ANA SEGOVIA

Fresh cut grass in their nostrils, the sun cums hard on their faces; their ears ring with roar. This is it, a million eyes on their cleats. This is what it’s like to be a citizen. No, this is what it’s like to make a citizen. The camera pans faces suspended in expectation. The time to come is the most significant and trivial. By trivial I mean it happens all the time. 90 minutes pass continuously as they do when they do. For a time, 90 min was also a kind of standard running time for feature length Hollywood films. 

The historian Bernard Lewis claimed team sports are a western invention; regardless of whether this predictable western conceit steeped in exceptionalism is true or not, the links between at least cricket, polo, rugby and soccer with British colonialism is undisputed. Soccer spread through ports throughout the continents as the British empire expanded its geographical grip on trade and imperial military dominance through the first half of the 20th century. 

Historians also claim however, that the history of sports is as old as the history of art. Some of the earliest cave paintings have depictions of “sporting rituals”, mostly portraying men wrestling one another. Historians think of it as an early form of proto-military training and entertainment. The assertion of physical power of one body over another. The victor demonstrates superiority with force almost divinely driven. Don’t we sometimes call these athletes God? Maradona seems to have been able to summon his hand at the very least. He was fighting a war against empire even as he’s own country was disappearing citizens left and right in characteristic fashion of a brutal dictatorship like the one Argentina was under in 89. I’ve heard people compare that same 89 world cup semifinal between England and Argentina to Shakespeare.

Though the question always remained: was Maradona referring to the actual hand of God or was he referring to his own hand, thus turning into God himself? He died an overweight drug addict, some people rumored, while he was taking a shit on the toilet.