#STUPID GAME MOMENTS FULL#

During pre-match anthems, Barry would stand next to his international teammates, an award-winning collection of rippling muscles and footballing nous, looking even smaller than his slight 5’–11” frame. None of these achievements mattered on the international stage.

#STUPID GAME MOMENTS FULL#

I started cheering for Barry in 2010, drawn to an underdog on a team full of favorites. For reasons that remain unclear, he even took and scored a penalty in the 63rd minute of a 2012 league match against Westerlo.

He won the 20 Belgian Cups with Lokeren - his and the club’s first titles. The 35-year-old who grew up in Abidjan and once languished behind Petr Cech on the Rennes depth chart has had a successful career in Belgium, first with Beveren and, since 2007, with Lokeren. These international appearances, for all but the most devoted followers of Ivorian or Belgian football, formed the entirety of Boubacar Barry’s biography. Through no fault of his own, Boubacar Barry was irreplaceable. Time and time again, Barry rose from the scrapheap of international football like a whack-a-mole ready to be struck down yet again by fate’s hammer. It didn’t matter because Les Éléphants had Drogbas and Toures to keep lesser players off the pitch.Įxcept in goal. The likes of Aruna Dindane and Steve Gohuri couldn’t help but play as though they belonged in a different league than Yaya Toure and Didier Drogba.

They shared the burden of expectations without possessing the skills or physical gifts to turn that hype into reality. It was crueller still to Les Éléphants’ squad players. The past decade was cruel to the megastars of the Ivorian “golden generation,” who could never assert their dominance on the international stage. It was unfair and it was unfortunate, and, as always, Boubacar Barry was right there as everything fell apart. Ivory Coast was eliminated from the World Cup. Samaras’ penalty slid past his outstretched hand.

Greek forward Georgios Samaras enthusiastically fell over Giovanni Sio’s leg. Then, as so often happened with Ivory Coast’s “golden generation,” everything went wrong. Les Éléphants were holding on to a 1–1 draw in the second minute of injury time. That afternoon, Ivory Coast only needed one point from their final group match against Greece to advance into the last 16 of the World Cup. On June 24th I decided that soccer is a stupid game, and me and Boubacar - we were over. I went through my inbox and deleted every half-written pitch to an editor in which I’d begged for a thousand words and maybe a couple bucks to extoll Barry’s underappreciated qualities. I tossed the outline I had written for an article about “ one of international football’s most loveable, tragic figures” in the trash. I'd love to include Microsoft's Xbox One unveiling here, but it technically doesn't count as the seventh generation, so sadly it'll have to wait for another article in another 7 or 8 years time.I gave up hope of ever writing an ode to Boubacar Barry on June 24, 2014. There were fads, there were embarrassments on a public scale (and I'm sad to say that Sony bore the brunt of them), and even we as gamers sometimes contributed to the whole crazy circus of absurdity. For all of the good the generation did, namely in helping to make gaming socially acceptable, it is also tarnished by some head-scratchingly stupid decisions, on the part of both the console's makers and the game designers themselves, which did nothing but annoy players and make them wonder if this new fangled tech was really worth it at all. The seventh generation of gaming was certainly one for the books, reinventing gaming as we knew it arguably more than any generation before it, largely because of the mass impact of the Internet upon gaming, after the relatively nervous approaches to online integration of the sixth generation (specifically the PS2).

Stupid game moments