Un homme et une femme

Jean looked impatiently at the river every day. He hoped that at that very moment she would arrive. His one and only. He knew every detail of the shore, every shadow in the harbor, the reflection of the sun on the water was engraved in his brain, every voice about the arrival of a ship was his friend.  And everyone knew him, crazy Jean, the one whose mind had been consumed by hope, the target of ridicule for sailors who emptied themselves into local prostitutes and irritation for eternal cynics.

Every day he hung on the harbor like an inventory to anchor hope, he had no information about her or his children, uncertainty every day tore off a piece of the illusion that happiness had not abandoned him after all and that maybe after all, there was some chance of meeting again, meeting with his Isabel. He was often a target of competent and incompetent advisors, invited and uninvited guests of his conscience who parroted him to forget her, to have pity on the children and to marry again. All those years they convinced everyone that they were right. Except him.

On the other side of the Amazon was Isabel. Four thousand and eight hundred kilometers away from Jean, the former beauty through whose veins flowed the blood of the conquistadors but also that of the Quechua Indians, a mixture that does not tolerate failure, educated and aware of the world around her. And she was waiting for Jean, whom she married too young, seemingly inexperienced. By her own will and to the immense joy of Jean, the twenty-something old cartographer who had come from France to measure the circumference of the equator and give it a final dimension to our planet, in the Le Condamine expedition.

And she expected news every day, and her sadness gave her a heavy expression in her eyes, she knew every detail of the coast, every shadow in the harbor, the reflection of the sun on the water was engraved in her brain, every voice about the arrival of a ship, and she was a friend. She spent eight years with him before he decided to leave for France. After the death of their daughter from the usual tropical diseases, they still decided to go. But now he refused to take her with him. He knew the risks of the expedition, he convinced her to stay and watch the children, they wouldn't be gone for more than a few months anyway.

If only he had known how much those few months would cost.

And he was right, almost half of the expedition was left to rot in the Amazon swamps, a tribute to discovering and charting new routes. The forgotten heroes of a forgotten war.

Still, he reached his destination on the Atlantic coast, with rough maps that he had compiled himself. Now he just had to send a message to her to come. And he did. The letter never arrived, lost in the curse of human madness and the sadistic games of chance. Spain and Portugal closed the area to the French, on the way to another war to gnaw at South America.

The road was closed. There was no forward, no back. As if the whole of Amazonia was not enough, now it was also divided by local maniacs thirsty for blood and gold. The future did not keep up with the present. At least not for Jean and Isabel.

A detour was needed. Jean set out through a bureaucratic labyrinth that was as nasty as the Amazonian one. He wrote, begged, sought passage through the Spanish-Portuguese territories. He tried to overcome obstacles, cynicism, misunderstanding, open hostility. Months turned into years. Jean decided that enough was enough and that it was time to take his fate into his own hands. He was helped by La Condamine, his mentor who managed to use some of his personal connections with local Portuguese powerful people. One thing did not leave Jean in peace...he knew that the Portuguese were aware of his attitude towards them, of the correspondence in which he accused them of their massacres of the natives. His suspicion slowly grew into paranoia. Had they forgotten?

Although both La Condamine and the local governor assured him that everything was in order...they even provided him with a ship to reach Riobamba, to Isabel. After so many years of troubles and apathy, he saw a trap even where fate had not intended to set it for him. He boarded the ship and set off. Every whisper of the sailors seemed to him like a conspiracy and an intention to throw him to the piranhas. One evening he got off the ship in Oyapoc, a small town forgotten by everyone, even by the crazy gods of the Quechua Indians. The ship continued and without him reached some destination that was not Riobamba, by the captain's will. And Isabelle heard rumors of a ship carrying him, several hundred kilometers away. Those rumors were enough to convince her to set off through the jungle, even though she had no knowledge of the dangers and despite warnings that she was going to certain death. Those who persuaded her were persistent and convinced everyone.

Except for her.

The small amateur expedition she had hastily assembled and financed was doomed to failure. No one survived the journey; they all ended up as the local cynics had predicted, playing the role of ominous birds in the eternal fear of being killed. Malaria and the swamp took their toll. The end of a love's journey.

Except for Isabelle.

Alone, half-crazy with fear, eaten by insects and despair, she continued. Like her ancestors who went to find El Dorado and left their bones in some remote pit, dreaming of the city of gold, she too went. With the vague instinct inherited from her other side, the Indian, she sought her El Dorado. And he was a certain Jean Gaudin, a man of flesh and blood whom she was not even sure was alive.

On 22nd of July 1770, she saw a settlement. With a last effort of will, she dragged herself to the first houses of...Oyapoc! The same place where Jean had reached.

They were finally together!

There are many things that cannot be explained rationally. This is one of those cases. Two spirits impenetrable under the fierce blows of fate. An insignificant episode in the history of South America, a mere footnote compared to the supposed great games and events.

Or something else entirely.

(Roger Mortis 017)

The Circle

The expression on her face was unusual. A kind of satisfying smile under her eyes that avoided other people's gazes. She was about forty-five years old. She left a vague impression that she had once been an attractive girl who had probably been the target of lustful glances, someone's loving eyes, or at least an erect penis.

What now attracted attention to her, besides her drunk and too slim of a body, grotesque makeup, and uncertainty in appearance, was her baby, from whom no one had ever seen her part from. Everywhere she went, she went with her little one. Well swaddled and in a safe maternal embrace. Protected from everything she considered a threat to the little one...like many mothers, she had that expression that is incomprehensible to men. No one knew who the baby's father was, whether it was a soldier on leave, the love of her life, or the local bored Council house fucker. It was strange that she was not the target of gossip, except for the newcomers to the city who were seeing her for the first time...

The mystery was revealed one ordinary rainy day on the steps in front of the local hospital. For reasons forever buried in her mind, she often hung around the city hospital.

No, there were no dramas or confrontations with the baby's possible father. No fateful encounters, at least not the kind that novels are written about, are retold as the latest gossip or end up on the pages of the black chronicle.

Just a small slip on the slippery stairs. And a shock. Shock when she slipped and fell down the stairs. For the first time in who knows how long, the baby, under the influence of inexorable gravity, left her arms and rolled down the stairs. It remained lying down on them, between the expression in the mother's eyes, some essence of horror, stopped time in her eyes and the shock of those who witnessed the incident. The baby remained lying. At first she didn't move. Despite the fall that engulfed all the stairs one by one. The baby didn't make a sound. And how could it have made a sound when it was made of - plastic!

It wasn't any baby, but an ordinary doll, a little old-fashioned and worn out. Plastic is not prone to injuries.

Collateral damage to the invisible whims of fate, drug addict`s stories from another time, an insidious game of chance, a karmic incident with no return ticket, like all of us, although all in our own way, carrying our cross as long as we have some illusion in front of us. Even if we have some kind of plastic doll in our hands, we also have something that makes us not stop. Not to break the circle.

An insignificant scene from an insignificant street in a small, gray town on the border with the promised land. A sad inspiration in the brain of an hydraulic press worker during a cigarette break.

(Roger Mortis 016)

Something about Generation Y

The informal philosophers of Generation Y, various weirdos such as Bill Hicks, George Carlin, David Icke, Greg Braden, Stuart Swerdlow, Michael Talbot and many others, perhaps for the first time in history led to a breakthrough in the rigid paradigms about the nature of reality and about the human place in the universe. Finally beyond both religious dogmas and mainstream scientific explanations. And perhaps most importantly, they did it in such a way that literally everyone, from a shoeshine boy in an alley in Calcutta to an average teenager in Darmstadt could understand it.

Here is a part of the authentic philosophy of Generation Y where science and spirituality finally join hands and emotions and reason are in a happy marriage, distilled in the lobotomized mind of a member of the aforementioned generation.

We perceive reality as part of the human race. In other words, our senses send electrical impulses & frequencies to the neural network in our brain that "decodes" reality. So reality exists only in our brain. We share it with about 8 billion other Homo sapiens-sapiens because we share an Operatin g system with them and only with them. Also we share the same "processor" and the same senses for perception and input of information to the said "processor".

The output of information is very different for each of us and we have a large range in quality and quantity, i.e. from the local moron with a mullet, a gold chain and a T-shirt to some brilliant scientist or writer. Same input, different output. We also share part of reality with some animals. The higher they are on the evolutionary scale, the more their reality (perception of reality, to be precise) is similar to ours. Example - dogs (incomparably better system for smell than humans) or cats (sight) or bats (hearing) have a different reality than us. Dogs smell what we can't, cats see what we can't, bats hear what we can't. that gives them a different perception of reality. They have a much greater input of information with electric impulses through the mentioned senses than we do. So a dog can probably recognize the smell of a stone (rough example), a cat sees something that we can't, although we`ll never know for sure. We cannot see the world though canine or feline eyes. Neither through bat`s radars,can we?

But our perception is not determined only by biological characteristics. When using any psychoactive substance, perception is shifted, expanded or narrowed depending on the chemical composition of the substance and the person using or abusing it. Although it does not necessarily mean that it is false.It is just different from the usual perception of reality, and whether it is a new reality that is only different from the one that is generally and jointly perceived as such, i.e. "Consensus-reality" is a question.

The decoding of the input of information & frequencies is also correlated with other things known as mind programming, brainwashing, propaganda, mind control, educational systems, psychological matrixes, religious patterns, electro-chemical balance in the organism and many others. Which significantly differentiates us from other forms of life on the planet in terms of the range of possibilities for decoding the input of information and with it of course the output which on the other hand is most important for what is called Ego, the Self, Personality, Individuality or any word that describes it.

Of course, the interdependence of the quality and quantity of incoming information is significant, but the decisive factor is the way it is decoded through the “software” and the “operating system” of our mind. This raises the question of what kind of power a group of people would have who would be able to influence not only the input of information (almost everyone can do that) but most importantly - the ability to download appropriate software with which the individual would later decode reality.

Perhaps history is just an endless series of software products placement, composed by a group with common interests throughout various time periods, which are constantly downloaded into the minds of the vast majority of people in a certain territory, and of course globally in recent times. If anyone knows the programming language of the software that conditions our perception of reality and the quality of its decoding, they have a key to unlock the conundrum of our time.

(Roger Mortis 015)

Two brothers in the back of my mind

Needless to say, I didn't remember their names. Despite the fact that they studied in the other class and were good people. Two brothers, Two Romani. Two Gypsies. Yes, they had nothing and that bothered us. Rags, stench, constant colds, severe poverty in a word. I won't describe them further because I can't describe the state of their misery. They were different from us. They would stay after school and go collect what was left from the cafeteria. To us, the well fed cattle, such a procedure seemed so lame. And the fact that it was repeated every day.

I know, I know, they collected it for home, so that a few more of their brothers and sisters could have a bite. Now I know. And then, we would meet them outside and do to them what we did. The bread would end up on the ground where they would pick it up again, the slaps, kicks and insults were standard drill, they served us as a punching bag on which we would pour out our fucking frustrations from home, from school, from the toilets, from our brains that were empty even though soaked in testosterone that was not wasted in some women's vagina but in the toilet bowl. Hence the back benches and the sadistic outbursts on those weaker than us.

We were a standard product of the educational and social system. And it was easy on our minds and sweet to our souls.

None of that can compare to the shock. The shock of why didn't they resist, why didn't they fight, why didn't they break one of our heads behind a wall with a steel bar at night. Why didn't they call their numerous brothers, cousins, friends,  you know, the Gypsy brothers. I still can't understand it even though I know they were barely standing on their feet. And they probably had some kind of life philosophy of their own or something along those lines. That was incomprehensible to us.

And I know something else...nevermind Mahatma Gandhi and everything I've read since then...through you, what we were hiding came to light...the terrible shit...ours and not yours...you just wanted us to leave you alone. And the tears in your eyes, and the words, mixed gypsy and Macedonian with which you begged us not to leave you... that was engraved in our hard drive... remained... although it will always be avoided when evoking memories of the `happy school days`...

No... the brothers were not the only ones to whom this was arranged. Although there were many others in a different way.  Ones who received a regular supply of misery and despair. For other "reasons" of course, the appropriate file downloaded by the system into our skulls was activated for different things, but with a similar results.

Were we children? Didn't we know any different? Well, thank you parents, relatives, neighbors and teachers for making us like that. Thank you for raising us like that, it was our greatest pleasure and it is still our pleasure to see someone in the mud, to console ourselves that we are not the most fucked up and shitty people in the world, that there is someone somewhere beneath us who we can step on.

Thanks for nothing!

This is dedicated to them brothers. I know they probably don't live in the virtual world, that they probably don't even have internet presence, and that they will never read these words. I apologize to you with all my heart and I hope that one day, someday, you will have everything that I don't, and that one day you will look at me with the same contempt that I looked at you with back then.

(Roger Mortis 014)

That Moment

The moment everyone had been waiting for had come. The gala dinner was almost over. The newlyweds, although tired from all the stupid fuss, petty-bourgeois congratulations, people in suits that didn't fit them, women who were perpetually threatened with breaking their heels and who were staggering around, finally saw the bed in front of them. Two relics of their puritanical upbringing. The moment he and she had been waiting for had come. Hush hush.

The sun had risen for Yuri Vladimirovich Streltsov, first term, former Komsomol member, raped four times in order to pay off his debt to the "death apron" and the tax to the Dedovshtina. The military academy, the absence on his alcoholic father's funeral and the crazy version of the Oedipus complex towards his mother. The denunciation. His moment had come. Authority. Money. Power. The red button.

The five minutes had come for him, the little guy from the docks, the thrifty bastard who ran a stall, giving up the small pleasures of everyday life, patiently tracing his path to the middle class, that den of gluttony and moralizing where he dreamed of belonging, so many times he had imagined it that there was no room left for any other dream. And finally, he arrived at his destination, he had his own business. The future seemed as pink to him as the bottom of a Madagascar Lemur.

Derek Chamberlain, born into opulence and decadence, Ivy League education, Trust funds, superficial superficiality, the child of the owners of four fear-producing concerns, a procession through many female and male crotches, the stairs of the bourgeois dream, the governor's office, new elections and victory. He got his dream of dreams, the mandate in the Oval Office. Power, fame and a code book for the descendant of the old lineage of degenerates.

The mosaic also matched the child from the other entrance of the building, he could not separate himself from the soccer ball and the redness in his cheeks every time a little blond girl of his age passed by him. Their eyes met more and more often. Their moment came, the first awkward kiss and his confused babbling that one day he would play for Everton football club and that she would be proud of him. Probably the same day that she would start acting together with Edward Norton. Still, it was their day, beautiful and wonderful with the taste of her tongue in his mouth.

Ahmed Ibn al-Samani, the middle-aged Sheikh, the monster of the Gulf, the master of manipulation and intrigue, the strict Muslim, the eternal juggler between East and West, the gambler who gambled with millions every weekday, and in his free time with the lives and fates of his subjects, had long been fulfilling his life's mission. The only thing she had no control over was right in his skull. Galloping schizophrenia and megalomania.

She was nothing special on any grounds. No amount of imagination would be enough to find any specialness and give her any meaning. Apart from her husband and two sons, she dedicated her life to the three of them, prepared tons of food, sent tons of dirty laundry and gave many maternal kisses goodnight to her sons and occasional routine sex to her husband. The time had come for her dream to come true. Her sons were getting an education, getting jobs and one of them was getting married. The woman was shining like never before in her life.

A predictable future, dancing in the shadow of the Real-Politik dance and everyday joys and sorrows, the small and big hopes of the small and big players on stage.

Some would like it to stay that way, apparent tranquility and false peace, violence on the screens and pensioner comments in the park. Almost everyone expected it, a kind of predictable path of the living and the main actors as well as the supporting cast and extras - likewise. The only crack in that picture were the demons in a Sheik's head.

The second horseman of the apocalypse did not come as predicted in the scriptures, there was no red horse and sword. He came unnoticed for the sailors of the USS "Gettysburg" in the form of an Exocet missile, and minutes later for those of the "Udaloi". The confusing international conference, interrupted coitus at the height of passion on the first wedding night, opening the ICBM silos, the Sheik's last game of poker, the big bets and the simultaneous strike on both superpowers. The rosy future of the newly minted businessman received darkish red tones from the Megatons detonated over his port.

The red button, the code book, the breakdown in communications, Yuri's bluff, Derek's bluff - both unsuccessful and cheaply executed. The petrified embrace on the bench where the wannabe footballer and actress experienced their first love, unaware that their first kiss would also be their last. A belated coup, The Fulda gap blues, the Sheikh's head mounted on a spear by the guard of honor. Intercontinental ballistic missiles saluting one another as they passed each other on the road to eternity. A mother's unfulfilled dream for a piece of happiness stolen from the monotonous everyday life sacrificed in the name of a happy tomorrows.

Yes, everybody was looking forward to the day after...

Well...

There was no day after.

(Roger Mortis 013)

Masquerade

Masks. I was given a few when I was born, on some rainy day, many years ago, although they came without instructions for use. The use was learned behavior later, although the word learning is just a euphemism tantamount of anal penetration without proper lubricant.

One of the many masks that take the form of indifference and arrogance was intended to hide emotions. To hide something that is felt towards something or (horror of horrors!) towards someone. That's when the united forces of the petty bourgeoisie, posturing, wisecracks and other impotent phenomena set out, which in the name of the Matrix take care to detect if someone somewhere and somehow in the world is happy and then procede to destroy him!

In order not to be boring, that destruction of what is best in us and which we all desperately need takes different forms. And those forms come in the variety of masks that we have to wear depending on the occasion and depending on what kind of feces we have to swallow. Purely to fit in the middle, the Matrix will cut us to the ground and throw us into the waste of life, where all the roads that started in some happier times when we have been extatic with an innocent smile on an ordinary sunny day, the passing of sympathy rubbing shoulders next to us or an ordinary dish of chocolate that we now eat after reading how many calories it has and whether it has expired.

And no one has asked why they do it, why they try to destroy something beautiful, something that he or she wishes to experience from the bottom of his or her soul. It doesn't wonder because it wears several of those masks that he got for free and that he will pay for the rest of his life until the final triumph of the ultimate winners assume their role - the worms underground.

The worms? End of the road? Maybe and maybe not. I feel as if I have dug something out of mothballs, from the times when I first thought about the finitude of life in the holographic projection known as self experience. Finally, in the best and most sincere Balkan tradition, one greeting. Fuck you all, fuck off, break your head and stay away from me. I have one life and I will live it my way. If you don't like it - well, that`s that we'll see us above one day and compare notices.

(Roger Mortis 012)

Greatest World Cup upsets

Lets take a look at the Top 10 stunning upsets in World Cup history :

Ten. West Germany 0, East Germany 1, 1974

In a perfect football epitome of the Cold War, West Germany, hosting the Cup in 1974, were drawn to play their neighbors from across the Berlin Wall - East Germans in what was to be East`s one and only appearance ever on the world football stage. Both teams having secured qualification for the next round, everything that was at stake was pride, and lots of it. West Germans, European champions of the day, having arguably one of the best line-ups in the history of the game was up against a team of eleven unknowns from the communist East. What the capacity crowd at Volks park stadium in Hamburg witnessed, happened to be a sole goal scored by one Jurgen Sparwasser for the East Germans in the 77th minute of the game. West Germany threw everything on offence in a vain attempt to equalize but the East Germans weren`t impressed. The result stood at 0-1 and Sparwasser rose from obscurity only to became something of a household name in Germany. However, West Germans recovered quickly from the embarrassment and went on to win the Cup later on.

Two. Germany 2, Switzerland 4, 1938

Nazi Germany having won a bronze medal in 1934 edition was set to conquer the soccer world in 1938. Boosted by as much as nine Austrian players that were included into the German team after the ”Anschluss” of Austria in March of that same year, they were to play Switzerland in the first round of the tournament hosted by France. Brandishing a nazi salute before the start of the match in front of a very hostile crowd at Park des Princes stadium in Paris, Germans took on the non-remarkable Swiss team but managed only a draw after taking the lead earlier in the match. According to the rules in those days a play-off was to be played within 48 hours. Two days later at the same venue, Germans were cruising comfortably 2-0 at half-time and nobody expected anything out of the ordinary. Except for the Swiss players that were determined to make life difficult for the Germans and pulled off one of the most shocking comebacks ever, scoring incredible four goals in the second half and sending the Nazi Dream Team out of the Cup.

Three. Italy 1, New Zealand 1, 2010

One could hardly imagine more unbalanced fixture than defending World Champions of 2006, Italy playing New Zealand in 2010 World Cup in South Africa. ”All Whites”, representatives of Oceania, a team occasionally being beaten up by the likes of Fiji and other exotic sides wasn`t perceived as a threat by any stretch of imagination. Though Kiwis pulled one remarkable last minute escape to a draw with Slovakia earlier in the Cup and Italy did likewise against Paraguay it was hard to expect anything but defeat at the hands of the ``Azzuri``. Saving a point with Slovakia is one thing, stopping the World Champions is quite another – yet that is exactly what happened at Mbombela stadium in Nelspruit to the amazement of anyone that even remotely knows ``who`s who`` in football world. Shane Smeltz shocked the world after seven minutes and Italians only got to equalize through a penalty kick later. As the subsequent results showed, this draw sent Italians back home alongside All Whites that still finished in front of Italy in the group!

Four. Argentina 0 Cameroon 1, 1990

Playing an opening World Cup game against reigning World champions is difficult enough, playing against Argentina as it was the case at the 1990 World Cup opener is worse, having to stop Diego Maradona, widely acknowledged as one of the best players ever to have played football is next to impossible, but beating them with one and later two men down is a stuff that legends are made. That is what the team of Cameroon pulled off at San Siro, Milan sending shockwaves around the world and becoming most successful African World Cup side to date. More resembling a pitched battle than a game with numerous wild tackles from both sides it took one mistake to decide the result and it was Argentinian goalkeeper Pumpido that dropped the ball into his own net after clumsily trying to save Omam Biyik`s header in the seconf half. Cameroonians didn`t stop there and famously went on to progress to the quarterfinals only to be stopped on the brink of a medal glance by losing in extra time against England.

Five. France 0, Senegal 1, 2002

Having to open a World Cup defending the title puts a team in precarious position, best illustrated perhaps when the French set out against Senegal, being shocking African qualifiers but not much more in footballing terms. Nothing seemed to go right for the French that day in Seoul, missing many chances to score and as it often happens when one team misses so many opportunities, punishment is swift and cruel. This match wasn`t an exception and Senegalese caught the French defence asleep on the counter attack with Papa Buba Diop scoring the only goal after thirty minutes. Efforts on behalf of the French team that included superstars such as Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira proved futile and the result of the first match at the first World Cup to be co-hosted in Asia by Japan and Korea stood at Senegal 1, France 0. France never recovered from this defeat and had a nightmare of a campaign being eliminated in the group stage without even scoring a single goal! Senegal on the other hand went strongly to make most of their single World Cup appearance ever and matched the best World Cup results by African teams narrowly missing on the semifinals.

Six. Holland 1, Egypt 1, 1990

Hopes of winning the World Cup are commonplace, and chances of winning the Cup backed by the likes of Marco Van Basten, Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard and Ronald Koeman having the European throne already in their back pocket must have seemed very realistic. The Dutch team was set to achieve in Italy in the summer of 1990 what had eluded them twice in the final matches in 1974 & 1978, even more so because their first obstacle wasn`t too scary by any way conceivable. It was Egypt, another African ``loose mine`` waiting to strike at unsuspecting favorites. Maybe not as easy as expected but the flamboyant Dutch still took the lead in the second half and had control over the game. That was so until 83rd minute when Koeman`s foul on Hossam Hassan just inside the 18-yard box led to a penalty from which Abdelghani equalized and stopped the Dutch dead in their tracks. A one-off shocker, Egypt failed to make further impact finishing bottom of the group and the Dutch fared only marginally better being eliminated in the second round.

Seven. West Germany 1, Algeria 2, 1982

German players were so sure they`ll beat Algeria in 1982 that they never even bothered to watch a tape of how Algeria, their opponent in an upcoming fixture – plays the game. Along with jokes and funny remarks for the upcoming fixture against the North African debutants, to say that Germans underestimated Algeria is an understatement. And it backfired badly. Algerians played their heart out and deservedly won the game in Gijon, to the amazement of the crowd and TV spectators around the globe.

As sensational as it was, this result was overshadowed by an apparent match fixing scandal when Germany and Austria went on to finish their match in the only way possible that would see them both through and eliminate Algeria. No evidence was presented and the Cup went along without Algeria except it prompted FIFA to change the rules for the last matches in the group to be played at the same time in the future, minimizing the chances for `friendly` outcomes, just in case.

Eight. Italy 0, North Korea 1, 1966

It was a shock in it`s own right that North Korea qualified for the 1966 World Cup in England and having been drawn in a group with the Soviet Union, Italy and Chile it was clear that it would take a miracle to beat all miracles if North Korea was to advance further into the knockout phase. Having lost comfortably against USSR and drawing with Chile, North Koreans were left with only one option in the final match and that was to beat the European football powerhouse, Italy. Renown for their defensive tactics, even a draw was enough for the Italians that day at Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough. Pak Do Ik`s stunner just before the half time sent North Korea in front and all subsequent efforts by the Italians to score were hampered by Korean defense and especially their goalkeeper, 19 year old Lee Chang Myung who rose from obscurity and saved the day, launching the North Korean players for a brief moment to world fame. Once in the quarter finals, North Koreans were on a brink of another sensation leading 3-0 against Portugal only to receive five goals later that put an end to the dream.  46 years later, a BBC documentary gathered all seven surviving team members for a reminiscence of what many consider to be one of the major upsets in international football.

Nine. Hungary 2, West Germany 3, 1954

It was the big final of the 1954 World Cup at Wankdorf stadium in Bern, Switzerland. Hungarians, one of the finest teams ever to be assembled surprised no one by progressing to the final match. Unbeaten in four years and 31 matches, having already destroyed Germany 8-3 in the group stage it must have seem natural that the Cup was already in their hands, especially after Puskas & Csibor scored two goals in the opening nine minutes of the final itself. Dubbed ``The miracle of Bern`` it was the quintessential German die hard attitude that made the difference and shortly afterwards the score line stood at 2-2, Morlock and Rahn with the goals. Helmut Rahn was to became a hero of post war resurging Germany by scoring his second goal of the match with only six minutes to go. Puskas scored a last minute goal for Hungary that was disallowed for an apparent offside and Germany ended winners, with millions of TV spectators watching the first televised World Cup. In later years, suspicions grew over alleged methamphetamine use by the German players which could explain the edge they had over their rivals. Sadly, Hungarian ``Golden team`` was to decline rapidly after the 1956 Hungarian revolution with most players emigrating and being adopted by other national football teams.

Ten. England 0, United States 1, 1950

At last, England ended the World Cup boycott and qualified for the 1950 World Cup in Brazil. As a country where football originated and having the best professional league in the world expectations run high. After an initial easy victory over Chile, English stars were to play United States, rank outsiders of the tournament in Belo Horizonte. Featuring legends such as Finney, Mortensen, Ramsey and Stanley Matthews they were up against a United States team, a strange mixture of semi-pro`s, expats and amateurs hoping to gain experience on the world stage. As the game opened, England pressed on to score and created several chances but executed none. And then in the 37th minute, it happened. Joe Gaetjens, Haitian emigrant and a part-time dishwasher while at Columbia University scored the goal that would decide the match and immortalize the greatest upset ever to occur at any World Cup. English threw everything they had at the Americans but it wasn`t to be. Indeed, in the closing moments of the game, U.S.A almost doubled their lead and moments later it was all over. England 0, United States 1. Such an outcome was so unthinkable that news reports around the globe assumed a mistake on the part of telegraph operators and printed 10-1 result in favor of England! United States finished the competition with a defeat by Chile, while the English, evidently still in shock, lost their final match against Spain and crashed ingloriously out of the Cup.

(Roger Mortis 011)