A victory for soccer

When I read this news story about a soccer game between kids from Iceland and kids from Afganistan I was thinking I would find some heartwarming truths about how sports transcend cultural boundaries. Instead, I found a story about people transcending competition itself:

The young soccer players from Kabul, Afghanistan, arrived at John Carroll University for their Sunday game with clean, bright red knee socks, and jerseys tucked neatly into black athletic shorts....Someone must've noticed how much taller and experienced the Iceland team was than the Afghan team, who just picked up the sport in recent weeks. Plus, there were only eight Afghan players, and it takes 11 to field a team...So organizers threw out the conventional rule book and mixed the players from both teams onto two squads.

"It does not make sense to play the game because we could get any score we would like to," said Jonas Sigurdsson, the head delegate from Reykjavik, Iceland. "Everyone is having fun."