FLY ME TO THE MOON!!

The French are not in style in Portugal this week, with the Portuguese press fuming over France’s 1-0 victory on a penalty kick in the 30th minute by Zinedine Zidane.

After achieving that edge, the French retreated into a hard shell around their own goal and did the soccer equivalent of rope-a-dope, preferring to break up the Portuguese combinations and leaving all the heavy lifting to goalkeeper Fabien Barthez, who knocked away successive volleys of Portuguese shots.

The Portuguese reaction was essentially, “We wuz robbed,” and “Why didn’t they come out and fight like a man?” The Portuguese sports daily A Bola sneered, “The French cock [the emblem is a rooster] was afraid to come out of the henhouse.”

This sly French strategy of letting their opponent wear himself out while expending a minimum of energy, like a fighter who lets his competitor punch uselessly at his arms, may have had some element of conserving their energy for the final against much younger Italy, who had qualified a day earlier against Germany. Or maybe the French were themselves too exhausted to carry the fight across the field, but it also demonstrated the evolution of the zone defense in soccer. The average number of goals per game in World Cup competition has steadily declined over the last half-century. In the 1954 World Cup an average of 5.5 goals were scored per game. The figure for this tournament is now 2.25 goals, less than half. French coach Raymond Domenech admitted, “When we see a scoring opportunity, we take it. But the emphasis is on controlling the rhythm of the game.”

This strategy may be due in part to the relatively advanced age of the French team, eight of whom are playing in their third World Cup. While they are unquestionably in fantastic physical condition, they have dominated a much younger field by virtue of their wisdom and experience.

Zidane, with his impassive face, is almost sphinx-like in the otherworldly calm he projects. Who can fathom the limitless complexity of combinations that must be endlessly formulating in the infinite labyrinthine recesses of his kasbah of a mind? Who can conceive of the treasure trove of passing combinations, shooting angles, tackles, deceptions and tactical strategies shooting through his synaptic impulses at light speed and the iron will it takes to conform his physical movements to those astro-infinital combinations. Let’s say that like a chess master he is thinking ten moves ahead, what really puts the guy in outer space is his ability to propel himself there and bring the whole team with him.

As though his efforts weren’t enough, he is aided by other tactical geniuses, his master generals who also possess the stamina of heroic footsoldiers, Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry, dominating physical powerhouses with a supernatural instinct for setting up plays and managing defense.

A team with all these physical and mental superlatives breaks through the realm of reality into the dimension of science fiction as imagined in a Pink Floyd-inspired travelogue of the inner mind, except that the physical concreteness of it is all too readily apparent to those of us lucky enough to be alive, to witness a French space program that never has to leave the earth to take us where no man has gone before.

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Posted on 7/9/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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