The Heat-Hour Football League Kicks Off Under the Stars

LAGOS — The whistle blew at one in the morning, and forty thousand people roared as if it were three in the afternoon in a cooler century. Lagos opened its heat-hour football season this week under the stars and the stadium's misting rigs, the latest and largest city to move its beloved game wholesale into the cool of the night. It began as grim necessity — the day simply too hot, by mid-July, to ask athletes or crowds to survive ninety minutes of it — but necessity has ripened into something the fans now prefer. The night matches have a texture the day never had: cooler air, a carnival of food stalls that stay open till dawn, families who bring sleeping children who wake for the goals. Attendance is up across the league, and the players, who once dreaded the furnace of an afternoon fixture, talk about the midnight game as a gift. "We lost the afternoon and found the night," said striker Chinedu Bassey, still glazed with sweat under the floodlights. The century took the daylight hours away from a lot of things. Football, at least, has answered by making the darkness its home ground — and filling it.