World Cup Blogs 19: Panama

This, Panama's first (football/soccer) World Cup, was quite exciting for them, I'm sure.   What will linger in the English memory (and let's be honest, the World Cup section of the English memory is far from full) is that Panama graciously let England score five goals to lead 5-0 at half-time.  Coupled with the 6-1 final score it makes England seem vaguely significant.  Perhaps its unthinkableness even inspired the unthinkable victory on penalties this evening.

Panama is a small nation and have a valid second excuse in that football is not their most popular sport.  That is baseball.

Now if there was a Baseball World Cup . . .

In fact, from 1938 until 2011 (with various gaps) there was a Baseball World Cup.  Panama never did manage to win it.  

What is, I imagine, really irritating is that England (or rather Britain) did.  They won it in 1938 against the United States.

There are few enough ways in which England resembles God, but at least they do in this frustrating way of appearing to have always been involved in everything and somehow doing very well.

Losing

The deliberate losing by some of the Olympic 'competitors' today is interesting. It was a blatant version of something that is surprisingly common. Nobody was making these remarks of tragedy and woe when in the Cycling Road Race team members were 'disrupting' the following pack to enable their leading cyclist to prosper. That was called tactics (even though it was deliberately doing less than their best). When in the heats a swimmer or rower or runner saves themselves for a later heat or the final that too is tactics. The idea that everyone in every sporting encounter is doing their very best is very far from the truth. Football fans experience this in pre-season friendlies where fitness is far more the goal than the goal is

.

In a nutshell, the word is 'ultimate'.  Those badminton players were thinking ahead, not of the money that the crowd paid to watch them but of the gold medal.  They frustrated officials who wanted to not only award a medal but control a method.

This brings me to the wonderful Christian chestnut question.  What Would Jesus Do?

I think he'd lose.  Sure, the crowd jeered.  But for the joy that was set before him he endured the cross, despising shame, and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.  I suppose this is not a truth about Jesus that made it into many English Public School assemblies over the years but it is a reminder that the route to victory is not the route of popularity and that popularity is not victory.

Unqualified

A few weeks ago I met some of the Moldovan Olympic Swimming Team.  They were practising in our town Leisure Centre in preparation for the Olympics.  Of course when I say I met them what I mean is that one day as I left the changing room some of them were arriving to head to their special area to change and we nodded a hello to one another.  Still, maybe it will be THAT girl who wins the Gold medal!  I tried to remember their faces.  Certainly watching them some days ploughing up and down the pool was a reminder that it takes an ability and dedication far in excess of my swimming prowess to compete on such a stage.

Having felt that sense of distance, I can now report that (as things turned out) I had a lot more in common with the two young ladies I nodded at than I first supposed.  To my way of thinking there on the other side of the pool were the Olympic competitors and over with me and the assortment of splashers from Wycombe District were those who would watch them on television.  I was wrong in this interpretation.

This week they were back.  Well, no, he was back.  For as it turns out only one 17 year old guy Danila achieved the standard to qualify and all the other Moldovan swimmers will, like the rest of us, be watching him and the other competitors on television!

Many people interpret the divide between those religious people furiously practising their divine devotion and their own futile spiritual splashings as the one that is likely to one day see them disqualified from the prize (if there is one).  Most of the religious people think this with a passion too.

It does appear, though, that only one human being qualifies.  It is in Jesus's victory that we have our only hope of sharing in final glory - it is in him, not as well as him, that we can qualify.