Playing a pick up soccer (football) game in Morocco is like entering into a contract. I didn’t realize this the first time I was in Rabat with my sister and we saw some guys playing on the beach. We had an hour or so until we were suppose to meet some people for dinner so I said, “let’s kick the ball around.” Nicole being the eager-to-please hostess, knew very well those words, “kick the ball around” didn’t exist in the football-loving country, but we played anyway.
Three hours later, my feet bruised and my toes bloody, we stopped because someone was hurt badly enough that he couldn’t walk. So this is a pick up game. You arrive at the beach, kick the ball and linger until you identify some opponents (prey you could say, depending upon how serious you are) and give a quick whistle or indication you want to play. There’s lots of negotiations and arguing about numbers, goal size and other things that I can’t understand due to language barriers, so I usually just wait.
And wait. And wait.
And that brings me to the beauty of this game: one can play in a football match no matter what language they speak- even sign language.
On a chilly and overcast Monday morning, the beach in Casablanca, which is usually filled with footballers, was empty except for a few scattered groups. My friends and I started kicking the ball around and soon my friend Mehdi began match negotiations with a group of guys nearby.
Again, I just waited.
He came back and said, “they don’t speak.” I thought he meant that they were shy, but when we started the game there was something wrong, something missing. Noise. It was a quiet Monday and a quiet game of football. The men we were playing against were all deaf. At first I felt as if we were playing a different game. There was no yelling, no calling for the ball. Everyone on our team could of course speak, but for some reason we followed suit and stayed mostly silent. I thought I was in another world for a while, a silent film perhaps. But about a half hour into the game, people started to push and shove and whine, and I realized that I was actually just playing football in Morocco. The arguments, outrage and debates that dominate every other game were happening here, only with dramatic hand gestures and theatrical reenactments of fouls and bad passes. If someone knocked you down, instead of crying foul from the ground, you had to get up and run in front of them, pointing to the very spot of sand on your leg that somehow represents concrete and undeniable evidence of the foul. And if they disagree well then, you reenact the play, waving your hands wildly. Whoever gets tired and frustrated of these charades loses, and the other gets the ball. In a way it was the only time I could understand what these arguments in Moroccan pick up games were all about. There was no more language barrier.
Even though the group of men couldn’t communicate with their words, they were very good. Their passes were quick, intuitive and difficult to read. They had a different vision of the field, one that replaced the oral communication we use when we play. I could also tell that they played together a lot, like a team, not just a mash up of random talented players. Often times during the game they would talk and argue amongst each other in very dramatic sign language, and my Moroccan team members would look at them like, “what on earth are they arguing about?” Now they knew how I felt, and so while they silently argued we did the only thing we could do- went back toward our own goal and waited.
-Lisa Matuska
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