Look Ma No Hands

It’s World Cup time. This excites me to no end for two reasons. The first is that it’s over one hundred degrees pretty much every day here. So now in addition to getting shot, I risk melting like the Wicked Witch of the West every time I go outside. And no, the fact that it’s a dry heat is not any consolation; in fact I can practically feel the greedy air sucking the water out of my skin every time I step outside the house. Being able to sit inside and watch lots of soccer in HD every day for over a month seems ever more appealing.

The second reason I’m excited is that, and I know this might make me a pariah in my home country; I’m actually a really big soccer fan. Four years ago I started watching the last World Cup, and despite a pitiful performance from the U.S.I got hooked. At the time I was living on a block in Manhattan that had a French café on one corner, and on the opposite side of the street an Italian bar. These were the kinds of places that did not have TVs 1460 out of 1461 days (that would be 365 times 4 and don’t forget to add the leap day), and didn’t have customers much more frequently than that. Except for the weekend when their respective countries were in the final match of the World Cup. All of a sudden, both establishments had TVs, balloons and lots and lots of people. So many that the intersection became an impromptu street fair, and perish the car that tried to get through. It was like the Super Bowl and the Olympics smushed together and translated into a language I didn’t speak. So, I spent the next four years learning it.

Surprisingly I found soccer similar to baseball in a whole bunch of ways. There are lots of players on the field at the same time, but only two or three of them are actively involved with the ball at once. Also, there are large stretches of both games with no scoring. To the casual watcher this makes them boring, while to a fan it offers a wider variety of factors to pay attention to. It’s the subtlety that makes both sports great, what goes on away from the ball and between the scoring. How is the defense positioned? Who’s getting tired? Who will react well to building pressure? Who is gaining the advantage in the individual mental battles that can prove so pivotal? And it doesn’t hurt soccer, that unlike baseball, there are no commercials or stoppages in play (other than halftime) and the game is over in under two hours.

So starting today I will be living all soccer all the time. Obviously the U.S. team is my first love, and a group I’ve followed religiously for the last four years. After them, I’m firmly in the Dutch camp (its either because I love Orange, or I have some monetary incentive you can decide) and then for sentimental (and maybe a little monetary also) reasons all the African teams. And since I’m a sucker for lost causes I’ll be sure to watch North Korea and New Zealand play as well.

I’ll be writing about it all (or at least some of it when I feel like it) here, because after all what else do I have to do.