World Cup Fever

The first ever blog I did, before I even knew there was such a thing as a blog, or even that such a word existed (and in truth, it may not have existed at that time) was in 1998. It was called something like "Ramblings of a disenfranchised football fan", and it recounted the amusing(ish) details of my life as a football fan living in the Federated States of Micronesia, attempting to follow the 1998 World Cup, which was not televised in that country (almost uniquely I was led to believe). I suspect it has vanihsed into the periodic clean-ups of a server somewhere (it was on Geocities before Geocities was bought up by Yahoo). I certainly can't find it via any search engine.

Now, however, eight years later, I live in a country that televises every game and which does so in a very convenient time zone for TV-based match watching. And hence World Cup fever has come to our living room. Sadly there is no Romania or Hungary to cheer on, so we have to make do with spotting players with Hungarian names (yesterday's red-carded Czech defender Ujfalusi being the most obvious). The World Cup for me is all about cheering on good football and hoping that the team playing the best football wins. Hence, I am not really that patriotic, since the last time England played good football in the finals of a major championship was ten years ago now, and even then it was only one match. So far, honours in the "great football" stake have been taken by Argentina and Spain, and long may they continue to prosper (Spain will, of course, get no further that the quarter finals, because they never do).

I'll spare you all my commentary on every game, since you can read such things in about a billion other places on the Internet, but I may just pop on from time to time to rave about a performance or criticise a ref (such as the horribly biased one who handed Holland an undeserved win over the Ivory Coast). I have learned, though, through the miracle of football, that Cote D'Ivoire is "Elefántcsontpart in Hungarian, which translates, I believe, as "Elephant bone coast". Either the Hungarians took the bits that were left after the other European countries had taken all the ivory, or there is a serious misunderstanding as to what ivory actually is.