FROM THE NEWSROOM
Every four years
By Blake Wolfe/The Scugog Standard

I wanted to get excited for the World Cup finals. I really did.

Soccer, or football, for those who don’t mind offending NFL fans (I sure don’t), is probably the only sport that I can really get into, either playing or watching. I know this is likely odd to many. Most people (including a handful of fellow column writers who have declared such) would probably say the opposite as they count the seconds until hockey season begins, each minute between the final goal of the Stanley Cup and the first puck drop of the looming season an agonizing eternity. It sounds something like a narcotic addiction.

Although far from a pathological fascination, the World Cup is the only time where I park myself on a couch - willingly - for several hours to watch a sporting event, save this year’s Olympic gold medal matches in hockey (but so did you).

But not just any soccer match. The Toronto FC has yet to get any ticket money from my wallet and judging from footage of the average game at BMO Fields (the ones I’ve glanced at, anyway), I’m not alone.

But it wasn’t always this way.

For me, it’s not a matter of national pride vested in the game. Money will likely grow on trees home to avian swine before Canada cracks the World Cup bracket, and if I remember correctly, Poland hasn’t reached the tournament since 2002, when I only paid attention for purposes of a radio broadcasting course that required students to have talking points for the on-air component.

But I watched a little in 2006, the infamous Zinedine Zidane (I hope those are in the right order) headbutt in the final match between France and Italy included, even watching a bit of the FIFA Junior championships held the following summer. So why do I look forward to every fourth summer, despite the warranted criticisms of the game having too many players milking minor injuries (if injured at all) for a referee call in their favour?

My guess is that it’s the contagious fervor accompanying each match, the benign national passion universally inherent to each team’s respective boosters.

Which leads me to my pick - Brazil. When you don’t have a team of your ‘own,’ pick one that appeals to you, and Brazil knows how to party. I blame it on a good friend of mine who has had the luxury of two Portuguese-speaking nations to root for every four years (can you guess the other?). Talk about passion. They celebrated like nobody’s business when the green-and-yellow won in 1994 and, in 1998, I recall the grim atmosphere when Ronaldo and company suffered a particularly bitter defeat at the hands of France. So really, me and the World Cup go way back - we just didn’t click until recently. It’s still more of a World Cup buzz than an outright fever, but I’m a relatively recent convert, having not grown up with ‘the beautiful game’ as something more than an after-school activity.

This year, I caught the first week or so of play, but thanks to work, I didn’t get to see Brazil in action - or most of the exciting games - which meant the finals provided an opportunity to make up for lost time. Too bad it was such a letdown.

If Spain and the Netherlands landed as many goals as penalty kicks, it would have been something. The one and only goal of the match by Spain (my pick for the game - Netherlands knocked Brazil out in the quarter-finals, ergo...) sort of made up for the preceding 115 minutes of back-and-forth, but overall, a disappointment, and one that was dragged out for 30 minutes longer than need be. Germany and Uruguay’s third-place decider the day before held my attention much longer and although neither club has captured my imagination, some of the precision plays by the German squad can’t be denied.

The biggest surprise of this year’s World Cup? I can’t believe I just wrote a sports column. Maybe I’ll do another one four years from now.