JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

Life is unfair.

Soccer is life. Football is life. It must be so. The T-shirts insist, whichever nomenclature and whatever size you order.

Ergo, soccer/football is unfair.

Think about it. Luis Suarez was being toasted in Montevideo on Friday night, while he was being hoisted on the shoulders of his Uruguay teammates, while he was roasted with a side order of rueful regret across Africa. The Uruguayan’s blatant cheating, and Asamoah Gyan’s overexcited, overcooked penalty following, was the pivot point of this lesson.

Unfair? Of course it was.

“It is part of football,” Ghana’s London-based defender John Pantsil said afterward.

Put that one quote in italics and frame it. The Laws of the Game don’t award goals until they cross the line. Dominic Adiyah’s last-second header that was stabbed away by the arm of Suarez was not quite a goal, but required a subsequent successful penalty to make it so. It’s the Laws. There’s no throwing-your-stick-on-a-breakaway rule in the Laws.

Unjust, or, as Ghana’s coach put it, “sporting injustice”? Yes, that too. Forget for a minute the talk of goal-line technology or replay-review as a corrective, the sort of thing taken for granted in North America, a place where utopia still endures as an idea. In the bigger picture, this old-world game is cynical and dystopian, a place where cheating – handballs, diving, even fixing matches—is rewarded instead of penalized. And doesn’t that sound like something familiar?

Someone much smarter than me once said that 0-0 is the score of life. You win a few, rare moments of bliss when the ball bounces just right. You lose a lot. You always, always, always complain about the refereeing, just like you always, always, always bitch about taxes and government. Sometimes you’re happy with a draw. Sometimes it sticks in your craw worse than one of those chicken feet they sell at the ball parks here. Mostly, it’s pointless, or seems to be, one long nil-to-nil slog to the grave that goes by in a flash, or 120-plus minutes of stalemate hinging on one split-second spot kick that bounces off the top of the crossbar.

Uncorrectable? Uh-huh. How many times have you said, “I wish I didn’t do that.” Now imagine Gyan’s thoughts.

Back home in Toronto, my 5-year-old grandson Peter is overdosing on the World Cup’s month-long sugar rush. Before I left I gave him some stickers for the various teams. When Italy crashed out early, he tearfully tore up the Azzurri sticker. When Brazil, his next favourite, was upset by the Dutch he cried. He might be the only kindergarten-age kid on the planet who celebrated with Suarez.

Poor kid. Lucky kid. He’s hooked for life. He’s learning the rules, and we’re not talking about offside or yellow cards. There might be no crying in baseball, but there’s plenty of it here, rivers of hot tears that have fallen on the almost-green grass pitches during this African winter, even on parched Port Elizabeth, where reservoirs are down to 29 per cent capacity during the worst drought in the city’s history.

Denis Leary said it best: “Life sucks – grab a (bleeping) helmet, all right?”

At the World Cup now, Africa’s grabbing a helmet. Ghana’s dignity in defeat was a lesson to everyone, after a tournament in which so many from the rich and privileged west have exited so badly. This continent and anywhere where the world’s most popular game matters – in other words, almost everywhere and everyone—will talk about Friday night at Soccer City for generations. The Rennes, France-based Gyan, a a quick and daring predator of a striker who is hearing the siren’s call of England’s big-money Premier League, will go on, forever linked with that penalty miss from the spot.

Suarez will go on, too, along with Gyan and the young Adiyah comprising the unholy trinity of one of the World Cup’s most controversial endings.

“He kicked it from his heart,” Pantsil said of Gyan’s miss.

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Unreal? Sure felt that way at Soccer City.

Oh, but it was real, almost too real for mere words. That’s soccer/football. That’s life. Nobody said it was supposed to be fair.