WC Highlight.

As the England team performed as well as the rest of us on the world stage there was one man who showed in one beautiful moment why. When Terry was asked why the excellent training facilities hadn’t produced a better performance he looked equally puzzled, “I don’t know, the hotel was great.” I’m guessing when you’re overworked the rest of the year a summer break is a welcome respite. Luckily for the rest of us we don’t come back off holiday to an inquest of our achievements. But this one man knows nothing of holidays, or work for that matter, he just lives in a continuous whirl of intensity. Before England took on the refined sensitivities of a stressed out, self involved, screen obsessed poodle we used to produce bulldogs like him. Heize is a fighting dog, a hit man without malice; it’s not personal, it’s just an eleven-man ninety minute contract. And so to the highlight. Minutes after Teves’s first offside goal, helpfully replayed in slow mo on the giant stadium TV so even the officials were aware the decision they were about to enforce was the wrong one, he scored again and the Argentinean team celebrate again. A steadycam operator, unaware of who he was dealing with, homed in on Heinze’s giant smile. So far in in fact that Heinze hit his head on the camera lens. In a hover fly’s wing beat Heize’s smile was replaced by a scowl and 200 million people got a smack round the face. As well as being the largest mass slapping ever recorded it provided the most widespread wakeup call in history. This isn’t just life and death, it’s more important than that. This game we each play every day called life is more than mere survival. It’s ‘what’ you live for and what you will die for that matters. Treat life as a summer break and you’re left with a 4:1 disappointment; treat it like a fighting dog and you stand a chance. 

If you’re interested Tom these were my structural thoughts when writing this piece.

It wasn’t going to be long enough if I just talked about the incident, which only lasted a second or so. I decided to tease the reader by not saying who I was talking about till well in. I decided on a wider philosophical point I would make in conclusion that required putting in place apparently unrelated items along the way, like clues in a who done it, that would all be resolved in the conclusion. I tried to write the incident for both people who had seen it and those who hadn’t. I.e. enough detail for those who hadn’t and a sense of immediacy for those that had. I like the counterpoint between the humorous ‘mass slapping’ and the more serious ‘wakeup call’; it sort of releases then pulls in the tension setting the scene for the conclusion.