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
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the Germans
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the French
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the Italians
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the United States
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the press
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In the summer of 2006, while the football world’s attention was focused on Germany, thousands of players around the globe were training hard and competing to be part of another World Cup … The Homeless World Cup. It had been a wild idea by a Scot and an Austrian—to give homeless people a chance to change their lives through an international street soccer competition.Five years later, the annual Homeless World Cup had become an internationally recognized sports competition. 500 homeless players from 48 nations would ultimately be selected to represent their country in Cape Town, South Africa – coming from such disparate parts of the world as war torn Afghanistan, the slums of Kenya, the drug rehab clinics of Dublin, Ireland, the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, the overflowing public shelters of Madrid, Spain, and the unforgiving city of St. Petersburg, Russia, where the homeless have no rights or identity. Win or lose, for these players it would be the journey of a lifetime.
