The Peruvian national team last qualified for the World Cup in 1982.PHOTOGRAPH BY HECTOR VIVAS / LATINCONTENT / GETTY
The last time I saw Peru beat Brazil was in San Francisco, a few years ago. It happened like this: My father’s first job, when he was a teen-ager, was announcing soccer matches for a radio station in the Peruvian city of Arequipa. He was so good at it that sometimes he’d be asked to call imaginary games to entertain his family, a kind of sporting radio play, with all the drama of a real game. This was before television, so people were used to imagining these sorts of things. In 2013, I asked him to do it again, for a show I was helping put together at a local theatre. He hadn’t called a game in nearly fifty years, but agreed immediately. The night of the show, he showed no hint of nerves. We pumped in stadium noise, the crowd cheered, and my father calmly took the microphone and strung together names from the players of his youth—Heredia, Goyeneche, Gómez Sánchez, Navarrete, Rivera. In my father’s imaginary retelling, a Peruvian defender stole the imaginary ball from Pelé, surged forward, the imaginary attack culminating in a Peruvian shot clanging off the crossbar, only to be knocked in by an opportunistic and imaginary Peruvian forward. Peru 1. Brazil 0. I closed my eyes, and could see it as if it were real.
In real life, things have tended to go a little differently. I remember watching a World Cup qualifying match against Brazil, at a cousin’s house in Lima. My father and I gathered along with a number of relatives, and for a while the impromptu family reunion was great fun. But as kickoff approached, the mood began to shift, and by the time the ball was in play, a collective, mostly unacknowledged gloom had overcome us all. The game proceeded according to the widely expected script: a goal for Brazil and then another, and soon the gloom had morphed into anger. I looked around the room at my despondent relatives, and wondered why we were putting ourselves through this.
Whereas most fans will insult and condemn their players after they botch an open-goal tap-in, my father always offered his baroque curses preëmptively, before the striker sent the ball flying wide of the post and into the stands. I’d always thought he was the only person to do this, but that day I realized it was at the very least a family trait, and quite possibly a function of our national character, part of our folklore, like a good pisco sour, or the melancholy notes of a pan flute. In soccer, we expect failure.
Which is fine, except that I was raised in the United States in the nineteen-eighties, when delusional optimism was one of the national religions. Even today Americans think of victory as a birthright. This is how my biculturalism manifests in sports: I sit down to watch Peru play against Brazil, believing sincerely and against all reason that we will win. That day in Lima, before the match, I mentioned to one of my cousins I thought we would beat Brazil. He gave me a perplexed, almost pitying look, as if there were something stuck in my teeth, or as if I’d just admitted I still believed in Santa Claus.
And so here it is, my confession: I should know better by now, but I was certain we were going to beat Brazil in Sunday’s Copa América match. Peru’s new coach, the Argentine Ricardo Gareca, has a track record of success, and Brazil, I reasoned, would be vulnerable, still traumatized from their humiliation at last year’s World Cup. A few minutes into the match, and my hypothesis appeared to be holding: we got an early lead off a defensive gaffe. But a few minutes later the game was tied, just like that, and for the next twenty it seemed we’d be overrun. Then something surprising happened: Peru recovered, began to play well. We more than held our own, and the game stayed at 1–1. Instead of trying to defend the draw, with twenty minutes remaining, Gareca sent on two attacking substitutes, and I felt something approaching pride. We were going for the win!
Foolishly, as it turns out.
In the final minutes, a moment of sheer genius from Neymar, Brazil’s star forward: he made the incisive sort of pass that appears logical and inevitable on a television replay, though you marvel at how he could have conceived of it at field level, running at full speed, in the dying moments of a match, much less executed it to perfection. The Brazilian forward Douglas Costa did the rest—a touch to control and a low, right-footed shot into the bottom corner. 2–1, game over.
I grew up hearing how beautifully Peru once played, what a team we were, and it’s true that the national sides of the nineteen-seventies were among Latin America’s finest. Peru’s teams were iconic, in their white and red jerseys. We were known for the technical quality of our play, and the names from that era—Cubillas, Chumpitaz, Sotil, Challe—still have a certain mystique. But we last won the Copa América in 1975, and last qualified for the World Cup in 1982. That past success, that glory, is just a rumor to me.
But I will approach the rest of the Copa América the way I approached my father’s imaginary game: with eyes closed, full of fierce and defiant hope. I believe they call this nationalism. Peru has two games left in the group stage, against Venezuela and Colombia. Two wins and we’re into the next round; even a win and a draw might be enough. I will not admit that defeat is preordained. As long as one has imagination, all is not lost.
Source link : https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/a-copa-america-confession
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Publish date : 2015-06-16 03:00:00
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