Accidental Goal: Luck & Determinism

In our pitiful band of gawky, maladroit, poorly coordinated mediocrities back in the day, there used to be this guy who used to make a lot of noise on the field, but was an authentic dud like the rest of us when it came to any kind of physical contact between foot and ball.  The bunch of us were happy and resigned to being spear carriers, standing around in defense while the athletically gifted did their stuff up front where the action was.

One day, a highly improbable confluence of factors landed this dud in a position where he randomly kicked and made contact, and the ball somehow freakishly shot through the goal.  Now this was a miracle of not less than Biblical proportions, and wrought an otherworldly effect upon those present – like we’d slipped into another dimension.

While the field recovered from the kind of daze the philistines must have felt seeing David cop Goliath in the forehead with a sling, the effect on the kicker of the goal was far less Biblical.  He started hysterically screaming out his lungs in a state of the most unbridled euphoria I have seen.  The only other time I have witnessed such elemental and explosive joy is when the tables turned at a match, and the supporters of the losing team went berserk with happiness.

But my whole point is about what happened next.  As soon as the first raptures had faded and his body had stopped convulsing, he underwent a bizarre transformation.  Suddenly the guy that used to loiter hopelessly in the slips was seen rocketing through the field towards wherever the ball was, convinced he had just found his destiny, and it was now time to show the world who he really was.

I have an indelible memory clip of this incident in my mind – I see him from behind in his uniform of blue trousers and white shirt, running like some stampeding wild thing towards the ball.  Naturally he would never make contact with it again.  I can never erase the memory of this chronic loser, transformed by a total accident into a temporary fireball, charging like a cheetah towards the action, desperately trying to grasp the fleeting, rhapsodic moment, to keep the dream from ending, to turn sheer luck into conscious design.  It was an amusing yet deeply poignant scene; the rest of us stood watching him “rage, rage, against the dying of the light“, as Dylan Thomas puts it.  But reality was already reeling him in.