soccer madness

It's the start of the beautiful game season! it's actually coming to my 4th World Cup season!! well i watched the 1990 world cup final in a drab affair where germany beats italy. but i didn't know a sh*t about what all the craze was about at that time. my dad woke me up at 3 am in the morning and said, it's the WORLD cup finals. i was thinking to myself at that time, what the hell is the world cup? but anything that has to do with the WORLD certainly has something special. and so, there it begins, my first encounter with the beautiful game.

i was 9 yrs old at that time, and wasn't some kid who played football, and certainly not a fan. however, after spending some effort to keep my eyes open to watch that goal-ess match, i got excited the next day in school, when i realise how many other boys also watched it. it became sort of like the cool thing, something to talk about. talking about football among us kids then were like dissecting a theory piece by piece, with such indepth analysis.
so i started reading about football, following (like every kid then) the EPL...

but then i realised there's not only the EPL in the world. there were many other leagues. but the EPL was the only league shown on TV in this part of the world. and so we got attuned to familiar names in english soccer.

my next world cup, 1994, i was more grown up then, familiar with quite a number of teams, and therefore started to understand the attraction of the beautiful game (why the heck would anyone wake up at 3 in the morning to watch 22 men kicking a ball). it was also during this world cup that i realise, many other non-EPL related teams play more attractive soccer than england! and i also started to realise, england is not as good as they were hyped up to be. (at the time of the writing of this post, it proved right again as england was knocked out by portugal for the 2nd time running.)

even though managers and coaches come and go, tradional football powerhouses typically try to retain their style. For example we associate italy with great defence, brazil with attractive play involving individual skills and ability to score beautiful goals, holland with their total football. Nowadays, these teams also set out to reinvent themselves as the gap between the powerhouses and other teams narrowed. ghana impressed in this world cup with their bold, strong play.

personally though, sometimes things become strange, like with brazil. i think they never get their samba rhythm for this tournament. we only see them playing counter attacking football, not play-making. counter attack is when you patiently defend and wait for your opponent to leave you spaces at the back and you attack them with one swift deadly movement. play-making is when you have a genius to control and move your midfield (like zinedine zidane or zizou of france). the whole world wanted to see ronaldinho show his stuff, but i guess he didn't quite perform because the tactics employed by brazil never really suited his style. Oh well, at least we saw the best of zizou reminiscing the 98 moments again.