If you’re a mad sports fan right now, or actually even if you’re not, you will probably know that the World Cup is on.
The World Cup is something I had no knowledge of prior to moving to Austria. In fact, no knowledge of prior to a few weeks ago.
It seems to be similar to AFL in Victoria or rugby in the northern states – when it’s on, instead of starting conversations discussing the weather, it’s the World Cup. It worms its way into meetings, there’s tipping competitions on every corner, and when the games are actually in session, well that’s the time to go shopping, because the streets are empty. To demonstrate just how crazy the phenomenon is, my company has a wall calendar to record appointments and other such things – although the calendar does show public holidays (in tiny writing) what is much more prominent, are the World Cup games.
The pic on the left shows Christmas Day, the pic on the right is World Cup games…
As you can probably tell, I am not a fan of the World Cup, or in fact a fan of very many sporting events (there was that time I fell asleep watching Real Madrid play in Madrid). Regardless, I have learnt some random things about the World Cup, simply because I live in Europe and can’t escape it:
- It’s on every 4 years (I have lived here for 4.5 but probably the first year I was too overwhelmed to notice)
- This time, it’s in Russia – all over Russia – not just in one major city (that’s as accurate as I’m going to get)
- It’s called football, but it’s definitely soccer
- Games run for 90 minutes, which is ridiculously long, and then there might be additional time added
- But in this extremely lengthy amount of time, teams score very few goals – maybe 2 – possibly only 1 – sometimes zero
- We were extremely happy when Germany was eliminated
- We don’t like France much either
And that’s it. Though to be honest, it’s more than I thought I would know given I have not invested one second of my time into learning about it. I don’t know when the final is, or how many there are – I could just look at my work calendar but it doesn’t really seem worth the effort.
I don’t think my brain needs to store much more information on this topic. Maybe in another four years I’ll collect some more titbits, but until then…
an aussie in austria 