Soccer at the Edge of the World

Helga Zeeb is wearing a red-and-white T-shirt, a red-and-white hat and a red-and-white scarf as she hurries down the cliff. Her earrings are embossed with a red-and-white crest. She rushes through the marquee that serves as the referees’ changing area and the snack bar and toward one of the dugouts. She immediately bursts into tears.

Zeeb describes herself, with a smile, as a “G-44 hooligan.” She has traveled with the team from Qeqertarsuaq for the week, and has taken up a place on the rocky cliff that serves as the grandstand for every game. Her incessant chanting — “G-44, G-44” — in both Danish and English has proved so catching that locals have started to join in.

Once on the sideline, Zeeb seeks out players from the scrum of bodies on the ground and offers them warm, congratulatory hugs. A victory, in the final game on Friday, has confirmed that G-44 will be in the final on Sunday.

It is only later, sitting on the porch of her sister’s house here while the team eats reindeer steak inside, that she recovers her composure. Zeeb’s devotion to G-44 is absolute: Her father was one of the club’s founders, and three of her nephews play for the team.

All that is left to decide, now, is who will play G-44 in the final on Sunday. There is only one game remaining: Saturday’s fog-delayed fixture between B-67, Greenland’s Real Madrid, and N-48, the team it defeated in last year’s final. It is a game that, to some of the teams involved, should have been declared a forfeit. Now everything rests on its outcome.

Source: The New York Times

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Keywords:

Association football • At the Edge of the World (1927 film) • T-shirt • White hat (computer security) • Hooliganism • Disko Island • Denmark • Reindeer • Greenland • Real Madrid C.F. •