The Scoring Game
My grandparents didn’t have cable or satellite, so one of the few things I watched when I lived with them was a VHS tape of the 2002 World Cup final between Brazil and Germany. I’m not a huge soccer fan, but my grandfather loved the game, especially the Brazilian team, especially Ronaldo. He had a few matches on tapes around the house, and the 2002 final was the most exciting one. I watched that game about 40 times. I watched it more times than I’ve watched other soccer matches. My options for entertainment were limited — it was either World Cup, or reread every George MacDonald novel again. I didn’t care much for the game in general, but I grew to love that tape as I learned its story.
The Germans were the bad guys as always in 2002, and the archvillain was the German goalie, Oliver Kahn. The man was inhuman — a cross between a terminator and a brick wall. He had only allowed a single goal so far in the entire tournament. While Ronaldo was scoring flashy goals against Belgium and Turkey on the right hand side of the bracket, the German war machine blitzkrieged through America and the dark horse South Korean team on the left. The Germans were methodical, and ironclad on the defensive, but missing several key players due to injury and yellow cards. The Brazilians were aggressive show-offs, keenly aware that they had a reputation to uphold. And Oliver Kahn sat at the back of it all, swatting away goal attempt after goal attempt. He was a golden blond goal blocking machine. As a kid I hated him.
The game starts slow. Ronaldo makes a couple attempts in the first half, but they’re rushed and poorly executed, winding up either off target or securely in Oliver Kahn’s gloved hands. You can feel the desperation rising in the Brazilian team as they put everything they have not into defeating Oliver Kahn but just in getting past the German defense in front of him. The German team almost scores a couple times, once with a header and once with a free kick. The free kick gets tipped onto the post by Marcos, Ronaldo flubs another golden shot against Kahn and you can practically see him shudder under the intimidation radiating off the German goalkeeper. At this point Ronaldo puts a wild desperation into his sprints across the field — he knows he has to score now, he’s got to get a point across Kahn or he might as well quit, might as well hang himself by his laces in the shower right there in Japan. The Brazilians are running on all 8 cylinders the whole time — they’re pushing themselves to the limit for 45, 50, 60 minutes straight.
But then, right when you think they ought to start flagging and the Wehrmacht will pull ahead with their inevitable second half goal, the Brazilians simply don’t. They run more than the Germans, but they force the Germans into movement too, and suddenly it’s the German team who’s lagging behind, faltering on their rhythm, and the Brazilians are dictating the pace of the game. Then Ronaldo passes to Rivaldo, who shoots, and this time Kahn is just a hair off perfect and the ball slips away from his hands after he stops it, and Ronaldo comes in and puts in a solid drive right in the left side of the net. This is the peak of the game, right when the two Brazilian strikers deliver their one-two hammer blows at Oliver Kahn, the moment when he breaks. The camera zooms in on the German goalie for a second, and his face is tired and angry. Now the Germans are definitely on the back foot — they make a couple attempts at scores but Brazil seems secure in their lead, and even widens it when Rivaldo fakes possession of the ball, lets it roll to Ronaldo who slams it into the same side of the goal again while Oliver Kahn cartwheels through the air towards it a quarter of a second too late. Now the game is basically over.
One time I was watching this tape when my grandmother came in and told me it was late, time to go to bed. I asked her to let me stay up until the scores were done. She sat there and watched with me until the first goal was scored, then picked up the remote. “Wait,” I said, “that’s not the whole scoring game yet! There’s one more goal later on, too.”
She might have rolled her eyes at me were she not in her 60s and a perfect matriarch. “The whole scoring game?” She fastforwarded the tape until she found the second goal, then allowed it to play for about a minute and a half. “There,” she said, turning the TV off, “you’ve seen the whole scoring game. Now go to bed.”
Those two goals were the key points of the game, the first thing anyone will see about it, the most obvious summary. But going to bed that night, I was surprised to find that I felt like I had missed the whole point of the game. The actual story, the fight between those two teams, the narrative arc, that began well before the World Cup itself and was so much more than just two points on a scoreboard. The actual turning point of the match wasn’t the first goal, it was somewhere in the third quarter, and the second goal was more of a denouement in comparison to the first one’s explosive climax. It’s hard to get a feeling of the match from those two clips — almost impossible, actually.
Probably you can look at a stat summary for the match and come away knowing all the objective facts about it. Probably you can have a conversation about it, and pretty much everything you say will be true. But without watching the game 40 times over, as I have, you’ll miss the actual artistry of the players, the epic drama of their conflict, the greater themes that can be read into the match. There’s no sense of the Brazilian arrogance, the cool German confidence, the crackling anticipation of the crowd, the lightning reflexes of the goalies, the brilliant geometry, the mind games, the breaking of the German morale, Ronaldo’s early failures which didn’t discourage him or cause his team to lose faith in him, but redoubled his determination to seize eternal football glory for himself and his country.
I recently looked it up out of curiosity, and found an article which makes the case that actually Germany wasn’t intimidating at all, and 2002 sucked. It’s entirely possible I didn’t learn much from watching just the final match — I should have watched the whole tournament 40 times to get a more complete understanding of the story. But this is my point: it’s difficult to pick a single isolated event and build a truthful narrative out of it. Facts, statistics and descriptions you can pull out of clips, but narrative requires context. You don’t learn very much about a match from the scoring game. But if you want to watch the 2002 World Cup Germany 0–2 Brazil finals scoring game here’s a decent link.
