A team you can appreciate

Here are seven reasons to back Senegal's 'Lions of Teranga'

For years, soccer fans around the world have been wired with a kind of default mechanism. You cheer for your national side, and when the lads get eliminated, you cheer for joyous, inventive Brazil -- "everyone's second-favorite team."

Well, I'm here with a pronouncement. The Brazilians have become too much the unsmiling dynasts to get my support. Henceforth I'm urging Americans, if ever the Yanks lose, to line up behind a new second-favorite team. I did, and won't soon get over Senegal's 1-0 extra-time loss to Turkey in the World Cup quarterfinals.

Fortunately, the Lions of Teranga figure to be a force in world soccer for years to come. Here's why they'll get my continued support:

• Is there anything Americans can relate to better than throwing off the colonial yoke? The U.S. did it to England in the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, in one of soccer's great upsets -- a result so confounding that one newspaper in the UK, certain that the telegraph had transmitted a mistake, ran the result as a 10-1 England victory. Of course, Senegal did a 1-0 job on France, the defending World Cup champs, this year in group play.

• The players worship Afrobeat master Youssou N'Dour, whose "Gaiende" -- "The Lion" -- is at least the second-sweetest anthem in soccer. ("Shosholoza," the theme song of the South African national team, may be sweeter, but that's in the ear of the beholder.) Shaq and A.I. would do well to note that athletes can cozy up to musicians other than gangsta rappers.

• It was the late Senegalese president Leopold Senghor, a poet turned pol, who developed the concept of négritude, an affirmation of all things black African -- yet the team's best player, striker El Hadji Diouf, is comfortable enough to dye his hair blonde.

• I've always had a weak spot for a country secure enough to embrace --really embrace -- a citizen of a former occupier as coach of its national team. The Irish did this with former England star Jack Charlton, who could have stood for president of the Auld Sod and won, he was so popular. And the Senegalese did the same with Bruno Metsu, a Frenchman who has the virtue of not believing in curfews, or even in practicing everyday -- and looks like Mama Cass Elliott in the bargain.

• The Senegalese, like the Americans, have risen far, fast. The U.S. needed a desperate goal to beat mighty Trinidad and Tobago to qualify for the 1990 World Cup. Ten years ago Senegal couldn't get past the quarterfinals of the African Cup of Nations, despite hosting the event. And here the two are, fellow members of the Final Eight Club.

• Virtually all the Lions have left their humble homeland for a better life. Of the team's 23 players, 21 had been playing for professional clubs in France, a middling European league. As a result of their Cup run, they're likely to land better-paying gigs in one of the elite championships on the continent: Italy's Serie A, Germany's Bundesliga or England's Premier League. This is the American Dream by any other name.

• Senegal is an Islamic society that believes in democratic pluralism -- no small matter in times like these.

We probably shouldn't make too much of this last point. To be sure, life and death can turn on World Cup soccer; matches have led to murder (for scoring an own-goal in the 1994 World Cup, Colombian defender Andres Escobar was slain outside a bar near Medellin), and even touch off wars (Honduras and El Salvador fought one in the aftermath of two qualifiers for the 1970 Cup). But I for one thought the performance of France's national team four years ago, with its polyglot composition and Algerian émigré superstar Zinedine Zidane, would end forever the career of anti-foreigner agitator Jean Marie Le Pen. Of course Le Pen turned in his best electoral showing ever earlier this year, just as Les Bleus were mustering to defend the 1998 World Cup title with which they had ostensibly united the country.

Nonetheless, if the Senegalese team reminded us of anything over the past few weeks, it's the hope and joy inherent in the beautiful game. So, from the land of Soccer Moms and Soccer Mamas, a shout out to the land of Soccer Mamadous.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff, who covered the 1994 World Cup for the magazine, is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure.

 

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