boring? really?

ESPN GameCast: “After Ivory Coast and Portugal played out a boring 0-0 draw (a recurring theme of these finals)”

Maybe it’s just me, but I loved watching that match. Didn’t find it boring at all. Quite enlivening, actually.

However, I had to throw in the towel after 3 minutes of Brazil/North Korea, because al-Jazeera’s satellite feed kept crashing. That has been an ongoing problem in Egypt during this Cup, and there are rumors of sabotage for unknown motives.

day so far

It hurts to be Slovakia right now. They had that one in hand, though you can only applaud New Zealand’s wonderful equalizer.

Ivory Coast / Portugal met and exceeded my expectations. Italy and Paraguay each played one good half, and it was different halves in the two cases. But Ivory Coast and Portugal both played hard all the way, and in the pouring rain. Haven’t seen a better 0-0 match in quite some time. And broken-armed Drogba’s entry for Ivory Coast in around minute 65, though ultimately fruitless, was dramatic and stirring; my 15-20 Egyptian TV mates cheered aloud.

I really, really ought to stay home and work tonight, but when will there ever be as bizarre a match as Brazil vs. North Korea again? It will be surrealist poetry, and I don’t want to miss it. Brazil often plays as mirthfully as if it were a magic show rather than a soccer match, and everyone has (probably accurate) preconceptions about what North Korea plays like.

game of the day

It’s hard to confine myself to one World Cup match per day; I’d forgotten how much fun this is.

Alas, I have a lot going on right now, and one per day plus fragments of one other is the most I can reasonably manage.

Today’s choice will be Ivory Coast / Portugal. I may try to catch a bit of the late Brazil / North Korea showdown, just for the pure bizarrerie of it. Also, though North Korea is highly unlikely even to stay close in that one, the table is set for one of the most shocking upsets in the history of the sport. Can you imagine, North Korea somehow pulling that one out?

As for New Zealand / Slovakia (another odd “Popeye & HAL” matchup, geographically at least) I may catch some of it on the ESPN GameCast. Whoever that guy is, there’s a British sort of irony to his sense of humor, and he’s an incredible wiseacre who is beginning to lose patience with poor play from anyone. There are usually a couple of laugh-out-loud zingers per half from him.

a slightly longer take on Italy / Portugal

I posted another version of it over at the WORLD CUP BLOG.

Italy/Paraguay

An hour ago I was all set to make a post about how Italy is doomed, that the defending champs look flat, and so forth. But the second half changed that.

1-1 might have sounded like a pretty good result to Paraguay this morning, but at the half tonight they really seemed to be getting the better of Italy. The header by Alcarez wasn’t as powerful as Klose’s for Germany, but was delightfully subtler and quirkier, off the back or side of his head into the corner of the goal.

Then Italy woke up, and Paraguay disappointed me by obviously deciding at a certain point that a draw was enough to satisfy them, and then they nearly lost even that.

In any case, this was my favorite match of the Cup so far. I’d only planned to stay until the half, but stuck it out to the end just because the pace of play was appealing.

Net result: the stock of both teams rose in my eyes a bit. Italy isn’t as hopeless as I had thought this year, and Paraguay looks capable of doing some damage beyond group stage (assuming Slovakia doesn’t knock them out first; we’ll know a bit more about the Slovaks after tomorrow).

vuvuzela strife

This article consider THE TWO SIDES OF THE DEBATE OVER VUVUZELAS at the World Cup.

Yes, it does have an eerie sound, like an invading swarm of bees. And when I started watching a match for the first time during this Cup (that very boring France-Uruguay game) I immediately thought: “we can’t really go through a whole World Cup with this, can we?”

But now I’m a convert. It gives a memorable identity to this Cup. And moreover, I agree with what this gentleman says:

“Responding to a typical stream of vuvuzela questions, Mkhondo said the horns are ingrained in South Africa’s history. ‘You find that they emanate from the horn which was used by our forefathers to call meetings,’ he said. ‘As our guests, please embrace our culture, please embrace the way we celebrate.'”

Hear, hear. Nothing is worse than people who come into your house, and tell you they don’t like the music you’re playing. Ever have that happen to you? It is incredibly annoying. When you’re on someone else’s turf, you let them set the mood. It’s an ironclad social law, or ought to be.

nice work by the NY Post

Nice headline after the England match:

USA Wins 1-1: Greatest Tie Against the British Since Bunker Hill

ZoneStyxTravelCard is right about the British influence on the Post. One of the funniest things in Egypt is to go to the museum at El-Alamein and see the British tabloids from after the battle.

Headline: “Huns Routed”

Then a picture of Rommel, with the caption “Not So Tough.”

the Dutch

The Netherlands gets past Denmark with a 2-0 outcome. The bad news: the Dutch will need to play a lot better than that if they want a chance at their first World Cup trophy. The good news: they probably can.

The policy is that I’m allowing myself one full match per day, and for the other matches I’ll either watch one half or catch parts of it at home on ESPN GameCast, with its sardonic typed commentary. The Zamalek Hostel (a dormitory for students, with faculty apartments on the upper floors) is a 10-12 minute walk from my place. They not only have a big screen TV in the lobby, they actually encourage AUC-connected people to come watch the matches there: I was astonished to be handed a printed schedule today for the whole World Cup, with business sponsors inviting us all to watch the matches in our own university dormitory.

The odd thing today is that when I arrived, the television was off and absolutely no one was near it. I looked at a few security guards and asked them why the television wasn’t on: “Is it broken?” Their indifference was somewhat stunning, since I have only rarely met a male Egyptian who is indifferent to the sport of soccer. I thought I must have hit upon a rare group of non-fans today.

But as soon as it was on, 8-10 excited security guards and students immediately assembled around the television, all of them rattling off the names of top Dutch and Danish stars. They simply must have been unaware of the starting time today.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about Egyptian rooting preferences. They are not inclined to cheer for underdogs unless there is some sort of special personal tie involved. On the whole, Egyptians seem to prefer the major European powerhouse teams. They’d have been perfectly happy to see Germany take down Australia 10-0 rather than 4-0, and it’s nothing against Australia. An American friend of mine was watching England-USA with some Egyptians, and one of them reportedly said: “If the USA wins this match, I will never watch soccer again for the rest of my life.” My guess is that it’s not because they like Tony Blair too much better than George W. Bush, it’s just the point I made: all politics aside, they view the USA as an unworthy runt in the sport, and they prefer the major nations to win.

On a side note, for the 2006 Final there seemed to be vastly more support for Italy than for France in Cairo, which surprised me (I thought there would be more Zidane fans here than that).

sportswriter again

Thanks to Mark Fisher for seeing to it that I have REENTERED THE SPORTSWRITING WORLD at the World Cup blog. This will be fun.

best so far

Best team I’ve seen so far = Germany

Best player I’ve seen so far… either Klose (Germany) or Messi (Argentina)

Messi was certainly the most fun to watch. But I missed the whole South Korea match, and it sounds like that whole team was fun too.

To me, the most interesting thing about Messi is that he doesn’t look like a star athlete. He looks like a sensitive kid who would be good at playing the viola.

As for the Germans, their team seems a lot more entertaining than usual this time. In most Cups they’re dismissed as dully robotic yet efficient, and frankly that has usually been my experience watching them in past Cups. But this version of the German team seems more electrifying somehow. Some people were writing them off after the Ballack injury, saying they wouldn’t even get out of the group. That now sounds like wild overstatement.