The Aztexan

ESPN Soccernet: World Cup 2010: Montevideo celebrates victory in defeat

There’s nowhere else quite like Montevideo for feeling the footballing history of a city, and watching a World Cup semi-final in the city where the first ever World Cup was held was quite something. Gio van Bronckhorst’s stunner early on silenced the plaza and seemingly the whole city, but only momentarily – seconds later the chants of “U-RU-GUAY! U-RU-GUAY!” started up again louder than ever. When Diego Forlan pulled the trigger shortly before half-time, the place simply exploded.

Read it all.

SI.com’s Joe Posnanski: The Meaning of Garra

Before Uruguay, soccer apparently was a game of long passes and violence; the sport was direct, forceful, without guile, rugby without hands. In 1924 and 1928, Uruguay took its style to the Olympics — short passes, individual brilliance, something like dancing. Uruguay won, often by spectacular scores — 7-0 over Yugoslavia, 3-0 over the United States and Sweden, 4-1 over Germany. The beauty was what struck people. This was art.

A link to this Sports Illustrated blog post about the history and current state of the Uruguay national team is a little outside the scope of what I usually cover here. But I have more than one reason to share it with you:

1. I have a more or less random but nonetheless keen fascination, almost obsession, with Uruguay. (I don’t know why; blame Bajofondo. And Wikipedia.) So I would have been interested in this anyway. And I also hope that publishing it here somehow gets me introduced to some Uruguayan expats who wind up inviting my family and me to stay for a week or two at their summer place in Montevideo.
2. Uruguay vs Ghana in the quarterfinals, and after Ghana sent the U.S. home from South Africa, we’ll all be Uruguayans on Friday, right?
3. It’s just really an excellent article. It’s a perfect capsule of everything I love most about the World Cup. Soccer, of course, but served with generous helpings of history, geography and philosophy. Fantastic!

One more excerpt, because I can’t resist (though you should really read it all).

But to get to the point, Uruguay had competed in two World Cups… and won them both. When the final ended, Jules Rimet — one of the founders of the World Cup and the man whose name is on the trophy — offered his definition of Garra Charrua, that spirit which had driven Uruguayan soccer. He said:

“In football, playing well is not sufficient. You also need to feel it profoundly as does Uruguay.”