I have to say, I’m getting a huge bang out of watching this year’s World Cup. That’s a sentence that, heretofore, I would never have imagined myself writing. Football—or soccer as we Americans insist on calling it for some (stupid, I’m sure) reason—has never interested me in the least. But living in Luxembourg, where one is surrounded by France, Belgium and Germany—all of whom are kicking some serious World Cup arse—I can’t help but get caught up in it. Cycle the countryside and the flags of those three countries are flying everywhere—from windows, cars, trees, etc. The fevered pitch was even more so about a week ago before Ronaldo and Portugal—from where so many of Luxembourg’s residents’ hail—made their quick exit. The TV coverage here of the World Cup is great too. We usually watch a German channel and since our German is very limited (“Hey, he just said ‘heute’! They must be talking about something going on today.”), all we can focus on is the players and the game. I love the athletes’ pre-game nervousness and intensity, and the way they sing their national anthems—some fairly shouting it at the tops of their lungs. And the tradition of having the players take the field while holding hands with some little kid soccer player is great too. Before one of Argentina’s games, the kid who got to hold Messi’s hand was in such awe; he couldn’t take his eyes off Messi, looking up at him (actually, not that far up) as if he couldn’t believe that Messi was real. Speaking of Lionel Messi, please allow me a digression which hopefully you will find amusing: When we first moved to Luxembourg about a year-and-a-half ago and discovered the Eurosport channel, we often saw commercials for Turkish Airlines that featured Kobe Bryant, a basketball player for the Los Lakers, and this other guy we’d never seen before. He must be some Turkish basketball player, we figured. Months later I learned that it was Lionel Messi, who’s generally regarded to be the best football player in the world. Oh, he’s a soccer player. OK. But unconsciously, it must’ve been imprinted in my mind that, like Kobe Bryant, Messi was basketball-player tall. (Kobe is 2.0m; 6’-6”) Thus, the first time I saw Messi in football mode was before the game where that 11- or 12-year-old child who was so in awe of him was also only a few inches shorter than him. (Messi is 1.7m, 5-7.) “What the hell—he’s short?!?” I fairly shouted in our apartment. “Messi’s short! He’s the shortest player out there!!!” Obviously, I have absolutely nothing, zero, null, nada against anybody’s height; I was just surprised that’s all. It’d be like seeing a co-worker whom you don’t know very well but see all time come into work one day and they’re suddenly a foot shorter than they were the day before. It’d be jarring. Back to the TV coverage: what I like about the German broadcast of the World Cup (and the French and Belgian ones too) is that once the game starts, that’s all you see for about the next hour or so—no over-hyped commercials featuring celebrities you don’t care about, no heart-tugging personal feature stories or dumbass whiny-athlete interviews, etc. (In other words, no Bob Costas.) The games air here at 6 and 10 p.m. (in the first round it was 6, 9 and midnight) and we’ve watched quite a few. (I’ve only seen the American team play once. But will watch them tonight for sure when they take on Belgium, a country less than 15 miles from beim McQuaide.) As a family we like the Brazilian team. (Hey, it’s our first family foray into the World Cup so we can’t be blamed for taking a shine to the favorite.) We love Neymar with his brushed-forward hair and mad-crazy skillz, Fred for his mustache, Marcelo for his panache, Hulk for his bulk and David Luiz, whom we call Sideshow Bob for his resemblance to the character on “The Simpsons”. Personally, I’m pulling for any of the three Luxembourg-surrounding teams—the Netherlands too—but my son really likes Brazil; that’s the only team for which he’ll stop what he’s doing and join us on the couch to watch. He even insisted we buy a soccer ball—I mean, a football—to kick around. Thus, last night we were at Parc Merl ostensibly playing one-on-one football on the sandy soccer pitch, but mostly we just found ourselves retrieving the ball from the surrounding bushes. We’ve got no skills, but we had a lot of fun. And I know that in the future we’ll look back with super fondness on these days in Luxembourg when as a family, we all went a little football mad together.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 09:18:42 +0000