Ooh, now this is embarrassing. The organizers of a friendly soccer match between Argentina and El Salvador mistakenly played the wrong national anthem before the game. Perhaps you didn’t even realize that the Isle of Man has its own anthem. “Ellan Vannin – the Manx name for the Isle of Man – and El Salvador are next to each other on a list of anthems,” reports BBC Sport. More than 50,000 spectators were in Maryland’s FedEx Stadium: “El Salvador fans whistled in disgust and their players were left baffled,” slowly dropping their hands from their chests as the wrong anthem was played.
CMS Sports accepted full responsibility for the error and issued a statement saying the mistake was not done with “malicious intentions.” The two anthems could not be more different. Not only do they not sound anything alike, there is a big difference in the tone of the two. The El Salvador anthem, for instance, proclaims that for the Latin American country “Freedom is Her dogma and Her guide/ A thousand times She has defended it/ And as many times has She repelled/The hateful power of atrocious tyranny/Her history has been bloody and sad/Yet at the same time sublime and brilliant.” Take that, Spain! The Manx anthem, in contrast, is less bellicose, more bucolic:
When the summer day is over
And the busy cares have flown,
Then I sit beneath the starlight
With a weary heart. alone,
And there rises like a vision,
Sparkling bright in nature’s glee,
My own dear Ellan Vannin
With its green hills by the sea.
