interpreting Zidane’s head

Italy won the World Cup, but thanks to the press building up the final match as Zinedine Zidane’s swan song and their inability to wrap their minds around his senseless overtime headbutt, collective cognitive dissonance is all that remains. Few can stop talking about Zidane, but even fewer are saying anything.

Roger Cohen’s “Camus and Zidane Offer Views on How Things End” is one of the better attempts at interpreting Zizou’s headbutt. He concludes,

Zidane, it seems, lost his head. Or perhaps he kept his head and chose to write a coda to his story that would have all the complexity of a great novel. Perhaps he sought an almost unseen act of anger that would prompt a global, virtual argument about the merits or demerits of a gesture without sense.

Maybe he didn’t want the fairytale ending to his career that the New York Times built up on the Saturday before the Sunday final.

This morning I received by email the following interpretation, which as of yet, is one of the best.

Zidane’s headbutt, as seen by

the Germans