a giant cat and
a wolf), which will also eat you if you don’t
wear your finest clothes at Christmas.
Þrándur Þórarinsson captured the true
essence of Grýla in a horrific painting that
went viral some years ago and still gives
me nightmares.
The other thing that we’re really afraid
of is the “fifteen minutes of horror”—
not to be mixed with the game “seven
minutes in heaven,” where teenagers of
the opposite sex go into a dark closet
and do whatever it is teenagers do today.
(Spoiler: they browse their phones until
it’s over.)
Snickering wizards
When I was growing up, our national
teams weren’t good at anything that
involved balls. Although our handball
teams were pretty decent, when it came
to competing in smaller—dare I say,
insignificant—tournaments, we were
always fighting this weird curse.
During the “fifteen minutes of horror,”
everything just goes sideways in the worst
way possible. It didn’t really matter how
well the team was doing in the game—we
always waited for these dreadful fifteen
minutes to come. It was like our beloved
team became possessed by some kind of
a sport version of Linda Blair.
This ghastly period would best be
compared to a cheap ‘90s Disney movie,
when everything goes wrong because
of some snickering wizard and his crafty
magic. But there was no trickery involved
(I think!). We were just incompetent when
it came to sport.
The only way to survive these terrible
intervals was if the team had scored
enough goals to have a secure lead
before it happened. Even then, the other
team would often gain a landslide of
goals during these cursed minutes, and
often there was no coming back.
So then...
When I noticed that our football team was
doing better than usual at Euro 2016, I still
waited for the fifteen minutes of horror.
After years of experience, I’d grown to
expect any optimism to be crushed. I
thought to myself—sure, they’re good,
but can they survive these fifteen
minutes?
In the first game, it never came. A
pleasant surprise. But was the curse
broken? Did someone finally sacrifice a
middle-aged football bully that refuses to
act appropriately for his age (you know
the type, it’s the guy that paints his beard
in the flag's colours) to break the spell?
I wasn’t really sure
It wasn’t until we beat England that I
dared believe we had broken the curse.
Sport-Linda Blair had been exorcised
(and the spirit, from the looks of it, flew
straight into the souls of the English
football team).
My theory is simple. It was the team’s
lion hearts—and perhaps having some
incredibly talented players, and coaches
and a solid game-plan—that vanquished
the curse. Nothing can beat passion
(except, perhaps, the other team’s
incredibly talented players and coaches
and solid game-plan). And the Icelandic
team is always the winner, because they
fight with their hearts.
The Icelandic nation have already
won. We got to the World Cup. We made
sporting history in Iceland, and we have
nothing more to prove. Now we’ll just
watch our stressed-out opponents trying
to control their nerves when they meet
our team on the battlefield. They’re right
to be nervous. We will smite those puny
creatures.
And just remember, if this goes really
sideways for us, we still have fifteen
minutes—but instead of horror, it’s our
fifteen minutes of fame.