We Are All Someone Else?s Fleas

Fernando Torres of Spain competes with Jonathan Tehau of Tahiti during a FIFA Confederations Cup group match on Thursday in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Photo by Jasper Juinen/Getty Images

It would have annoyed Jonathan Swift to know that posterity would think of him as an Irish writer, since he considered himself thoroughly English. Born in Ireland to English parents, brought up in Ireland and educated in England, it was his bad luck to be an outsider in both countries: an Irishman in England and an Englishman in Ireland. Forced to settle for a clerical post in Dublin, which he saw as a provincial backwater, Swift had plenty of time to brood on perspective. In 1726, he published the perspective-shifting masterpiece by which he is remembered, Gulliver?s Travels.?

In brief: Dr. Lemuel Gulliver voyages to the South Seas. He is shipwrecked and washes up on the island of Lilliput, which turns out to be populated by tiny people whose affairs Gulliver regards with amused condescension. Later he again blunders off course and winds up in Brobdingnag, land of the giants, where he is reduced to the status of a performing monkey at the court.?

Swift gives the location of Lilliput as somewhere near Van Diemen?s Land, which is modern Tasmania. Brobdingnag is in the Pacific, 500 leagues east of Indonesia.?

Both countries would today be members of the Oceania Football Confederation.?

Oceania is characterized by immense watery expanses and stupendous gulfs in footballing ability that could not be much wider if Lilliput and Brobdingnag were actual members. It is the home of the double-digit score line, a land where drubbings are commonplace.

In the rest of the world, such massive margins of victory are extremely rare. Inventing the sport gave England a 50-year head start in international football, but they?ve still only won by scoring 10 or more goals five times in 141 years. Before Thursday?s 10?0 win against Tahiti, Spain had done it twice in 93 years.

Tahiti have done it 14 times. Last year they crushed Samoa 10?1 on their way to winning the Oceania Nations Cup, running in four goals in the last 15 minutes. Half the nations of Oceania have at some point writhed under the Tahitian lash. Guam, 14?0. Micronesia, 17?0. American Samoa, 18?0. The Cook Islands, 30?0.

To put Tahiti?s 14 double-digit wins in perspective, the regional superpower, Australia, managed only 10 such results before becoming exasperated with the low standard of competition and applying for a transfer to the Asian Football Confederation.?

Among the big beasts of the Confederations Cup, Tahiti are kittens?but back home that kitten is a bloodthirsty monster that toys with its prey before exterminating it. Having beaten up on so many smaller teams themselves, Tahiti knew what fate might await them at the Maracana.?

When Gulliver is in Lilliput, he feels a great responsibility not to injure or offend his tiny hosts by throwing his gigantic weight around. Some felt that the Spanish national team were confronted with a similar dilemma.

Spain were the world champions and the greatest international team to play the game. Tahiti had one full-time professional player. Would Spain risk looking ungentlemanly?even ridiculous?if they set about Tahiti with all the strength at their disposal?

The question suggests an unfamiliarity with the peculiar ethics of football. The Spanish internationals mostly play for the two giant clubs that dominate one of the world?s most unfair leagues. They know that soccer is a jungle where the strong crush the weak. The ?mercy rules? common in American kids? sports are alien to the spirit of the game. Mercy in that context means pity, and pity is contempt in disguise. Teams often ease off on a beaten opponent to conserve their own energies, but there?s no law of sportsmanship that says they have a duty to preserve the opponent?s honor?that?s the opponent?s job.

Collectively, Spain?s goal was to defend their own prestige, and that meant beating Tahiti by at least as wide a margin as Nigeria had in the last game. Individually, the Spanish attackers knew that here was a chance to pad their international stats. When they count up your goals at the end of your career, nobody will complain that a chunk of them were scored against Tahiti. There was also personal pride at stake?no Spanish forward wants to walk off the field having failed to score against a team of delivery men and PE teachers.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2013/06/spain_tahiti_confederations_cup_2013_spain_s_10_0_victory_reveals_that_we.html

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