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Monday, June 4, 2007

Football - Rapture at the Ramada

Last night, I went to the Ramada to have a couple of cold beers and watch the Champions League semi-final between Liverpool and Chelsea. It was a pulsating game, and Liverpool won on penalties – a very unfortunate way to lose any game.

The bar at the Ramada was bursting with people – standing room only. What seemed like half the English expatriate population of Qatar was propping up the bar. Contrast this with one quiet English guy who came to watch the cricket World Cup game between England and the West Indies, and you will realize how soccer is a religion in England. Most of the English expatriates in Qatar are oil rig workers with thick Northern England accents – when they speak, they sound like they are talking Russian.

Of course, there were no Scots around. My old Scottish friend has left Qatar for greener pastures, and he does not have much time for anything English anyway. He believes that the Glasgow Rangers are the best football club in the world, and that there is a conspiracy to keep them from winning the Champions League.

I love being a bar-fly, since it is a great opportunity to observe people at their most relaxed and unguarded. Since most of the Englishmen present were working class oil riggers from Northern England, Liverpool supporters heavily outnumbered Chelsea supporters. The bar was full of large, middle-aged, heavily tattooed men cheering Liverpool’s every move. One especially large, bald , tattooed guy was sitting right in front of me. He had muscles in places where other people do not have even places. Not a guy you wanted to get into an argument with. He was very intimidating indeed. One of the few Chelsea supporters was an upper-class English fellow dressed in a suit. His feeble cheers for Chelsea were soon silenced by a withering glare from the intimidating gentleman in front of me.

In this increasingly divided world we live in, football is such a unifier. It is proof of our common humanity. This was in abundant evidence at the Ramada last night. African clerical workers with their soft, lilting accents rubbed shoulders with Indian IT professionals, while phlegmatic Filipino waitresses checked on the score with Chinese laborers and excited Arab traders. Everybody was excited – even the Lebanese hookers hanging around at one corner of the bar. They were all focused on one thing – the game of football, the “beautiful game” as the great Pele once called it.

Across the bar from me, I caught the eye of a man who looked like he was from China or Korea. He could have been from Harbin or Pusan. We had nothing in common – we looked different, came from different backgrounds and cultures and had different life experiences. He probably was not fluent in the English language. Under normal circumstances, we would have had nothing to talk about. But for one moment when Liverpool scored the opening goal, he looked across the bar and smiled, and in that one instant, we connected as human beings.

And that is where the magic of the beautiful game lies. For ninety minutes, nobody cares about the color of your skin, how old you are, what your religion is, or where you come from. For ninety minutes, we are all on the same page and on the same wavelength – just kicking back a few beers and enjoying a great game of football. I do not know if heaven exists (I seriously doubt it), but for now, I will take ninety minutes of a great football game as an acceptable surrogate.

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