Hook, Line, and Sinker
England, along with every other nation in participation minus the U.S., has a bad bad case of World Cup fever. Its symptoms include an undying and somewhat maniacal devotion to one’s home country, an incapability to pry one’s eyes from the TV set when a match is on, and an acquired ability to memorize lots and lots of trivial facts such as player stats, scores to all previous matches, who scored what goal for what team in what manner in which match at what exact time down to the last minute and second, etc.Weirdly enough, I have taken the bait and have fallen for it all.
Quick, get away from me! I might be contagious! It’s true. It’s hard not to get excited about something with which EVERYONE around me—every man, woman, and child—is obsessed. It’s like an unstoppable disease which manifests itself in the form of team jerseys, copious amounts of beer, mini-flags to attach to car windows, the list goes on. No, I’m not embarrassed by having given into this non-American past time, but I do have one very big problem with it.
Which team should I support?
Before the whole World Cup thing went into full swing and before I cared about a bunch of Europeans and South Americans kicking a ball around, I promised JP that I would support England. Now that I’ve been watching the games, and now that I’ve seen that America might not get its assed royally kicked, I feel my patriotic side kicking in and I feel like I should support the good ol’ U.S. of A. But then there’s that nagging Korean in me that keeps wanting to break out and cheer on the players from my mother country. What to do??!? England is the strongest of the three teams, but one of their key strikers tore a knee ligament yesterday and won’t be able to play for about 6 months. Their other main striker just got over breaking his foot and hasn’t played a full game in about two months. Korea is everyone’s underdog favorite, seeing as how they made it to the semi-finals in the last World Cup. The U.S., despite having been put in a difficult group, aren’t doing too badly. They managed to tie with Italy over the weekend even though two players were red-carded and the team had to face Italy with 9 instead of the usual 11 players, and they can still make into the next round of games if they win their game against Ghana tomorrow. Well, I guess I will at least wait until tomorrow to see how the Americans do. I may or may not have to decide between three teams after tomorrow.
And for your enjoyment: pictures from the England vs. Jamaica friendly match that was played the week before the squad was sent over to Germany for the tournament.
Claire, Dave, and JP outside of Old Trafford stadium in Manchester (where Manchester United play their home games).
England fans do their little card trick and make the England flag. Good start, but I still think the Cal Big Game ones were way better.
hot dog : American baseball game :: meat pie : England football match.
Bonus: I managed to fix my computer (temporary solution, but hey, I'll take what I can get) and I found out that each time I reinstalled Windows, a new user folder was created under "documents and settings" which contains all temp files, history, etc etc and this was taking up LOTS of extra memory. I wiped out extraneous folders, cleaned and organized all of my documents and photos and managed to clear up 6 gigs of new harddrive space. As Eva best described it, it was like taking a big poo. My computer feels purged and clean.
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