Gol!A sign of the times, I've found that I - perennial non-watcher of organized sports - have begun to be drawn into the 2006 World Cup action.
A sport that the rest of the world has long followed with a deep fervor but which has largely been overlooked here in the U.S. in favor of Football, Baseball, Basketball and Hockey, all of which I've tried to watch at various times, all of which have in one or more ways have bored me to unconsciousness.
That, unlike any of the sports worshipped here in the states, this is truly a game drawing worldwide interest was part of what helped draw me in on Friday. One of our new hires, Leo, is from Costa Rica, which was one of the teams playing (against Germany) in the opening game.
The tail end of very changeable, often wet weather threw many of our field projects into disarray, so Eric was in from the field. Crypt Leak was feeling under the weather and had the day off, so when lunchtime rolled around Eric and I opted to hit a local Mexican restaurant: El Cancun.
There they had a large screen tv set up, tuned to WUVP-TV, a Spanish language channel, a Univisión affiliate, and the Costa Rica/Germany match was already underway. We watched while we had lunch, noting everything from the style of play to the way they don't have a countdown clock -- theirs simply counts the seconds and the minutes... and it's relentless. There aren't time-outs, and any time taken for specific instances is simply tacked onto the end of the official 45 minute half, but even that's done very sparingly. Each half runs well under an hour.
A World Cup wall chart from the BBC (seen below, though it'll likely be larger if you follow the link) is especially helpful for a newby such as myself.
The sport moves, and I'm finding the game interesting and watchable. The lack of hard, intentional physical contact, the low-scoring and even no-scoring games (a 0:0 game is not only possible, least one of the games in this session of the World Cup - Saturday's Trinidad & Tobago vs Sweden - has come up that way) have each been points of ridicule by sports fans in the U.S., but I say to Hell with them. In the past three days of game I've seen excellent plays and superb sportsmanship. Opposing players helping each other up after a collision on the field. Little to no in-your-face, out of control ego moves. No damned, single-player, end zone victory dances. Fouls and other penalties are taken very seriously by the judges, and consequently by the players - and it shows. Do I expect the matches to become more aggressive as the series progresses? Certainly. Each team will get to play at least three times between this past Friday and June 23rd, with the first of the teams getting a second chance on the 14th -- when Germany and Poland (hey, history buffs...) play each other as the third match of the day. I expect each of those second sweep matches to be the most hard-fought, as those who won the first time will want to defend their leads and those who lost will know it's their last chance to keep seriously in the running. Or... at least that's how it seems to me.Am I going to become some soccer fanatic? I doubt it. On the other hand, I've watched most of each of the games since this thing started on Friday, and I find myself a little bugged that I'm not going to have the opportunity to catch so many games this week. (No, I'm not going to bother taping any of them.) That's an astounding change between anything I would have told you had you asked me about the World Cup anytime from early Friday afternoon on back.
Oh, if you're going to watch the games I'd suggest watching them at least part of the time on a Spanish language channel. What we've seen of ESPN and ABC's coverage they're making entirely too many decisions of when what's on the field isn't interesting enough to watch, so they throw up huge, screen-devouring graphics with player stats. If that appeals to you, then go for it. I'm having more fun taking in the subtleties at my own, slow, non-sports watcher pace than I am being rushed along by a U.S. sports reporting organization. Besides, they're so much more enthusiastic.
Well, I see that Mexico has all but officially won against Iran, and it's time for me to get to some other things.
Addendum: We're getting to see some of the rough, poor sportsmanship side of the game via the team from Angola today, as they're playing against Portugal -- a match two thirds through the second half as I type this -- but the crowd and the judges are letting them know what they think of it. Portugal's leading, and if there's any justice it'll stay that way.
Comments
Of course, a second Bush Administration's ruining us just fine, so we may not even need the rest of the world to knock us over.
Now that you've shone a light in the proper direction I've looked it up and see that the Portuguese empire disintegrated as a consequence of the proxy conflicts between the US and USSR in the Cold War, and that once the Poruguese ceded independence to Angola in '75 a civil war erupted partially in the vacuum and partially because it became another puppet war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., with the US backing the insurgents... and it lasted roughly 27 years.
Given that since the death of UNITA leader Savimbi in 2002 the unsettled leadership in Angola is largely under MPLA control -- the communist-funded group, I imagine that they have little love for the U.S. either, and I can't say that I blame them.
Thanks for pushing me in the right direction!
You may decry the so-called relative standards of American ignorance about the outside world. I don't know.
Yes, you are right about the smug, self-satisfied attitude. I have met ugly Americans, yet, in my experience living in California for four years while in university in the eighties, I met the nicest people I have ever met. My impression? Nicest, well-meaning but the most naive. Again, these are my impressions. From one person.
Okay, since you have mentioned this, yes, there are ugly Americans exhibiting these traits as well as some rather normal ones. I don't know. Perhaps, you could say it is part of a cultural outlook? Brash, loud and outspoken? It's different from the Machiavellian, reserved outlook of Asians. And sometimes, you get a lot of hyprocrisy, usually to do with face here.
I know there are varieties of it everywhere in the world -- when my family was living in Italy it was apparent that, as a consequence of what was coming through the entertainment pipeline, quite a few people there envisioned the U.S. as a few of big cities surrounded by badlands filled with cowboys and indians. Still, when it's me, I can't help but feel responsible for fixing it.
Above and beyond all that, I'm embarassed for my country when I know that G.W.Bush - his face and his administration's actions - is the U.S.A. for much of the rest of the world. Many of us didn't vote for him -- by any reasonable accounting the majority of us didn't vote for him in 2000 -- but that's what we've been stuck with.