Baiowolf

I watched two Euro Cups and a World Cup while living in London, and it’s a pretty fantastic city to watch sporting events like those. I was keen on getting back to London for the World Cup this year, to spend the period drinking in the pubs and watching the games. There is no doubt a great atmosphere in the London bars right now. Australia, South Africa, England and New Zealand are all in the World Cup at the same time – you can’t tell me that happens too often.

Sadly, I couldn’t make it over - partly due to work reasons, but mostly because I am broke. I invested a fair bit of savings into my Baby Portrait Studio, which hasn’t been returning the dividends I had hoped it would.

Besides from catching up with the London crowd, there were two reasons I wanted to watch the Cup in London: better times for the games (London is only an hour behind Cape Town), and people are generally more interested in the tournament.

I’m lucky to have a few Soccer fan peers here in Adelaide (mostly workmates) that I can chat about the World Cup with, but they are certainly outnumbered by those who clearly don’t give a fuck. The problem for the average Adelaidean is threefold:

1. Apathy for Soccer in general: We love Aussie Rules in the winter, and Cricket and Tennis in the Summer. For most of the population, Soccer never really enters the equation.

2. Soccerwhos?: Some locals find it kinda hard to get enthused about a tournament Australia is not usually associated with. True, Australia qualified and performed better than expected last World Cup. But from a year before I was born, up until a few months before my 29th birthday, the Socceroos did not qualify for a World Cup. The tournament just doesn’t have the same green and gold tinge as, say, the Cricket or Rugby World Cups.

3. The time difference: wasn’t too bad when the 2002 World Cup was played in Japan and Korea (half an hour behind us), the other 17 World Cups were played in South America, USA and mostly Europe. Those polar opposite time zones really didn’t help the tournaments following around these parts.

At the end of the day – fuck it. The World Cup isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, and I probably wouldn’t be that interested if I hadn’t had half a decade of Soccer saturation in London. If anything, if you have no interest in the Cup you’re saving yourself a lot of late nights. Also, not having to listen to the mosquito drone of those fucking Vuvuzelas must be pleasant.

The time difference is definitely a pain in the ass at this tournament. There are heaps of matches being played at the reasonable Australian time of 9pm – but Australia has been dumped with two 4ams and a midnighter, and the UK also has two 4ams and a midnight game. When I ask mates if they want to wait up until 4am to watch a game, they usually stare at me like I’ve asked them to drink a pint of Scott Baio.

There’s a grim irony to the schedule – I’ve watched four of the 9pm games, and a handful of midnight ones which usually consist of clashes between minor ranked teams, but then had to miss the first England game which was on at 4am on Sunday morning.

I couldn’t wait up for that one, because I had to be at the Old Lion pub at 9am to head off on the Sea and Vines Tour, a yearly Adelaide Wine Tour to McClarenvale. The day made me a little nervous, as my first beer was at 9am...and I had the Australia vs Germany game at 4am the following morning (luckily a public holiday here in Australia). I was sitting on the edge of a Volcano, staring deep into the lava of a 21 hour session. Not impossible, but throw in a six hour wine tour, and it was looking pretty fucking improbable.

The wine tour consisted of three wineries and six hours of solid red and white indulgence, followed by a bus ride back to the city (I’ll post stories and photos on that later). Our crew of about a dozen wine stained inebriants got to the Alma (who had a late licence for the game) and I was feeling nore than a little worn. I spotted Jimmy (who works at the Alma Friday and Saturdays), and we had this conversation:

Me: How much longer until the game?
Jimmy: about nine hours.
Me: ...fuck.

I instructed my crew to pace their drinking, in order to better our chances of staying up until kick off. For some reason, most of my wine soldiers took this to mean ”buy as many shots as possible”. A rambunctious South African who was with us (and whose name escapes me) bought a round of a dozen Sambucas, a dozen Tequilas, and then a dozen Jager Bombs in the space of about 20 minutes. Kate went him one better and bought a round of Flat Liners (half shot of tequila, three dashes of Tabasco, topped up with Sambuca) – it’s the kind of drink they make you have in Guantanamo Bay.

With tears in my eyes and a throat that felt like I had been blowing the Human Torch I got another time check. Eight hours until kick off.

Twas indeed a long night. I spent most of the evening berating my unpatriotic cohorts for not wanting to stay up until 4am to watch Australia play... and then I ended up leaving the pub at 3:55am, completely and utterly hammered.

After the intense surgical procedure of trying to unlock my front door, I waited for my lounge to stop spinning around the room and leapt onto it. I lay on the couch and managed to catch six minutes of the game, before passing out with the wondrous melodies of those plastic horns ringing in my ears causing me to have feverish dreams of Wasp attacks.

As it turns out, I entered my booze coma two minutes before Germany scored a goal, the first of four in a pummelling of the Australian side that even saw our star player Tim Cahill red carded (that even the German player who was fouled against had to agree shouldn’t have been a red card). After three months of gracing the covers of just about every magazine and Newspaper Australia has the ink to print, Harry Kewell didn’t even play – a fact that didn’t surprise me all that much.

Nobody was expecting us to win, but we were all kind of hoping we wouldn’t lose by that fucking much. Australia has to win their next two games (no draws) now to progress to the round of 16.

It’s looking a little shaky.