¡GOOOOL!

An e-mail exchange between Peter, a former co-worker and current football enthusiast, and me. Or at least he’s more of an enthusiast than I am, watching World Cup games on one of the Spanish channels here and ESPN (sometimes at the same time).

Peter,
I was looking at the Tribune web site's coverage of the World Cup (probably not the best place to read about it, but I was in the virtual neighborhood), and this headline from last week made me smile. An evil smile, but still:

Valiant Poland can't hang on
GERMANY 1, POLAND 0

Couldn't they think of a new headline? This was recycled from late Sept. 1939, I think.

Dees

Dees,
But remember there were two armies invading Poland in 1939. A more accurate score would be Poland 0, Vicious Neighboring Dictator-thugs, 1. Euro sports types alway give the home team first!

When I tune into the World Cup, I have the Spanish channel on 'cause
their feed is about 5 seconds ahead of ESPN. So I have the remote's
"Jump" button set for them and ESPN so I can see each rare score in
these matches twice! Or if I'm not quite paying attention and hear
the Spanish announcer say "¡GOOOOL!", I can still hit the Jump button
and see the goal once on ESPN.

Peter

Peter,
Sure enough, the Soviets did gobble up eastern Poland in '39, never to return it even after they became fraternal socialist nations. Stalin figured, give 'em a piece of Germany instead. So Poland drifted westward (so far west that a lot of it ended up in Chicago).

At the Imperial War Museum in London in 1988, I saw a small map depicting the German invasion of Poland on the wall. The museum had curiously left eastern Poland blank, as if there were no Soviet incursion, but someone had inked in arrows to represent Red Army movements.

Dees