As you very likely are aware, the South Africa World Cup started today, completely changing everyone's attitude and priorities. TVs were placed all over the campus, in every student lounge, making it more of a "lounging about" room and less of a "actually getting work done" room.
Poor naïve little me, having not gone to student lounges during the last World Cup, actually thought I could isolate myself from the games, and work on my projects. As the way the sentence is constructed may lead you to think, I was wrong.
I tried, I really did, to work on my projects, but there was no way to escape the "Ooooh!"s and "Goaaaaaal!"s and especially the "Shit, man!"s. After all, I am human, and the temptation to find out how the match was going was way to great. In the end, I ended up watching both games in their entirety, and regretted it.
"Sure," you probably say; "now he regrets not working on the huge projects he's got due next week. He regretted it because he's gonna be stressed out all weekend! But when he was watching the opening match –savor that for a moment: the... opening... match!– he surely wasn't regretting it! He's just being a hypocrite!" Well, no. I regretted it because I found the matches shitty.
Now don't get me wrong. I know I could never play soccer like that. I thought South Africa's "La Macarena" celebration of their goal was original and everything; but the fact is that, as I watched, I couldn't help but thinking that they weren't really playing for the sake of the game.
The players weren't really "into it". They seemed to be more worried about burning the remaining minutes without getting a goal scored against them, than on actually making the effort to score themselves. There wasn't any serious defense either, just keep it going, up and down up and down. No real, nail-biting struggles for the ball with player scampering all over showing that split-second-thinking skill we call "talent". No. It was all about getting the game over with.
The second match was also like this, but had a lot of the other extreme. I mean, come on! I know it's irritating to be there an hour without having anything to show for it, but six yellow cards? Six? We want excitement in our games, but beating-up your opponents just isn't the way.
Well, those are my thoughts on the first day of the 2010 World Cup. Yours?
Friday, June 11, 2010
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