Few kicks in soccer drama

The show: 21 Thunder, Season 1, Episode 2 The moment: The locker room fight

Stefan (Kevin Claydon), a veteran player on the Montreal Thunder soccer team, was head-butted during practice by the new guy, Junior Lolo (Emmanuel Kabongo). Now they’re facing off in the locker room.

“Hey, Lolo, want to try that cheap s--- again?” Stefan asks. “I will bury you.” The two push their foreheads together. They start shoving each other. Their teammates erupt in “Hey, hey,” and “Knock it off.”

Alex (Andres Joseph), a natural leader, breaks them up. “This s--right here cannot happen,” he says. “This is a team. Sometimes I feel sorry for the guys who play individual sports. Because they’ll never know that feeling. Of winning as a team when no one else thought it was possible. But we win nothing divided. Now come on! Do it!”

Stefan and Junior shake hands. “Now work hard for each other,” Alex says. Soccer has everything a good drama needs (behind the scenes, if not always on the field). It’s a game of personalities. A clash of international cultures. Because it’s a no-contact sport, all the contact has to be sneaky. As HBO’s Ballers (about pro football) demonstrates, it’s fascinating to swim in a sea of testosterone. How do you get a bunch of raging men to be a team, especially in our era of narcissism, of glorifying the individual?

Unfortunately, the three episodes I’ve seen keep straying away from the arena, down well-trodden paths (drug trouble, gang trouble, family trouble). The show is freshest when it keeps its head in the game. 21 Thunder airs Mondays on CBC. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.