Matchday 13

Tomorrow night, Ecuador will play its thirteenth Russian World Cup qualifier, against Paraguay in Asunción. The prognosis is good. The Paraguayans have lost four of their last five games, with home defeats to Colombia and Peru. Ecuador’s record during this time consists of two victories, one draw, and two defeats.

What’s better is that our players are confident and healthy. Last weekend, in the English Premier League, Énner Valencia played some fifteen minutes and tallied a goal and an assist. Antonio Valencia tallied a goal that showed that he was “full of running” (as the British say). And Walter Ayoví scored a golazo two months ago, in Mexico.

Pray for Ecuador to win.

The fourteenth qualifier will be played on Tuesday, at home, against Colombia.

The woes of Énner

By now, you must know that Ecuador “mopped the floor” with the Chileans, 3 to 0. The first two goals were tallied before the 25th minute. The third goal was scored in the initial moments of the second half. Commentators agree that many more goals could have been attained.

Énner Valencia, in particular, put himself into scoring position again and again, only to waste chance after chance.

Shortly before the game was concluded, Énner was substituted out with an “injury.” He was taken in an ambulance to a clinic. The police jogged several yards behind Énner, putting on a show of chasing him. He was not arrested inside of the stadium.

Since then, Énner’s legal troubles have been resolved: at least, he’s been allowed to board the plane to El Alto (tomorrow, Ecuador will play against the Bolivians, in La Paz). Meanwhile, Énner is using Twitter to defend himself to the public. He maintains that he already has paid lots of support to his child’s mother (who is an inadequate parent, he alleges). He’s trying to obtain custody of the little girl so that she can go to school in England, where he resides.

All of this may yet lead to a happy ending. Please pray for Énner and his family, and pray for Ecuador to defeat Bolivia.

Here are replays from the game against the Chileans. One silver lining of Walter Ayoví’s absence is that Christian Ramírez, his twenty-two-year-old understudy, performed superbly. (I’d been worrying about Ecuador’s vulnerability at Walter’s position, left-fullback.) Ramírez even scored the second goal, flying into the box from well outside of it, expressing a shrewd sense of what was required at that time.

A prayer for Ecuador

Karin’s birthday was on Monday. She & I were too tired to go out. But yesterday we did go out, to the laundromat; and, while the clothes were washing, we left to get some ice-cream. Karin put some of it into a styrofoam container and brought it back with her to the laundromat. But she didn’t eat it there, because dead bugs were falling from the ceiling.

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Tonight, again, we went out. We bought mountains of groceries. Then we stopped at a used-media store called Disc Replay. Karin bought an old Nintendo game, Crash Bandicoot, as a present to herself. I bought Seasons 1 and 2 of King of the Hill for very cheap.

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Mary now works with me at IUSB, tutoring students in the writing of papers. The baroque requirements of the First-Year Writing program are driving her nuts. (That was how it was for me, too, the first couple of years that I worked at IUSB.)

I’m finally making good on my promise to write an IUSB-style First-Year Writing paper. And I’m doing it the way that IUSB wants its students to do it: I’m writing the body paragraphs before I write the thesis statement. (This is one of the program’s features that drives Mary nuts.)

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Ecuador will play against Chile tomorrow (Thursday). The situation is dire: several players haven’t been playing regularly with their clubs; our captain, Walter Ayoví, is injured; Antonio Valencia is accused of having cheated on his wife; and Énner Valencia is compelled to sneak in and out of the stadium to avoid being arrested for failing to pay his child support. Under these circumstances, I’m reluctant to ask God for victory over the Chileans. But I believe that our God is a merciful God: that he is with those who call out to him in repentance. Repent, compatriots! Repent, and reclaim God’s favor!

Our demise

The best moment of the Copa América occurred at the end of the group stage. Raúl Ruidíaz scored with his hand, allowing Peru to knock out Brazil.

The Uruguayans also were KO’d during the group stage.

In last night’s quarterfinal, we Ecuadorians were beaten by the U.S. (as foretold in Ecclesiastes 9:11). To their credit the gringos did what they set out to do, which was to station nearly all of their players close to their own box.

(Remarkably, the gringos were able to get away with doing this at home. Their fans were even willing to applaud them for doing it.)

Still, we created plenty of chances. Most of them were wasted by Énner Valencia. We also earned a few set-pieces, one of which we converted (set-pieces are crucial when the other team is stationing nearly all of its players close to the box). But we deserved to have more free kicks than the referee gave us, as well as at least one penalty kick. After one especially bad no-call, Coach Quinteros justly insulted the referee’s mother.

In the game’s last minutes we performed an experiment. Our left-back, Walter Ayoví, moved into the center of the field, where he carved up the U.S. with his passing. The Argentinian commentators were in awe. “Walter Ayoví with your 37 years, we love you!” they exclaimed after the game ended.

Costa Rica 1, Italy 0; France 5, Switzerland 2; Ecuador 2, Honduras 1

The Costa Ricans are for real.

The Swiss’s collapse was sorrier than Spain’s. Some of the French goals were as soft as cotton.

Victory for Ecuador. … We looked awful. We looked like we were in the 2002 World Cup: tentative, nervy. Without Castillo, we couldn’t dominate the midfield. It wasn’t pleasing to behold.

A few other notes:

(1) The Hondurans have such dirty players. They tackle viciously; they handle deliberately. Playing beautifully against them is impossible. A cynical, cynical team.

(2) Our second goal against Honduras was a carbon copy of our goal against the Swiss — and of several earlier goals (here and here). A foul against Jefferson Montero on the left side of the box; a bullet cross by Walter Ayoví; a close-range header. This trick may be unstoppable.

Walter Ayoví

I’ve been trying to find out what some other philosophers think of the case of Mr. Edward Snowden (future refugee in Ecuador?). One philosopher I consulted was Robert Paul Wolff, more politically outspoken than most. Alas, he had little to offer beyond a few snarky comments about the NSA. But he did say quite a lot about how well he liked his own writing. Which was fine. In this merciless discipline, some light self-appreciation is refreshing.

The concluding paragraph really hits it:

Far and away the greatest contemporary cellist is Yo Yo Ma. He has so completely mastered the ferociously difficult technique of the cello that when he plays, he looks as though he is not so much producing the music as listening to it. There is something about the way he holds the cello, leaning back away from it as though it were playing itself, that communicates that he need no longer even think about the fingerings and bowings that absorb the attention of lesser cellists. The great Russian cellist Rostropovich used to play in much the same manner. God knows, I do not think of myself as a satirist in the same world as Jonathan Swift, say, but there are times when I feel like Fast Eddy Felsen, moving around the pool table with an animal grace, secure in the knowledge that he cannot miss.

Whom I kept thinking of was Walter Ayoví. Walter Ayoví.

I wondered if there were any good YouTube videos of Walter Ayoví “moving around … with an animal grace, secure in the knowledge that he [could not] miss.” Probably not, I thought. How many other people are there who sit around thinking of the animal grace of Walter Ayoví.

And then I found this video commentary by some Mexican dude. Here was someone who understood. Thank heaven for small mercies.

Listen to the commentator say: Siempre desmarcado.

If you don’t know Spanish, I feel sorry for you.