2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa - Group A - Uruguay v France - Goalie Nestor Fernando Muslera of Uruguay, Photo: picture alliance / empics

Yellow tricots are in – at least with the goalkeepers of France (Hugo Lloris), Uruguay (Fernando Muslera) and the South African team. Will this be a World Cup of yellow goalkeepers? Or is this just the beginning of a kind of fashionable extroversion?

For those goalies, who don’t wear yellow, one wonders, if they would’ve liked to, as in the match of England versus the US. In that match, only the referees wore the color yellow, and so it was forbidden for the players. But maybe the uniform as a test in extroversion is still developing itself in a way. How would it be with combinations of light purple and kitschy green or a no less elegant mix of turquoise and cherry red? That could be interesting.

Who serious expected something else? A Greek team with an average age well beyond 30, trained by the Bundesliga-Dino Otto Rehakles, who has seen everything, who ascended Europe’s throne with Greece in 2004, and is thus immortalized by the Greeks, but who once was disgraced by a 0:12 match with Borussia Dortmund against Borussia Mönchengladbach – the largest Bundesliga (German football league) defeat of all time. And there he sat, in the match against the nimble, galloping players from South Korea, running his hands through his thick hair. Early on the South Koreans were in the lead, later finishing with an easy 2-0 win against the Greeks. But with his head held high, Otto, as a legend of this quality, will always still have a job, and that will be as the national coach of Azerbaijan.

The US defenders appeared frozen, as England took the early lead. After just a few minutes of play everything pointed to what would be an easy win, and when England was withdrawn to their own half they had a chance to measure the harmlessness of the Americans – that is until the error by England’s goalie Robert Green. The Americans took the goalie’s error to heart and shifted to trying to prevent everything, so was the US team’s confidence after their goal against a top European team like England. By this point, England made itself too comfortable in its own half, and no longer able to regain the lead.

So back we go to the color yellow. And to the Uruguayan goalkeeper or better said his suppliers who thought of something very special. After all yellow is not just yellow. How would it be, wondered the man behind the scenes, with neon yellow. Considered done. Was it this yellow-clad uniform that helped the goalie between the South American posts master his job? Or was it that the aging French team’s agility was not what it once was?

This based on a blogpost written in German by Marius Hulpe and translated by Angela Boskovitch.