One thing that has always bothered me about this World Cup stuff is the behavior of the crowds.
I remember a few years back when (I think) Columbia and Chile played a pre-World Cup match in Oakland at the outdoor stadium.
We took BART (the "subway") that night because the Grateful Dead were playing at the indoor stadium next door. The walkway was a pool of glass, vomit, urine and trash as thousands of drunken immigrants marched around waving rags at each other that looked vaguely like national flags.
Can you imagine a soccer crowd that makes thousands of traveling Deadheads next door look like a gentile garden party in Palo Alto?
After the game - I still don't know who won - these soccer loonies were driving down the streets in Burlingame and San Mateo honking their horns, waving flags and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Not one person in 50 on the street had the foggiest idea what the fuss was about.
It is not like we have a large population of Columbians or Chileans to begin with in the first place, but this was 30 miles from the site of the game!
Irrelevant. But they don't get it.
I think that the Wolrd Cup is little more than a form of warfare for many of these nations. England play Argentina . . . . and the newspapers write stories about revenge for the Falkland war. Must be a slow news day.
I suppose it all comes down to an incident I remember on the produce market.
There was a match between Mexico and the U.S. - something everyone was barely aware of. But on the market, with a large Mexican population, every radio was blaring the play-by-play in Spanish.
At one point Mexico scored and the entire terminal erupted in cheers . . . . . the only problem was that most of these guys were born in this country.
I asked a guy named Cesar, whose parents left Mexico for a better life and who earned a substantial salary - why he was pumping his fist and jumping up and down?
"You were born here, right?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said, "so what?"
"Why are you jumping up and down for a country that your family left because they were repressed and impoverished?"
"Hey man," said Cesar, "when it comes to the World Cup, I am a Mexican first and I hope *we* kick America's ass."
Having pride in your ancestry is all well and good, but it is not like I am going to get up at 2am to watch the Armenian World Cup team play Azerbajian.
This has nothing to do with kicking a ball into a net . . . the World Cup raises deeper and far more complex issues than who has a better soccer team.