TEAM TT

SPORTS

Every four years for the stars of world football, the hour of judgment comes, and it is called the World Cup. These days glamorous characters such as David Beckham playing in blue boots with English flags on the tongues, or Andrei ...

Every four years for the stars of world football, the hour of judgment comes, and it is called the World Cup. These days, glamorous characters - like David Beckham, who plays in blue boots with English flags on the tongues, or Andriy Shevchenko, who managed to keep his stylish parting in the game against Spain - from the jungle of world football, a crowd of new heroes, smelling of not a promotional Spice deodorant, but a real sports sweat.

The faces of these people had just been unknown to anyone except their wives and friends. Their exploits in the provincial stadiums with wooden benches were not written in the newspapers. They fought for points in championships that are not covered by the Eurosport channel. And all of a sudden, TV cameras are pointed at them, and three billion people are watching their jerks and feints, and the royals sitting in the stands are applauding them. Among the players from Côte d'Ivoire, Togo and Ecuador, now entering the arenas of Germany, everyone is free to choose a new hero to their liking. I choose the Trinidad and Tobago team. I root for them. I admire them.

These people, who in their first match came out to play against the status team of Sweden, by the standards of world football were nobody at that moment. Experts, experienced in sports, did not know their names: who is Sid Gray from the San Juan Jabloteh club, who is Avery John from the New England Revolution club? Their names and surnames gave off something unreal, as if they were not people of flesh and blood, but characters in Stevenson's pirated novel. The Trinidad and Tobago team was destined for the role of a curiosity in the world football theater, which will cause a fleeting smile on the lips of the public, jaded with spectacles. Within the strictly defined framework of the myth, they were supposed to become a collective lamb, which is given to the slaughter of the harsh Vikings and powerful Britons.

The Swedes believed in this when they entered the field. On the faces of the European kings Larsson, Ibrahimovic and Ljungberg was written confidence in the inviolability of the world football order, as well as in the laws of Darwin, according to which, in the name of evolution, the strong must devour the weak. But gradually the expression on their faces changed. Everyone who watched this match saw that in the end, anger appeared on the faces of respectable Swedes. Angry was the famous midfielder Ljungberg, who plays in the thoroughbred English Premier League: he could not cope with defenders who, collectively, in their entire lives would not earn as much as he did in one season. Ibrahimovic was angry when he suddenly found out that plastic black guys from distant islands can do with the ball what he can’t. Irritation was also on the face of Larsson, who recently handed out elegant passes in the Champions League final, and then suddenly he could not cope with the children.

Yes, with children. By all football standards, the Trinidad and Tobago team, even if it has a six-foot-tall player, are children. They are inexperienced like children. They are as diligent as children. After playing with the Swedes, they ran around the field and screamed like children. In the game against the British, keeping the score 0:0 for 80 minutes, they laughed like children who managed to put experienced adults in a puddle. The smiles that appeared on their sweat-drenched faces were beautiful: there was such immediate pleasure in playing ball, such a cheerful and somewhat vengeful joy that they made a fool of Britney Spears' husband in his fashionable blue boots!

The game that Trinidad and Tobago has shown is outside the canon of football, which prescribes a quick transition from defense to attack. This canon originated in big cities obsessed with rapid transition from rags to riches; he established himself in megacities, where everyone is always running on business and even making love hastily. But on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago they don’t live like that! Black guys are in no hurry: they cherish the ball like a precious toy that is nice to tinker with. So you can turn a large pink shell in your hands, in which you can hear the dull sound of the ocean, so you can roll a rubber ball along the beach - pleasantly, aimlessly.

Team Trinidad and Tobago! In the title itself, there is a foretaste of adventure and another life. This ship under a colorful flag, having entered into battle with a British dreadnought, did not disgrace the honor of the descendants of pirates and slaves. There was more in their small pass of reason than in a hundred jerks of Owen, who had lost the gift of wit. They didn't try to crush the opposition's midfield with a jackhammer, because I suspect jackhammers are not their genre at all; they enveloped the Swedes and the British with their movements, as if dragging them into a soft rastaman dope. In the world of football, where there is already Italian concrete, the Dutch movement and the German will, the envoys of Trinidad and Tobago introduced a new material - Caribbean resin, viscous, viscous and golden.

This is not a building pitch, black and thick, which in our cold climate is covered with cracks. Caribbean resin flows without hardening. It contains the elements that make up distant fairy-tale islands: yellow sun, blue water, white sand, a little bit of happiness, a little bit of luck. Even if they do not advance to the next round, their joyful and patient children's football is still not to be forgotten.