Die-Hard Dedication

If you thought soccer violence stopped with British hooligans and Zinedine Zidane, think again. Here at Harvard it’s not the pros who follow in this tradition but the amateurs: while the Varsity team might stay collected on the field, IM soccer matches versus graduate students in Dudley House have become reputedly heated events.

In a Quincy vs. Dudley match on Nov. 7, players kicked at each other, while the ball went largely unloved. Off the field, a Quincy tutor chastised Dudley players, one of whom responded with several obscenities, and asked the tutor if he “wanted to fight.” The tutor responded with a written complaint.

“Yeah, [the word ‘fuck’] is not polite,” Dudley soccer captain Eduardo A. Silva admitted, “but if you complain every time you use the ‘f-word’ in a soccer game...”

Dudley IM reps Michael A. Kagan and Jonathan A. Fan brushed off the “incident,” saying only that Dudley’s soccer team “may in fact be a little more animated.”

Both sides recognize that the level of intensity is different when undergraduate Houses play Dudley than when they play each other.

Dudley was “significantly rougher, and far more invested in the game than anybody else we had played,” said Eliot IM Rep A. Patrick Behrer ’09.

One reason for the intensity may be that Dudley’s team is composed mostly of international students—about 90 percent, according to Dudley’s assistant-captain Mauricio O. Carneiro—who come from countries where soccer is taken more seriously.

Dudley players, on the other hand, say undergrads play more aggressively with them because they are strangers. Carneiro (valiantly) said he asked his reps if Dudley could spend the beginning of games meeting the undergraduate players, hoping this would lessen the violence. Props for the conflict mediation...although a few punches do make things more interesting.