In a move comprising fully 26 passes and involving nine different players, Argentina moved the ball from one end to another in the space of 57 seconds. The Serbo-Montenegrins could only look on in wonder as the sublime movement and technique of the South Americans ripped their feted defence to shreds.
The goal was football poetry in motion. First Maxi Rodriguez, well inside Argentine territory, laid the ball back to Gabriel Heinze. From Heinze to Mascherano, from back to front, and from right to left; a perfect example of Argentinian artistry. Rodriguez was involved on five occasions, Mascherano and Juan Roman Riquelme four times each, while the hapless Serbo-Montenegrins were forced to play the role of hypnotised onlookers.
Their agony was finally complete when, with his third and most telling contribution to the move, Cambiasso stroked the ball home to spark wild celebration in Argentina and open-mouthed acclaim from the rest of the world.
Fittingly, it was the conductor of the Argentinian orchestra, Riquelme, who best summed up the significance of the strike. “With that goal," he said, "we showed what kind of team we are. When the squad is united and we’re feeling good, these things happen. Knocking the ball around is what we like doing best.”
Kevin Spacey's career peaked when he won the Best Actor Oscar for American Beauty in 2000, and he has dedicated himself to helping others ever since. The actor decided to quit striving for greater success and has thrown himself into projects like his artistic directorship of London's Old Vic theatre. He says, "As far as I'm concerned, when I looked at what happened in my career in 2000 - after American Beauty - I thought it couldn't get much better. What was I going to spend the rest of my life doing? Trying to top myself? Trying to stay hot, trying to make sure I was in the right movies? I don't give a s**t. I'm trying to do something with my success which is bigger than myself. I'm no longer interested in my personal career. I am interested in the impact I can have on a lot of other people's careers and on audiences."
Way to go, dude...er ... Keyser.
Radhi Jaidi scores at the 90th minute to fetch the draw for Tunisia.
And to know that the tickets to this game were available for me. Alas ... and so is life!
Anyone still asking why?From Hindu notions of dirt, South Asia's preference for women leaders to patronage in democratic politics, Dipankar Gupta resolves many of the paradoxes of contemporary India in this book. In the process, he issues a damning indictment of the westoxicated elitist Indian middle class, and shows how unmodern the people of this class are in the very areas in which they are considered to be modern. Modernity, argues the author, is not about technology and consumption, as is mistakenly believed in India, but has to do with the attitudes, especially those that come into play in our social relations. It is there that the Indian middle class is found severely wanting.
Family connections, privileges of caste and status, as well as the willingness to break every law in the book characterize our social relations very deeply. The past clings tenaciously to our present - traditional India thrives in contemporary locales. A brilliant and chilling treatise on the hypocrisy and vanity of the Indian middle class, and its pathetic attempts to cloak its traditional ways in superficial modernity.
After eleven years as an American in London, Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise round the coast and find out what Britain and the British are really like. It was 1982, the summer of the Falklands War and the royal baby, and the ideal time, he found, to suprise the British into talking about themselves. This book is the result of this trip.
Once, from behind a closed door, I heard an Englishwoman exclaim with real pleasure, “They are funny, the Yanks!” And I crept away and laughed to think that an English person was saying such a thing. And I thought: They wallpaper their ceilings! They put little knitted bobble-hats on their soft-boiled eggs to keep them warm! … They charge you for matches when you buy cigarettes! They smoke on buses! … They spy for the Russians! They say “nigger” and “Jewboy” without flinching! They call their houses Holmleigh and Sparrow View! … And they think we’re funny!
Americans also boasted. “I do some pretty incredible things” was not an English expression. I’m fairly keen” was not American. Americans were showoffs- it was part of our innocence- we often fell on our faces; the English seldom showed off, so they seldom looked like fools. The English liked especially to mock the qualities in other people they admitted they didn’t have themselves.
This is like Sita's Agni Pareeksha. Some idiotic Darrell Hair decides that he chucks. So he has a check. He clears. Then some dumb Ross Emerson wants his 15 minutes of fame. so he calls Murali for chucking as well. Murali again goes through the Agni Pareeksha. And clears again. And now that his action is checked for every ball a-la Shabbir Ahmed (whether he chucks a few and bowls a few, or not...), nobody is really complaining.... apart from these murmurs.Well, cheap wickets for sure. Warnie's got 172 of those.
So the sore loser Aussies cannot say that he chucks. It was in their labs that he was proven to be a 'bowler' through and through. So what do they find now? Ah of course, Murali has been playing against bad opposition all the while, na?
