As I'm sure many readers have suspected, I've spent the past few weeks battling an unrelenting case of World Cup Fever. My temperature has come down a few degrees today, the first day without games since the start of the tournament. What better way to fill the void than with a repost from October 2020, where I briefly mused on the tradition of Spanish-speaking commentators yelling "GOL" after the ball finds its way into the back of the net?
My hunch is that this practice is related to how fans react to goals. I noticed early on in my viewing career that Spanish-speaking crowds sounded different after a goal relative to their English-speaking counterparts. (My best but likely unhelpful attempt to explain the difference is that the Spanish-speaking crowds sounded lower, not in volume but in pitch, than the English-speaking ones.) It took a few more years before I connected the dots - in the former, fans yell "GOAL" (or "GOOOL", I suppose) while in the latter fans tend to just make all kinds of otherwise unintelligible noise. What I'm not sure about is how this might fit into the commentator's tendency, leading to a sort of pollo and huevo conundrum - do announcers yell GOL because that's what the crowds do, or do crowds yell GOL because that's what the announcers do? And of course, all of the preceding speculation comes with the caveat that I might have misunderstood something along the way, which would wipe out all of this paragraph.
Let's focus instead, then, on what I do know. In this tournament I've watched games with commentary in both languages at a roughly even split. The experience has reinforced a feeling I explained in the 2020 post linked above - those who attempt to make some sort of insightful commentary in the moments after a goal are almost certainly doomed to failure. When a goal is scored, there is simply nothing to say. What words could resonate better than just taking in the explosion of joy, excitement, and hope that comes in the moments after a goal? What is better than just becoming part of the noise for a few seconds? I think the Spanish commentator's practice of yelling "GOOOOOL" until the celebrations start to wane reveals a deep-rooted wisdom about communication - if it's not the right time to say something, maintain the connection until it becomes appropriate to resume speaking.
