I am shamelessly a World Cup-only fan. Despite the tremendous amount of soccer played throughout the world during the other 200-ish weeks between World Cups, I can’t be pulled away from NFL American football, NBA basketball, MLB baseball, and just a tad of NHL hockey, to pay attention to the leagues that the rest of the world care about. Over these 5 weeks, however, I quickly developed strong opinions about the ability of different teams, criticized FIFA for their policies, and expressed outrage about poor strategy and execution in game.
But that’s not really what I have been talking about these past few weeks. Instead, I would much rather talk about
- Luis Suarez’s history of biting
- people gambling on Suarez’s vampiric tendencies
- how TV footage has filmed female fans in the crowd
- objectifying the players
- the best arm-folders
- the biggest floppers
and just about every topic that doesn’t actually involve the soccer itself but is somewhat related. Given the media coverage of these things, I think that i’m probably quite normal in this respect. During the World Cup, I feel obligated to stay informed and active in this event that citizens of almost every other country regard as being tremendously important. Even so, I can’t engage with it directly, so I stick to the odd news around it. It turns out that it’s a lot more fun to talk about the random stuff rather than analyze the intricacies of a game that I don’t actually understand.
And now that the World Cup is over, I return to my normal sports life, filled largely with my objectively irrational love of baseball, the least action-packed and most idiosyncratic popular sport I know. It’s only another 2 years until I again feign knowledge and interest in athletic competitions taking place in Brazil, only because the peer pressure that everyone else is faking enthusiasm for as well. But it’s a self-fulfilling and sustaining enthusiasm that I think we all enjoy quite a bit.
So good on you, Germany, for taking this one. Having watched a few of your games, I whole-heartedly believe that your team really deserved this victory, even though your strategy was quite conservative and boring in the final game.
But importantly, Scolari is out for having embarrassed Brazil. What do you think of that?
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