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Ivory Coast, 5. Madagascar, 0. Didier Drogba, priceless. photo by Austin Merrill for vanityfair.com

If you’ve been following along with my journey over the last two years here at TIAS, you’ve read about my fascination with Didier Drogba and the Ivory Coast national soccer team. It is a story we are all likely familiar with in soccer circles, so why am I covering it again? And what does it have to do with American Soccer?

Well, for starters, as many American soccer fans can attest, sometimes you need a little reminder that the sport we love is as important as we think it is… somewhere. Not here, sigh, but somewhere, where people honestly believe it can end a war. And maybe it can.

And because this time, it is more a story about Austin Merrill, a former Peace Corp volunteer and Associated Press writer in the Ivory Coast. He now works at Vanity Fair, where we find his first person narrative about returning to the war-torn country and attending the Elephants’ African Nations Cup qualifier against Madagascar, in which there were “five goals to erase five years of war,” as a newspaper headline read the day after the Ivory Coast victory.

A must read: Best Feet Forward