there's no clock in the forest

Lauren Bacall, September 16, 1924 – August 12, 2014.

He’s right about the ‘ineluctable consequences’, but wrong about the moral aspect. It is precisely the amoral consequences of the shoot-out that are the problem. The term ‘shoot-out’ comes from the Hollywood Western where, in the climactic final scene, the good guys in white hats invariably killed the bad guys in black hats. Even in Sergio Leone’s cynical spaghetti variations on the genre, shoot-out victory went to the more morally deserving. The Good killed The Bad and let The Ugly live. Football shoot-outs disrupt and subvert this moral universe, for The Bad and The Ugly often kill The Good. Think of West Germany’s scandalous victory over France in 1982, or Argentina’s triumph against Italy in 1990. The Italy–Holland shoot-out produced a result that, whatever it revealed about the two countries’ penalty skills, was a bizarre travesty of the game that preceded it. As an Italian journalist in the Arena joked: ‘Zoff is a tactical genius: he pinned the Dutch into our half for two hours. Then they were cooked.’

The football shoot-out is really much closer in spirit to Russian roulette or that scene in Spartacus where sadistic Roman general Laurence Olivier forces Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis to fight to the death for his own amusement. No ritual could be better designed for crushing individual players. After Clarence Seedorf’s decisive miss in the Euro ’96 quarter final, his friend the French midfielder Christian Karembeu, who finished on the winning side, observed of the shoot-out: ‘It is loading a bullet into the chamber of a gun and asking everyone to pull the trigger. Someone will get the bullet; you know that. And it will reduce them to nothing. Fair? Fairness is not even an issue.’ Michel Platini, a great penalty taker in his day and now a senior bureaucrat has said, ‘The player who misses a decisive penalty suffers a lifelong trauma. He is branded as if he had killed his colleagues and parents.’

Man Ray Hands Montage

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket