“In early April, silly flags were already flapping all around Beirut. A non-resident would think that dignitaries from the entire United Nations were about to make an appearance, adding a touch of color to our city. According to numerous sources, the flags had sprouted much earlier. As early as January, my sister made sure to tell me. I don’t think any earlier than that, my mother said. People were too busy with Christmas and New Years, and in 2009, Ashura, the Shiite holiday fell at the same time—far too much going on for anyone to concentrate. It was still not 2010, in any case.” (TNR), (Must Read Soccer)

“Two teams who made it to the World Cup through playoffs met on Sunday, June 13, 2010 in Group C of the World Cup. It was Algeria facing Slovenia in a match that neither team could afford to lose if they wanted to have a realistic chance of getting out of the group stage. Slovenia would be slightly favored to win the match.” (The 90th Minute)

World Cup 2010: Algeria 0-1 Slovenia
“I volunteered for this game. On paper it seemed a good idea to do. I’d seen Slovenia play Spain at Euro 2000, and Slovenia are some of the loudests fans I’ve ever come across. They only really have one song: “Kdor ne skače,ni Slovenc, hej, hej, hej”. And when they sing, they jump up and down in unison, and if you’re in the upper tier of a stadium with 10,000 Slovenians ten feet away for them, you get that a great atmosphere, with the slight sense of unease that the stadium is going to collapse.” (twohundredpercent)

“Is America a soccer nation, now? On the morning of the United States’ most-hyped ever game against England, I combed through the front covers of every single American newspaper listed at Newseum, a good couple of hundred of them (which is not comprehensive, but is a pretty hefty sample-size), to see what Americans were waking up to read about it on their front pages — if anything at all.” (Pitch Invasion)

Cape Town
“Two teams who will be fighting for a spot in the knockout stage met on Saturday, June 12, 2010 as South Korea faced Greece. Argentina is highly favored to win the group so the two teams would need a win as a loss would probably end their hopes of getting to the next round.” (The 90th Minute)

World Cup 2010: South Korea 2-0 Greece
“Statistics are often as misleading as they are informative. On one hand this game is between the 2004 European Championship winners and the 2002 World Cup Semi-Finalists. Another way of describing the game is between a side whose World Cup finals record outside their own country is just one win in seventeen games (and that over African minnows Togo) and the only European nation ever to play at a World Cup without scoring. At the outset, that may be harsh, as the South Koreans are showing that the co-hosting of the Cup in 2002 has been beneficial in the long-term as the 1994 World Cup was for the United States.” (twohundredpercent)

“It’s going to happen. You know it and I know it. At some point in this tournament, with the whole world watching, a player will take a dive. Somebody will engage in play-acting of an extravagantly transparent design. The tut-tutting will start. We’ll hear some guy on TV, probably from England, who will be all bluster and denunciation. The game will be declared to be in disrepute. Standards lowered. Somewhere in the denunciation, in the outrage or in the subtle subtext, there will be a suggestion that what the diving, play-acting international soccer player has done is unmanly. Unworthy. Not sporting.” (The Globe and Mail), (Must Read Soccer)

“This, my friends, is the smoke before the fire, the thunder before the lightning, the salty sea breeze that portends the coming hurricane. Enjoy and savor the smell, because when all is said and done, when your house lies in rubble, your cash savings burned to keep warm, a smile shall not grace your face. But rather a physical embodiment of WTF?” (futfanatico)

“Nearly there folks, the World Cup starts today. Yes, that’s today, and next time you hear from me I’ll have some actual real actual football to talk about. Just one more thing before we’re underway. As hopefully you’ll know by now, twohundredpercent is going to be a very busy place over the coming few weeks – our team of, uh, hand-picked experts will be providing the best coverage possible from the comfort of our own living rooms, and we thought it was only fair that we nail our colours to the mast first so that you know where we all stand.” (twohundredpercent)

“My first piece is up at Chimurenga’s Pilgrimages Blog: ‘In Port-au-Prince there stands – or at least there stood, before the January 12th earthquake devastated much of the city – a mural depicting four great nationalist heroes of the Caribbean: Toussaint L’ouverture, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Emmanuel Sannon. If you don’t recognize the last name, you are not alone, for Sannon’s presence among this group might at first seem a little odd.'” (Soccer Politics)

“The French Caribbean Team” @ Pilgrimages
“My second post to the “Pilgrimages” Blog is up, this one on how France is the Caribbean team in this World Cup. ‘When the French team takes the field against Uruguay, and later against Mexico, history will be lurking.'” (Soccer Politics)

“It all started as an excuse to drink good wine during the 1998 World Cup in France. A few of us had decided to attend the tournament, but before we jumped in the car we had to work out where we were going to watch those matches for which we didn’t have tickets. France doesn’t have many pubs, and for my Anglo-Saxon friends the thought of watching their beloved England team in a Parisian café didn’t appeal. And it was beer they were after, in this wine-drinking country; warm and flat, not the strong, gassy lager served on the Continent.” (WSJ)

“Turn on ESPN Friday, or in the 30 days that follow, and a regular viewer will be in for some surprises. The ever-present news ticker will often be gone from the screen bottom. The action on the field will be called in British cadences and analyzed by men with unfamiliar names and German, Dutch or (occasionally) American accents.” (WSJ)

“Well, this is how you layer in a multimedia presentation. The national sports daily in Spain, Diario Marca, produced a highly interactive World Cup calendar for its Web site. Find the graphic here.” (MARCA)

“We present an epic contribution from Bill at Bill’s Sports Maps on the 2010 World Cup, that event you might have heard starts this week. Bill’s illustrated map features all 32 team jerseys, and statistics on World Cup performance. It’s pretty damn awesome. Click on the image below for the glorious, full-size version.” (Pitch Invasion)

“Dizzee Rascal has already had four number one singles in the United Kingdom. His motives, therefore, for getting involved with the atrocious Simon Cowell vehicle World Cup song ‘Shout’ (a cover of the 1984 Tears For Fears protest song), remain unclear. Perhaps he genuinely feels that hollering at the top of his voice about “Bobby Moore an’ that” will really help the team while they struggle against odds that seem to be getting longer with each passing day, five and a half thousand miles away in South Africa. Perhaps he is really desperate for that fifth number one single. Perhaps he merely has a particularly persuasive agent.” (twohundredpercent)

“Yes. The books I’ve chosen are very broadly oriented, but the one aspect they all have in common is that soccer is both primary and secondary at the same time. Soccer is the reason for the books being written, but the writers’ interest is everything that goes on outside the stadium. Which makes it more effective and more interesting than writing that just covers the game itself, which is very hard to describe. As Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer, says, ‘Football is faster than words.’ It’s very hard to capture, but it becomes something more transcendent when you look at what happens outside the arena.” (Five Books)

“The Football Haiku World Cup is a project based on the writing of haiku (俳句) poetry specifically geared to the football/soccer World Cup in South Africa in 2010. We want to publish beautiful poetry written by you to accompany the beautiful game. Please do not worry if you do not consider yourself to be a writer or a poet: the beauty of haiku is its simplicity, universality and flexibility. Whoever you are around the world, we would love to hear your voice in haiku form.” (The High IQ Haiku World Cup Project)

“For most of the 21st century Smith has logged his working notes and research on sport theory at sportsBabel, a site that “examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture.” As evident below, he is interested in technical developments in sport and in its consumption, which leads to reflection on the postmodern spectator. Smith’s commitment to praxis as well as theory comes through in his annual promotion of Global Village Basketball, a Web-aided melding of pickup results from Poland to Serbia to the USA that illustrates the potential of ‘sporting multitudes.'” (The Global Game)