Penalty

I don't know what to say. But not in the way you think I don't know what to say. There are so many things that the Aus v Ita result brings to mind. That everything from here on in is a cliché, that sport really brings out the ugliest in people, whether it's in victory or defeat, and that now we have to endure the overblown aftermath of the bandwagon crashing at full speed. I really don't like sport. I used to play Australian rules football and didn't like the kind of person it was turning me into, so I stopped. I remember watching games as a teenager, being on the edge of my seat, yelling at the TV and lashing out in frustration when things didn't go my team's way. Then I woke up to how pointless it was. When there's 12 or 16 teams in a competition, come the end of the season it's a pretty large proportion of people who are going to be disappointed. I do like playing sport though, and apart from the physical benefits of it, for me sport became a mostly mental exercise, an exercise in getting over myself. I used to taunt the opposition, give lip and make snide comments. Then I realised I didn't like being that kind of person. It became a pursuit of being able to disconnect myself from the situation, an exercise in self-control and being in my own head and rather than concentrating on 'the game', concentrating purely on the execution of the manoeuvres I was performing. Sport should be about skill; not about rivalry. Have you ever seen the T-shirts they sell on The Onion? They have this great knack of distilling a message to its basic rhetorical structure, a method of comedy (or parody, I think) that I find rather clever and amusing. Anyway, there was one that said "The sporting team from my area is superior to the sporting team from your area." It kind of sums up the pointlessness of anyone supporting a team. I mean, so what if it's the Australian team? I don't know Mark Viduka any better than I know David Beckham or that Brazilian player that looks like Coco from Fame. So for me to support Australia is rather silly. I know someone who once knew someone who played for Italy, so really, I should have been supporting them when you think about the connections we have to the teams we follow. That said, I'm not going to stop watching world cup matches now. Coming up over the next week and a bit is going to be some of the best football anyone is going to see for the next four years, and even if Australia had lost against Uruguay, I'd still be looking forward to a lot less sleep over the same period because this is one of the few sports I enjoy watching. But I don't enjoy the news coverage; I don't enjoy the interviews with countless experts saying the same inane things over and over; I don't enjoy the attitude of fans, gloating in victory and becoming bitter (or blaming the ref) in defeat. I don't want to face work tomorrow knowing that some people are going to do one and some people are going to be doing the other. Sure, I'm having my own little rant about it here but I'm not accosting people in the office kitchen making them listen to me. And though I say I don't care, what I think I hate the most was that my heart was racing when that penalty hit the back of the net. So to qualify my earlier comment, I don't hate sport. I just don't like the fans. Or some of the players (yeah, the kind of players I used to be like). I'm going to keep watching world cup games but just not tell anyone about it because I think fans are what really ruin sport for me, so I just don't want to be one. I miss running (damn ankle). Non-comptetive running, when it's just you, the road, and whatever's banging around in your head at the time. Now that is sport.