Say the worst, hope for the best

Mexican fans in Doha, days before the opening of the World Cup. MARKO DJURICA (REUTERS)

Dear Martin:

You start with a pass and I respond with a punt.

And it is that the opening party did not give for more.

The host country was unable to shoot between the three posts and Ecuador dominated it with calm bureaucracy.

The only outbreak of genius was linguistic: soccer deserved a player named Hincapié!

Before three minutes the game awoke a promising paranoia: Ecuador scored a goal that seemed legitimate, but the VAR confirmed that technology helps human uncertainty to happen more slowly.

Enner Valencia's annotation was annulled, activating conspiracy hypotheses: Did Qatar not only buy the venue but also the referees?

Unfortunately, this hidden plot, more attractive than the events on the grass, could not be proven.

Valencia scored two more goals, one of them with a high-school header, and the game was resolved with tedious good sense.

If football bores, we turn our eyes to the stands.

Among the purple clothes of the Qatari fans it was not possible to see a woman.

The World Cup will put the emancipatory impulse of football in tension with the restrictive conditions that make it possible.

When Jean Paul Sartre went to Brazil in the 1960s, he went from one classroom to another until he exclaimed: “Where are the blacks?!”

He had known a reservation of white people.

The same thing happened in the Maracana in the 2014 World Cup: the few blacks were on the field.

Ecuador offered the same chromatic pattern yesterday.

The fans who cheered for a brown-skinned selection were eminently white.

"God save me from understanding football!" exclaimed Nelson Rodrigues, the chronicler who guessed that Pelé would be King.

The game is wonderfully inscrutable.

There is no way to explain Messi, but we know too much about the stadiums where he will work his magic.

You start the correspondence with a sure touch, quoting Enric González.

“I would prefer not to know why the World Cup is being played in Qatar.

However, I know it ”, affirms the Catalan maestro that he only loses his equanimity when Espanyol plays.

The phrase recalls the exceptional overture to

: "I didn't want to know, but I knew."

Enric explains that the season will be played in hell.

Qatar violates human rights, lacks a soccer tradition, gained French support by buying PSG at a premium and the weapons that Sarkozy sold them, and more than 6,000 immigrants died in the construction of the stadiums.

As if that were not enough, beer is prohibited;

looking for a drink will be as risky as buying heroin.

Not since the Argentine dictatorship organized the 1978 World Cup had there been such widespread repudiation by the host country.

Now that also includes FIFA.

In 78 Havelange received regular bribes from Adidas, but it was not known.

So you lived in exile and you went through the "cognitive dissonance" that Enric talks about: criticizing the military and supporting Kempes.

Suspicions circle my head like fruit flies.

Soccer is weird, but reality—this reality—makes it weirder.

Still, we can imagine great things.

Nobody said that the promised land was beautiful.

That longed-for territory may be a wasteland, but it is the site of the tribe.

Soccer has known how to represent freedom in prisons, boarding schools and death camps.

While it happens, it is a transitory celebration of utopia.

That symbolic charge will return with De Bruyne's passes, Courtois' saves, Foden's takedowns.

I don't know to what extent the gods will test our friendship because Argentina will face Mexico.

It's not to brag, but we are used to losing.

What would happen if we ended the impeccable streak of yours?

You will tell me how your defeat reserves are.

Having said the worst, now I hope for the best.

I dream of the illogical victory of my team.

As a good Mexican, I depend more on illusion than on facts.

I end, then, with an act of faith: Qatar and FIFA will not prevent rebellion.

In a world where plunder is lavish, the poet Antonio Deltoro understood that soccer represents a disconcerting challenge: "revenge of the foot on the hand."

Martín Caparrós will respond this Monday, November 21.

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