Word: robins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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CONVERSATIONS WITH WILLIE by Robin Maugham Simon & Schuster; 188 pages...
...teams, with the best talent each home country could assemble and train, be gan to play elimination rounds all over the globe. This month the 14 survivors and the West German team, the defending champions, moved to Argentina to join the host country in an exhausting series of round-robin matches for the World Cup, which is held every four years to decide who rules soccer. The play was only fit fully brilliant, and it produced no wonder team, no commanding individual star of the magnitude of Holland's Johan Cruyff and Germany's Franz Beckenbauer...
Because of the complexities of the round-robin play, the Dutch needed a tie with Italy to get a chance at the title. Italy needed a win to go on to the final. The game mucked about inconclusively until, after 18 minutes, a tall and gawky defender named Erny Brandts tried to thwart an attack by lashing savagely at the ball in front of his own goal. He knocked it into the netting and in the bargain crippled his teammate, Goalie Pieter Schrijvers, who was carried off on a stretcher. The score was now Italy: one goal up, and Holland...
...nature of the round-robin tournament often made it sensible for a team to play for a tie against any opponent that seemed dangerous, and to play for a win -thus committing defensive forces and risking a loss-only against the worst teams. In the typical game, each team fortified its own goal so thoroughly that only thinly manned patrols could be sent forward, and their efforts seemed more reconnaissance than aggression. If the opposing defense dozed off in a body, a goal might be scored, since the individual attackers were superbly skilled, but the likely game result...
...double imagery of blackness and blood that dominates the play is projected with cinematic dexterity by Co-Directors Robin Phillips and Eric Steiner. The same cannot be said for the treatment of the text, laboriously articulated as if for slow listeners. This seriously hampers the tempo of a play that should speed an audience headlong toward the hero's fierce doom...