More Fun Stuff

Brace yourselves, sports fans! Only two chances left to see a live World Cup Soccer game in 2006! Saturday July 8 at 2pm (CST) Germany and Portugal battle it out for 3rd place. Then at 1pm (CST) Sunday July 9 2006 is The Championship Game between Italy and France. I know that for some of you (okay, many of you) watching The Game would mean missing your standard Sunday afternoon nap but you're not going to get another chance to see live World Cup Soccer for another four years. Let me help you out a little bit.

Interesting (whether you're a newbie or a veteran at "fut") is the Bilingual Soccer Blog (it might take a few seconds to load). Then you can check out a link to the World Cup bracket and read an article on How to Appreciate a soccer game on TV (this wikiHow article links to several other useful soccer articles like How to Understand Soccer Strategy)

One of the things the TV article mentions is to watch the game on a Spanish language channel (plenty of those in my area) because the announcers are better, you might not understand a word but it won’t matter – you’ll know when something exciting is happening. When i was a kid my dad would watch basketball games on TV with the sound off and he would listen to the game on the radio - naturally the radio announcer was better.

This World Cup has been the cause of quite a bit of off the wall humor (i think its funny but the English DON'T :-) and quite a bit of carping. see here and here. And even i (as cynical as i am) didn't see this (political) complaint coming.

i had the day off Monday - no soccer. i'm taking off tomorrow to help my folks with a yard sale and guess what - no futbal (soccer). But i have been listening to the commentators (even when there are no games - you can still get opinions and highlights - you gotta love Spanish TV) and they are being uncharacteristically reserved in their predictions of the final outcome of this Cup. Once the "safe bets" had been eliminated, the commentary got a lot less emotional and a lot more cerebral (works for me) or maybe they're just trying to fill the time between games with factoids.

i love democracy and that is one reason that i love soccer. The whole world plays soccer (the US is getting in on this kinda late) and out of all the countries in the world, only 32 make the tournament. But this is the great thing, out of those 32 countries almost nobody would have guessed that this year the championship would be between Italy and France. Safe money would have bet on Brazil (i'm glad that i don't bet on this game - i would have lost that bet!)

The Italian defense has been "mythical" to quote the commentators. They have not allowed any team to score against them in this tournament. In fact, the only goal against Italy in this World Cup was "put in the box" by the Italians themselves in their 1-1 tie against ... Team USA.

Is that cool or what? If Italy wins this one (ihopeihopeihope) and is able to hold France scoreless (i would LOVE that) then the only goal against the 2006 World Cup champs would have come in a game against Team USA. Its kind of a sneaky way into the history books but what do you want? This is the closest chance that "USA" has of being in the same sentence as "World Cup Champion" for quite some time. Of course, we can't count our chickens before they are hatched - France has beaten Italy as recently as 2000. Saturday and Sunday should be great games.

More later.