I may have had a break- through.Some of you know that I don't really get soccer. Going to games is fun, but watching on TV is rather dull. People run around, the ball hardly ever goes in, this is not great entertainment.
Last night, I finally got angry at someone for blocking my view of soccer on TV.
I was at the Amstel Stroom, the closest bar to our apartment (I love it when Casey's coworkers decide to go there). The projection TV was showing the first round of the Euro Cup: Netherlands vs. Italy.
For those of you not into soccer tournaments, here's a little about how they work. Teams get put into groups, and the groups play each other. The winning teams from each group moves on to the next round, and the losing teams do not. For this round of this tournament, the groups are four teams, and the best two move on. Makes sense?
OK. The Dutch team is in a group with Italy (who won the World Cup two years ago), France (who finished second in the World Cup two years ago), and Romania (who is fine but not favored). There are several good Dutch players now, but being put in this group weakened their odds of going all the way by quite a bit.
Yesterday (Monday) were two games of interest: earlier in the evening was Romania vs. France, for which France was favored. That game ended at a 0-0 tie. (See, this is why I can't get into soccer. Two hours of running around and sweating in summer heat, and not a single goal.) Anyway, the uneventful game had a surprising outcome, which is actually good for Holland's chances of moving on. (It's not likely that they can do better than Italy AND France, so if Romania helps keep one of them down...) I didn't watch the game, but Casey said that the Romanian players were doing a lot of diving (faking injuries to get the ref to call penalties on the other team). Sucks for France, since they seem to have cleaned up a bit since their diving performances in the World Cup. Anyway.
The second game was the aforementioned Nederland vs. Italia. I'm not sure what I expected... I guess for Italy to do a lot of diving (like in the World Cup) and for the final score to be something like 1-0 Italy.
I'll spare you my amateur game recap. Suffice to say that the Dutch team won, 3-0. There were many shots on goal from both sides, so it was an exciting match, but in the end, the Dutch team seemed to have far more energy than the Italian one, and they dominated much of the game. The average age of the players has a lot to do with that, I think.
The atmosphere in the pub was fun. Lots of orange, an assortment of noisemakers, and one guy had face paint to share and walked around at breaks decorating others with Dutch flags. Then a drunk Brian Dennehy-looking guy showed up to cheer far too loudly, to the whole bar's amusement. (I have to say, I was impressed with how positive even the old drunk guy's cheers were. "Come on Holland! Yeah, good, Kuyt! Good, van Nistelrooy! One more goal!" I can boo the Yankees with the best of them, but I still appreciated that the crazy loud drunk guy managed to stay positive most of the time instead of starting up anti-Italy chants or whatnot. The majority of his cheering would not have been out of place at a youth soccer game.)
Anyway, that's the story of the day I finally got into soccer. I'm SO watching the rest of the Euro Cup. Hup, Holland, hup!
