Reports from distant cultures, in Guatemala and Burma, confirm how football insinuates itself into the most hallowed seasonal festivities.
Padaung writer Pascal Khoo Thwe recalls in From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey that football helped mark the festival calendar. To commemorate trophies at distant tournaments, his township team would receive homecoming welcome from a brass band playing Handel. But not The Messiah. (Dec 29)
Doha, Qatar, Jan 3 | In the family tree of football variants, cuju begat chinlone begat sepak raga begat sepak takraw.
While this genealogy may be speculative—less formalized and less freighted than that in the first chapter of Matthew—the importance is that the stylized kickball game of imperial China has found expression in the modern era.
Mandalay, Burma, Apr 20 | Dry dispatches announcing chinlone tournaments appear occasionally in the New Light of Myanmar, the mouthpiece of Burma’s military regime.
The terse pronouncements show that despite the political and economic torpor and the governing junta’s Orwellian logic—the capital recently was relocated from Rangoon based partly on the forecasts of astrologers—a taste for the beauties of “cane ball” remains.
Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, has campaigned to relocate the remains of goalkeeper-cum-existentialist Albert Camus from their resting place in Lourmarin. More about language & literature »
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