soccer, futbal, footie, calcio etc.

I am in the midst of world cup fever. Thought I'm usually at work during the matches (stupid time zones), I'm DVRing the important ones and trying to remain ignorant of the result until I get a chance to watch it later. Today however, I got to work and the owner was already there with the gamecast going on the internet. We tracked the England-Portugal match via the play by play update when there were no customers around and did the same for the first 60 minutes of the brasil-france match. Then he found a live video feed from espn and we watched the last 20 minutes or so on his laptop. The feed kept getting broken up but we got the gist of it from the audio and the tension was certainly building up as both of us were pulling for the French.



I've been a fan of the French team since 1998 when they won it all on their home turf. Zinedine Zidane is an amazing player so I think that's a large part of it. My most brilliant moment on the soccer field was inspired by one of his plays in the '98 final. Also, you gotta love their coach, he looks like some drunk existentialist writer on the sideline; very French, very appropriate (see attached photo). I was very happy to see le bleus win this afternoon but it could have been anyone; as much as I like any team, I hate brazil more.

So now we've got an all Europe final four teams. I think the Germans have a good shot as the home team but Italy has been shutting down opposing offenses very well and have some good forwards so they could easily make it to the finals if they score early. Portugal has played well but they seem to lack a certain something to push them over the edge. France can easily ride their momentum past them to the finals. With Zidane retiring after the tournament, you can tell he's pushing the team to wine and they are happy to oblige their capitain. I guess my two favorites would be Italy and France for purely culinary and enotecnical reasons but I'm really just happy that it won't be Brasil.