Midnight Moments of Magical Realism

I woke up from a week of fever which ran alongside the soccer fever injecting the effect of magical realism on a mind which was slipping between sleep and sense to discover the clash of the Latin giants; Brazil against Chile, Columbia against Uruguay!

Borrowing from perhaps the most voracious reader among soccer stars, who grew up on Chekhov and Dostoevsky, and conceded before a match with Italy, that his team would have been no match for Dante, Petrarch and Leopardi; Columbia will go past Uruguay on the shoulders of the Master of Macondo.

And Brazil would be child's game for Chile, had it been the game of magic with words! Neruda, Donoso, Bolano, Allende and also Miguel Littin, the real life hero of Marquez!

Speaking of stopping spot kicks, running around a stadium he had stunned to silence, taking a leaf out of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Sergio Goycochea felt like a child, having saved a penalty from Super Mario in his home town, Lima!

Having sent the ball past the keeper for his second goal in the Federation Cup finals, Christiano Junior went on to collide with the goal keeper, staggered away, fell to ground and quietly slipped out of life in a match his team went on to win by two goals to nil!

As she 'closed her eyes' to the incoming corner kick on the 117th minute of the world cup finals, against the physically superior Americans seeking their 3rd World title, Homare Sawa was lifting her game by the notches her male Asian counterparts can not dream of in another "one hundred years of toil"! VIDEO

Inspired by his black commander, as Alcides Ghiggia unleashed a thundering left footer, the Maracanazo, it had "the same dramatic pattern… the same movement… the same precision of an unstoppable trajectory…. and even the same motion for the dust that was stirred up, in the assassination of a President, more than a decade later, on the northern part of Americas!"

Back to that bibliophile wearing soccer boots, the image of the host captain steaming around the stadium shouting "where is the police? where is the bloody police?" even as the crowds fought pitched battles on the stands, and finally finding a police man brutally caning a fallen fan, running up and landing a karate kick, right on the face of the officer and thus officially 'kicking off' the Balkan War, Europe's nastiest since the two world wars. Yes, there he was! prepared to risk his life, his career, and everything that fame could have brought, right in front of the most brutal of the future Balkan warlords!

The General might have nodded in approval from his labyrinth!

And to conclude, in spite of their "literary" inferiority, the Croatians edged out the Italians on field! Hope the Brazilians emulate the feet to overcome the resurgent Chileans in their do or die battle.