The weather is sunny, but ominous storm clouds occasionally roll by. On this hallowed ground, where the blood of French men and women flowed during 18th century revolutionary purges, rowdy Scottish soccer fans are staging a massive outdoor party. It is a sea of blue and white. Here and there some Brazilian yellow can be seen.

A group of 10 fans has just arrived and laid out an enormous Scottish flag for use as a picnic blanket. On the cross where the flag’s white lines intersect, they plunk down four cases of Foster’s Lager “oil cans” (the 20-ounce monsters). It’s a picnic of sorts, but there’s only one thing on the menu: beer.

Everywhere are overweight, red-faced men in kilts, many with their faces painted blue and white. One volunteers to demonstrate to a Brazilian television crew just how little Scots wear under those wool coverings. As he bends over, the cameraman comes in for what must be a frightening close-up of a bare male ass. One can only wonder what the folks back home in Rio are thinking.

Another kilted fan scales one of the bronzed green statues that line L’Hotel. Straddling its shoulders, he grasps a beer with one hand and waves a large Scottish flag with the other. From 15 feet above the square he yells, “Fuck England!” The masses below cheer their support. He spies five French gendarmes approaching and lets out an equally hearty “Vive la France!” to laughs and cheers.

The World Cup is here and the mood is nothing short of ecstatic. It’s loud. It’s raucous. It’s almost out of control. But it’s also a hell of a lot of fun. And the game hasn’t even started.

Into the second half, the Scottish team appears to be holding its own against a far superior Brazilian side. Storm clouds are gathering over Paris and the putrid smell of beer dried into cement is growing stronger by the minute.

Suddenly, the chants and songs cease as all eyes focus on the screen in a moment of wonder. There is Brazilian striker Ronaldo, 20 feet tall on the Jumbotron, the ball at his feet, smoothly dancing his way around one, then two, then three, then four Scottish defenders in a super slo-mo replay. Scotland’s big sweeper Colin Hendry (whose long blond locks make him look like he should have been an extra in “Braveheart”) has been spun around so many times that he looks like a dog trying to catch his own tail. He’s running with his back to Ronaldo, looking over his shoulder, trying to figure out which way to turn.

Ronaldo makes it look so easy. As he coolly dodges and weaves past the opposition, he appears remarkably confident and composed. The clip seems to last 10 minutes and leaves even the Scots speechless, if only for a moment.

A few minutes later, the Scottish team is cursed with a bit of terrible luck. After a Brazilian shot on goal, the ball bounces mistakenly off defender Jimmy Floyd’s shoulder toward his own net. Hendry desperately tries to stop it from rolling in, but he can’t get there in time. Cries of despair rise into the storm-laden Paris air. Some fans curse; others weep. Scotland’s moment in the sun has passed. They are now down, 2-1.

Satisfied simply to hold their lead, the Brazilians play keep-away and let the clock run out. When the final whistle blows, the kilted crowd around me is disappointed but also proud. “We gave ‘em a good run for their money!” one of the Foster’s group proclaims.

As if on cue, the sky lets loose with a tremendous downpour, and any further festivities are washed out. Hundreds of us swoop into the nearest Metro stop. The first game of France ’98 is history.

ON BOARD THE TGV, June 12: I’m whizzing through France at 150 mph bound for Marseille for the evening match between France and South Africa. This will be South Africa’s first-ever World Cup game, having been banned from the tournament for the last 28 years due to apartheid. Soccer has long been the sport of choice for the country’s black population, but under apartheid, they were not permitted to play with whites. Instead, “colored” leagues, much like U.S. baseball’s Negro Leagues of yesteryear, were formed. These days the team known as Bafana Bafana, or “the boys,” consists primarily of black players. I’m hoping to find a South African fan with whom I can chat about race relations, the politics of football in that country, etc.

As the French countryside blurs by, I head back to the cafe car for a beer and meet Gary, a transplanted South African who lives in London. He’s already been traveling for five hours. He caught the train at Waterloo and is headed straight for Marseille.

Gary’s got sad eyes and a somewhat droopy face. He seems to be a nice, thoughtful fellow. He even went to college in the United States on a soccer scholarship at North Texas State (“We were No. 11 nationwide,” he offers). We make plans to share a cab together from the station to the game when we arrive in Marseille. Now that I’ve found an interesting pal for my story, I return to my seat for some shut-eye.

When we arrive in Marseille two hours later, Gary stumbles out of the train, arms draped across two Englishmen. He swigs from an open can of beer in one hand, while grasping a closed one in the other. As we head toward the taxi stand, he and his English mates start loudly singing Tottenham Hotspur fight songs. He’s drunk off his ass and he’s expecting me to get him to the game. So much for uncovering the profound meaning of South Africa’s first appearance in the World Cup.

After Gary takes some cash out of a bank machine and nearly loses his wallet, we hop in a cab. Immediately our driver tries to sell us tickets to the match. He’s asking only about 10 pounds over face value and Gary’s amazed.

As the streets of Marseille go flying by, Gary yells out the window at every female within earshot. He and the driver strike up a conversation in Franglais about the women of Marseille. The driver bridges the communication gap by sticking his right index finger through the circle his thumb and index finger on his left hand have formed. Gary lets out a hearty laugh.

I ditch my South African comrade once we arrive at the grounds and soon find my seat inside Le Stade Velodrome. Behind me sits a row of 10 college-age males, all with red, white and blue French flags painted on their faces. They’ve got the air of American frat boys, but they’re thinner and much better looking. One or two could double as Tommy Hilfiger models.

These are very, very loud French fans, first bellowing out the French national anthem, then leading the chants: “Allez, allez, allez!” or “Allez les bleus, allez les bleus!” There are some variations on these, but it seems that every French cheer involves the word allez (“go”) and les bleus (the national team’s nickname because of the blue color of its uniforms).

The game starts and a chilling wind whips across the field. Though it’s the middle of June, it must be no more than 50 degrees out. The boys behind me scream, “Zizou, Zizou!” each time France’s central midfielder, Zinedine Zidane, touches the ball. In addition to being Marseille’s hometown hero, Zidane is far and away France’s most important player. He is their playmaker, their maestro.

To watch Zidane play live is sheer revelation. On a field far larger than the U.S. football gridiron, he is seemingly everywhere at once, controlling the game for his team. Slightly stoop-shouldered, with a large and growing bald spot, he seems an unlikely candidate to dominate any sport. But Zidane is blessed with tremendous balance and strength, and he possesses the most important attribute of any great playmaker — imagination. He creates scoring opportunities where none seem to exist. On the ball, he moves like a panther, head lowered, jersey often askew, bouncing and spinning off defenders. Suddenly, at just the right moment, he makes that improbable pass to spring a teammate into the clear, just behind the opponent’s defense. It’s the kind of pass that even good soccer players cannot imagine, let alone execute. He is a whirling dervish of soccer frenzy, a genius to behold.

All French roads to goal go through Zizou. He takes all the team’s corner kicks and most penalty kicks. More important, he runs the offense and organizes the defense. His importance to “les bleus” cannot be overestimated. If France is at long last to enter the World Cup holy land (the team has never done better than the semifinals), it will be Zidane who leads them there.

It is ironic that this brilliant athlete also happens to be the son of Algerian parents. Though Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan and Senegalese immigrants play an increasingly important role in France, many French do not welcome them, and signs of racism are not difficult to uncover. The fans behind me are a good example: I return to my seat several minutes after the second half has begun, forcing the two Moroccan immigrant French teens in the seats next to me to stand so I can pass. The three of us temporarily block the view of the French frat boys. These same fans who earlier had called Zidane’s nickname with such admiration now holler at the three of us: “Asseyez-vous!” and, because they know I am American, “Sit down!” Then one of them yells some gibberish in mimicked Arabic. It’s an insult clearly aimed at the two Moroccan-French boys, and his friends laugh, albeit a bit sheepishly.

The game ends 3-0 for France. I run out of the stadium, board the Metro and head back to the train station, catching the 1 a.m. TGV to Paris. By 7 a.m I am fast asleep in the comfort of a friend’s apartment on Boulevard Port Royal.

PARIS, June 13: Parisians seem generally unfazed by World Cup hoopla. During several lolls through the cinquième arrondisement I’ve found quiet acknowledgment of the event but not much downright enthusiasm.

I’ve just wandered into the Cafe du Port Royal to watch Spain take on Nigeria. The restaurant has strung the flags of the 32 Cup participants in the entryway (these seem to be standard issue for every eating and drinking establishment in the city). But only a small TV atop the dessert cooler broadcasts the game. A teenager on roller skates smokes and bangs away on “The Addams Family” pinball machine in the corner. A haggard old woman sits with her back to the television, chain-smoking and eating quiche. The bartender is engrossed in his dishwashing. Other patrons seem content to stare out the window at yet another cold, damp day.

Suddenly Raul, Spain’s Wunderkind striker, blasts a scorching shot past Nigeria’s goalkeeper. As the announcers crow about a spectacular goal, no one in the cafe looks up. Welcome to World Cup fever, Paris-style. At moments like this it seems hard to believe that thousands of Bangladeshis have been rioting for three days because power outages have prevented them from watching Cup matches.

But that is not to say that Paris has not found its own unique way of exploiting Cup excitement. A recent ad in the city’s weekly entertainment circular Pariscope translates roughly as follows:

“Come see the Moulin Rouge Stadium featuring a 70-square-meter screen.

“The Moulin Rouge invites you to experience the 16 matches of the final phase of the World Cup in a unique place, the uncontested symbol of France. Tingle as if you were there for the sporting event of the year. And admire the 60 Doriss Girls and their celebrated French can-can as they make the third half of the game unforgettable.

“It promises to be a great moment for Football and an excellent evening.

“Cover Price for Le Match Finale: 2,000 francs”

If I stumble across $330, my next report will be ringside from the Moulin Rouge!

What was the most surrealistic moment of your life?

It’s nonstop surrealism. But I remember something of a reverse
surrealistic experience. In the ’60s, I had reached a point where I felt
television had taken over my mind. I’d walk down the beach in
California, the sun was setting, the seagulls flying overhead, a pretty
girl at my side, and I didn’t know if I was enjoying the experience
because it was really beautiful or because I had been brainwashed into
doing it because of television commercials. I no longer knew what were
my real, unique experiences as opposed to ones that I had been programmed
for. It’s one of the reasons I left America for England.

The great thing about coming to Europe is that there is such a sense of continuity
here. History surrounds you. You are part of a long continuum, which
you are constantly reminded of. Living in California, history begins
the morning you wake up each day. The truly surreal thing about
living in America is that history has been de-invented. There’s no
grounding for anything.

If you were America’s first dictator, would you eliminate television?

I would limit it. I would have less of it, and less channels. I would
decree that half the programs would have to be made with no image, only
the sound. I grew up with radio, and my imagination muscles developed with radio.
I had to make the sets; I had to put faces on the people; I had to design the costumes. I think that my whole visual sense came from radio.

If, as part of your power, you could bestow a behavior or personality trait on
the average American, what would it be?

A sense of irony. What predates the ability to understand irony is a
certain amount of wisdom, knowledge, awareness and intelligence.

You have said that Americans don’t understand symbolism. Why?

Everything is so literal. That’s why the Catholics haven’t done too well
in America — the Protestants marched in and got rid of symbolism. But
when you do that, you cut out abstract thinking. Symbols are about
abstract thinking. Americans aren’t totally devoid of it because they
love cartoons, which are symbolic in a sense.

What do you think of “Seinfeld”?

I don’t watch television much, but I’ve seen a few episodes of “Seinfeld”
and think it’s very funny. I also saw him when I had a tooth problem
in America and had to visit the dentist. There Seinfeld was on all the
walls, with those huge teeth of his, encouraging me to floss. The basis
of all the films I’ve done is a reaction against perfect American
teeth. I grew up with film stars with perfect teeth, and when I got to
England I started making medieval movies where all the actors have
rotted teeth.

Can you explain the British predilection with fart jokes?

When I came to England, I thought [the people were] the height of
civility and politeness. But they are the least polite. They are the
most tribal group of people on the planet. They hate one another and
they’re stuck on this f—ing little island. That’s why they
went out and created an empire. Anyone with any energy had to get out
of this place and kill somebody else. So they’ve invented this veneer
of civilization, but it’s only to keep them from killing each other.
The farts and bodily functions are really what the English are all
about, and the jokes are a way of dissipating it.

If you were reincarnated as a Monty Python character, which would it
be?

I’d be the big animated foot. Why not? It’s the all-powerful entity
that stomps on everything.

During your epic battle with Universal Studios CEO Sid
Sheinberg over the final cut of “Brazil,” you took out a full page ad in
Variety, sardonically asking him when he planned to release your film.
In the end, he was shamed into complying. What did you learn from the
encounter?

If there’s going to be a mistake, I want it to be of my making, not
someone else’s. I have control over my films only because I’m in a
position to have control, but most directors don’t. So many people in
Hollywood see an opportunity and grab it because they are interested in
“careers,” making money and paying the mortgage — not about doing artwork.
If your name is going to go on something, then you’ve got to take
responsibility for it. That’s why I fight for control. If my name is
not going to be on it, screw it.

What’s the best part about having money?

When I left the late shift at the Chevrolet assembly plant in Van Nuys,
Calif., I made a pact with myself that there were two things I
would do: One was that I would have control over whatever I did; the
second was that I would never work just for money. I kept my living
standards so low that I didn’t need it. In Hollywood they get you to
live beyond your means, so people have to keep taking jobs that they are
offered.

At one point in your life, you studied to be a Presbyterian missionary.
Where would you be today if you had taken that path? Any regrets?

No regrets, but I may have gone to darkest Africa. The idea of being a
missionary was a chance to see the world and have an excuse to do so.
I basically got fed up with the church because they couldn’t take a
joke. I was a real little zealot, but was constantly making jokes about
God. I used to say: “What kind of God is this that you believe in that can’t take my little
jokes?” The people in the church were appalled by this. So I walked away.

Monty Python reunited for one night at the Aspen Comedy Festival a few months ago. Do you envision getting back together on a more
permanent basis?

We got together about a year ago to discuss making another film. We’re
still this family of brothers, and yet the idea of working together would
be very difficult, because we’ve all developed different work habits.
To be honest, the idea fills me with fear and trepidation. I’m not sure
what my role is in it. I don’t want to be an animator anymore, and I
don’t want to direct Python. I don’t know what that leaves me doing.

Your colleague Terry Jones compared comedy to poetry.

Isn’t he a pretentious Welsh git! Both are about surprise and helping
people look at the world from a different perspective, so … I have to
agree with the pretentious Welsh git.

The proliferation of chemical and biological weapons has been in the news of
late — are we heading for a “12 Monkeys”-like existence?

I don’t know if we are or not, but we seem to have the need to feel we
are. It seems that we have this doomsday scenario hanging over us.
Maybe we’ve gotten used to it with the bomb. Maybe we miss the bomb.
There’s another side to it: it’s the sense that maybe we’ve gone too far
and screwed nature too badly. Look at the Ebola virus: It had been
sitting there quietly in the jungle, bothering no body but a few
monkeys, and as man ravaged the jungles, this virus leapt out and
suddenly found a new source of food and was ready to ravage us.

If you got ahold of a time machine, where would you want to go?

I always wanted to time travel, but as I’ve gotten older, all I want to
do is sit in this room right now. I’m happy to say that we’re living in
an interesting time. I don’t know if it gets better than this.

Imagine for a moment you had to give up one of your senses — which would it be?

Taste. I’ve always had bad taste.

It isn’t realistic to suggest that soccer will soon, if ever, be as big in the American spectator-sports pantheon as baseball, basketball or football. (Supplanting hockey, another imported niche sport that may be wearing out its welcome, is another matter.) But “America’s soccer nation,” to borrow a phrase from George Vecsey of the New York Times, has grown extraordinarily broad and diverse, stretching from immigrant-rich urban hotbeds like East Los Angeles and Newark, N.J., to middle-class strongholds around Portland, Ore., and Dallas-Fort Worth. As the planet’s attention turns to France this week for the opening of the 1998 World Cup — where the hot topics are striking airline workers, Algerian terrorists, English hooligans and a gap-toothed kid named Ronaldo from the slums outside Rio — it’s worth recognizing how far American soccer has come.

Major League Soccer, the 12-team U.S. pro league that arose in the wake of World Cup ’94, is a weird, low-rent affair in many ways. It has made several lamentable rule changes in an effort to make the game more comprehensible to non-fans, and its team names (the Dallas Burn? the San Jose Clash?) seem lifted from some marketing student’s MBA thesis. But MLS continues to draw respectable crowds in near-total media obscurity (the league-wide attendance average is about 14,000 per game). More importantly, its level of play has improved dramatically. If you’re one of the soccer snobs who spurned the league for its Madison Avenue cheese factor, or who gave up during its often-laughable first season, I strongly advise you not to miss this year’s edition of the Los Angeles Galaxy — a slashing, high-scoring team of speed burners who combine South American flair with North American grit. Professional competition at this improved level has in turn toughened and sharpened the U.S. national team, previously an unstable mix of foreign-based players and near-amateurs.

The American team that will play Germany in Paris on Monday is by far the best ever to represent this country, a tirelessly athletic side that plays sound positional and tactical soccer and doesn’t surrender goals easily. Its accomplishments over the last year have been impressive: The Americans held Mexico to a goalless draw in a crucial qualifying match before an enormous, enraged crowd at the high altitude of Mexico City; rode red-hot goalkeeper Kasey Keller to an astonishing 1-0 win over world champion Brazil; and thoroughly dominated Austria in a 3-0 victory in Vienna. Unfortunately for them, expectations were unfairly raised by the far less talented and interesting ’94 squad, which snuck into the round of 16 on a fluke, after a Colombian defender put the ball into his own net. (He was later murdered, perhaps by drug lords, in apparent retribution for his mistake.) In addition, this year’s team must play two of the most talented sides in Europe, Germany and Yugoslavia (the name still officially used by Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian government), and two of its games may be drowned in political hype: When the U.S. plays Iran on June 21, it will mark the first significant athletic competition between the two since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and the Yugoslavia game on June 25 will undoubtedly be tinged by tensions over the Serbs’ latest round of atrocities in the Kosovo region. In short, for all the team’s improvement, it will take a bigger miracle than ’94′s to get them out of the first round. Soccer, like life, is full of injustice.

To return to our agonized Buddhist for a moment, any honest soccer fan will admit that the finale of USA ’94 was a prodigious anticlimax. After 120 minutes of scoreless, tentative play in the championship (a 90-minute game plus a half-hour of overtime), the phlegmatic Italian star Roberto Baggio — yes, a Zen practitioner — missed the last penalty kick in the tie-breaking shootout, giving the trophy to Brazil. A potentially classic matchup between the two most skillful soccer teams in the world had fizzled out in a grotesque blunder.

But perhaps even that was instructive. More than most sports, this one traffics in heartbreak and disappointment, and, all things considered, world soccer came back from its American vacation stronger and healthier than it had been in years. Friendly, enthusiastic crowds and modern facilities made the deadly stadium collapses and violent tribal outbreaks of European soccer’s recent past fade into memory, and the style of play (aside from the championship game) was mostly freewheeling and attractive, free of the choppy, defensive slog often encountered at the sport’s top levels. Indeed, the soccer establishment gathers in France secure in the knowledge that its game has, if anything, grown dramatically in exposure and popularity in the intervening four years.

Europe and Latin America have produced an exciting new generation of star players, foremost among them Ronaldo, the 21-year-old Brazilian who has almost certainly replaced Michael Jordan as the planet’s most famous athlete. The top professional leagues — the English Premier League, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A and the Spanish Primera Liga — have begun to see themselves as leaders of a global industry, recruiting players from all continents and broadcasting their games by satellite around the world. A European super-league, involving such elite teams as Arsenal (London), Manchester United, A.C. Milan, Juventus (Turin), Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, is expected to emerge within a few years. And soccer fever is spreading rapidly through the densely populated nations of East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa — the 2002 World Cup will be shared by Japan and South Korea, with the 2006 tournament probably destined for South Africa.

It’s impossible to exaggerate the effect the Cup will have on daily life in most of the 32 countries represented at France ’98. Ordinary business will slow to a crawl for most of the next four weeks, and stop altogether whenever the national team is actually playing. (As many as 2 billion people, or one-third of the world’s population, are expected to watch the World Cup final on July 12. The National Basketball Association finals, perhaps Jordan’s final showcase, should top out at around 600 million viewers.) As for the U.S., well, as I say, we’re a lot more soccer-friendly than we used to be. The Disney-owned ABC/ESPN combo will broadcast every minute of every World Cup match live, a first for American TV. (Even during USA ’94, some games were only available on tape-delay.) Ratings will be somewhere north of the National Hockey League, but nowhere near “Seinfeld”/Super Bowl levels. In practice, if you walk into a sports bar in a major city, the Cup will probably be on — unless there’s a baseball game opposite it on another channel.

My private theory is that there is in fact a cryptic, matter/antimatter relationship between baseball and soccer — that the space soccer occupies in the souls of (male) Europeans and South Americans is filled, in norteamericanos, by baseball. This theory, I believe, can even account for the anomalous cases of Japan and Mexico, where both sports are widely popular: In each of those countries, American influence has ground like a tectonic plate against underlying and in some ways opposing traditions, producing a tense, peculiar cultural mélange.

Superficially, no two sports could be more different. Soccer at least bears certain formal similarities to football (11 players a side, with each team defending a goal on a rectangular field) and basketball (which also combines positional strategy with fluid, improvisational play). But football and basketball are modern inventions, whereas baseball and soccer developed deep in the rural, pre-industrial past before being codified in the mid-19th century. An early version of baseball was played in both England and colonial America; the game is mentioned, of all places, in Jane Austen’s 1796 novel “Northanger Abbey.” Along with cricket, its posh English cousin, baseball presumably descends from stick-and-ball games played by medieval shepherds (the legend that Abner Doubleday invented it in 1839 in Cooperstown, N.Y., has been convincingly rejected). Soccer is older still; it can be directly traced to a game played by the Roman legions in Gaul, and similar games were played much earlier by the Assyrians, Egyptians and ancient Chinese. Amusingly, a historical article published by the National Soccer Hall of Fame explains that by the 12th century in England, “the game had become a violent mob sport with no rules and any sort of behavior condoned” — not much has changed on the Sceptered Isle, evidently, in 800 years.

As befits such bucolic ancientness, both sports are deeply concerned with history and tradition. Both reward the obsessive, the purist, the acolyte far more than the casual observer. Both have childishly simple objectives — touch all four bases; put this ball in that net without using your hands — yet require almost impossible feats of athleticism and coordination, and seem to their devotees to be possessed of almost mystical depth. Both create a highly elastic sense of time, although in entirely different ways. Baseball, of course, is the only major team sport (besides cricket) that has no clock, and a single inning may take anywhere from two minutes to an hour or more. Soccer, although divided into 45-minute halves, is played in a nearly continuous flow of patterns that form, break down and reassemble, mesmerizing its fans into a kind of high-anxiety fugue state; add to this the fact that official time is kept only by the referee (except in the new and improved MLS), so players and fans never know exactly how much time remains.

Let’s be frank — another connection between these sports is that both bore nonbelievers out of their skulls. There’s no mystery to this, and it’s not solely a matter of incomprehension. All sports torture their fans in various ways, and both baseball and soccer do so with extended periods of stultifying tedium. “Fever Pitch,” English novelist Nick Hornby’s marvelously funny memoir about his lifelong obsession with the London team Arsenal, is full of self-recriminating accounts of all the atrocious matches he’s sat through. Hornby refers to soccer as a form of “entertainment as pain,” and writes that “the natural state of the [soccer] fan is bitter disappointment.” But boredom and irritation are part of a fan’s ritual allegiance to the sport; as though bargaining with the Old Testament God, we believe we must suffer through the bad games to deserve the brilliant ones.

This isn’t the place to discuss the kind of 8-2 baseball game that suddenly stops dead around the sixth inning and devolves into the kind of timeless nothingness otherwise achieved only in Wagner’s “Parsifal.” But I can assure you that among the 48 first-round matches of this year’s World Cup, there will be at least one or two deadly dull contests in which neither team will make any serious effort to score goals. (There is indeed such a thing as an exciting 0-0 draw in soccer, but we’ll leave that for the advanced lesson.) There will be several more in which one team will score a lucky goal early, then pack eight or nine men in front of its own goal, punt the ball downfield without chasing it and ruthlessly chop down any opposing player who dares to foray forward. Fans of the teams involved will watch such games on tenterhooks, for they know that, as unlikely as it may seem, a sudden defensive miscue or a lightning strike from midfield could destabilize the whole mind-numbing equation. The souls who really deserve your pity are those who watch such games because they have no choice — those who, for example, will get up early Friday morning to watch Paraguay play Bulgaria, and who will do so without hope, without expectation, without passion, but simply because they must. (Don’t call me that morning — I’ll be, um, working.) There will also, I promise, be a game or two (or more, if we’re really lucky) in France ’98 that will become soccer lore. Games like the 1958 final in which a teenager named Pelé scored twice against Sweden and his astonishing Brazil team taught the world what il jogo bonito meant; or the 1986 quarterfinal in which Argentina’s mercurial superstar Diego Maradona called on “la mano de Dios” to defeat England and avenge his nation’s humiliation in the Falklands; or the cruel, cruel semifinal of 1982, when les bleus, the long-suffering French team, scored twice in overtime against arch rival West Germany, only to see the relentless Teutons storm back, hammer two home in the final minutes to tie, then win the penalty-kick shootout. And the thing is, there’s no way to be sure, absolutely sure, that Friday’s Paraguay-Bulgaria clash won’t be one of those.

In brilliant and dreadful games alike, the best way to decode the apparently amorphous flow of soccer is to make sense of the alignment of players on the field. With 22 players running around trying to deceive each other, there’s a certain degree of chaos theory involved in even the best-played games — but following the action is a lot easier if you can tell the accidental patterns from the intentional ones. The most common alignment in soccer is a defensive-minded setup called the 4-4-2, meaning that there are four defenders positioned in front of the goalkeeper, four midfielders seeking to control play in the center and two forwards hanging around the opponent’s goal hoping to score. If the team is leading, the four midfielders will drift backward, creating an eight-man defense; if the team needs a goal, they’ll move forward to help form a six-man attack. There are many variations on this theme; the one most relevant to American fans at the moment is the unorthodox 3-6-1 formation that U.S. coach Steve Sampson has developed for the World Cup, in an effort to cover up the Americans’ weaknesses and capitalize on their athletic ability and team speed.

One of the keys to this alignment is the tremendous confidence Sampson has in goalkeeper Keller, a Washington state native who has excelled for several seasons in the English Premier League. Whatever hope the Americans have for advancing in the tournament rests with the unflappable Keller, who made numerous impossible saves against Brazil in the stunning 1-0 U.S. win over the champs in February. That game alone made clear how much stronger the U.S. team has become. Playing against a 10-man Brazil team in the ’94 Cup, the Americans never came close to scoring; the only element of suspense was how long it would take the Brazilians to penetrate the U.S. defense. Today, with a little luck, the U.S. has a fighting chance against any side in the world.

Directly in front of Keller is 37-year-old Thomas Dooley, the German-born son of an American serviceman and veteran of nine seasons in the Bundesliga. As the sweeper, or central defender, and team captain, Dooley is supposed to take on any attacking players who break free near the goal, keep a cool head and distribute the ball out of the back. The other defenders, “marking backs” with specific assignments to guard, or “mark,” opposing forwards, will almost certainly be Eddie Pope and David Regis. Pope, a rising star in MLS with two-time champions D.C. United, is one of a modest but growing contingent of African-Americans in soccer. Regis is also black, but his story is completely different — a native of Martinique who stars for the Karlsruhe team in Germany, he became a U.S. citizen (through marriage) less than a month ago. These are two of the most talented players on the team, and will often come forward to join the attack; Pope is known for driving headers on goal, while Regis has a dangerous long-range shot.

Of Sampson’s six midfielders, two are really “wingers,” speedy players who dash up and down the flanks of the field from goal to goal, from defense to offense, as the action dictates. These roles will probably be filled by Cobi Jones, the lightning-quick Detroiter who has scored seemingly at will this year for the Los Angeles Galaxy, and Californian Frankie Hejduk of the Tampa Bay Mutiny, at 23 the youngest player on the team. The two most fixed slots on the field belong to the least experienced players, defensive midfielders Chad Deering and Brian Maisonneuve. Deering, a Texan who plays in Germany, and Maisonneuve, who plays for the Columbus Crew in MLS, will “stay home,” in coaching parlance — they should rarely be seen in the offensive zone (unless the team is behind in the late going), and must pick up defensive coverage if Pope or Regis go forward.

The most important offensive player on the American team is midfielder Claudio Reyna, a New Jersey native who plays with Deering at Wolfsburg in Germany. An agile ball-handler with speed and tremendous vision of the field, he plays a role similar to that of a basketball point guard — penetrating the defensive alignment and creating scoring chances for his teammates or himself. Reyna’s partner at offensive midfielder will probably be Ernie Stewart, the team’s best blend of skill and experience. Another military brat, Stewart was born and raised in the Netherlands, where he plays professionally for NAC Breda. That leaves the lone forward, or “striker,” who hangs around near the opponent’s goal, using up defenders’ energies and hoping a loose ball bounces his way. Sampson almost seems to use this position as a decoy — to some extent, this entire alignment is an effort to adjust for the team’s dearth of star strikers. Eric Wynalda, the career American scoring leader, is recovering from a knee injury and looks slow and rusty. Roy Wegerle, a 34-year-old South African immigrant who once played in England, is a hard-working journeyman who’s no longer a lethal scorer. Nonetheless, Wegerle may start, since Sampson seems to lack confidence in Brian McBride, who stars alongside Maisonneuve in Columbus but has had little success in international play.

The theory behind the 3-6-1 is that eight of the 10 field players will join the attack at some point — even Dooley is likely to come forward once or twice — and that all of them are capable of scoring. These flexible waves of Yanks pouring forward will eventually find cracks, Sampson hopes, even in the technically superb German defense. Meanwhile, all those young, agile bodies clogging up the midfield will frustrate the ponderous, tradition-bound attackers of Germany and Yugoslavia, dispossessing them of the ball and launching devastating counterattacks. You can’t fault Sampson for trying something new and ambitious; the U.S. team wasn’t going to beat Germany with slow-footed defenders Marcelo Balboa and Alexi Lalas — two World Cup vets now riding the bench — doggedly manning the back line. In fact, after Hejduk, McBride and Reyna scored in the impressive 3-0 victory over Austria in April, Sampson had his team and the American media momentarily convinced that he had the German behemoth measured for the kill.

Maybe he does: Sampson’s reign as the first American-born coach of the U.S. team has been characterized by uncanny good fortune when it’s most needed. But the fragility of his experimental alignment was exposed when Reyna missed a few games with minor injuries and the U.S. attack fired blanks against Macedonia and Scotland, while mistimed forward waves allowed dangerous scoring chances to opponents. By far the likeliest scenario is that the American team, which for all its speed and conditioning lacks basic ball-handling skills, will be dismantled by the powerhouse Germans and outgunned by the explosive Serbs. Sampson will face public displeasure and lose his job, a big-name foreign coach will be hired at great expense to build the 2002 team and American soccer will continue its slow, incremental build. But Sampson’s gamble is a worthy one. A cheap goal and a few outrageous saves from Kasey Keller on Monday evening in Paris, and the team with the funny formation — the implausible offspring, if you like, of soccer’s 1994 blind date with America — will make front-page headlines around the world.