09/07/2014

Does anyone remember the first quarterfinal of the 2006 FIFA World Cup? I do. It was between the host nation, Germany, and my favourite team in the world at that time, Argentina. We watched the game together as a family, on holiday in a part of France which has since become like a second home for us.

My excitement for the game was as raw as it was uninformed (in fact, that’s not a bad description of my enthusiasm for competitive sport more broadly). I would’ve been hard put to visually identify a single player from the team, apart from those who had been around in the 1998 World Cup, and whose names I’d learnt religiously by insisting on playing every World Cup ‘98 game on our Nintendo 64 as Argentina. Even then, I only had about ten pixels to work from to figure out that Hernán Crespo had short, dark hair and at least one blue eye. And he’d grown his hair out that summer, providing me with a constant source of confusion.

Argentina played well for the first half, but Germany broke through a few times and the keeper, Roberto Abbondanzieri, was forced to make some impressive saves. In the second half, I was overjoyed to watch Robert Ayala score for Argentina, and was buzzing until around the 70 minute mark, when a kick in the chest from Miroslav Klose put Abbondanzieri out of the match. It was then Klose who put a header past Abbondanzieri’s substitute ten minutes later, and Germany went on to win in penalties (the substitute keeper didn’t save any).

I was livid. I really was. I raged to my siblings about how the Germans had planned the whole thing, that they’d identified Abbondanzieri as their stumbling block and had conceded a foul just to take him out. Also that his replacement was entirely incompetent and had lost Argentina the match. It was uninformed spectator opinion at its finest, with an energy that belied my twelve years of age. My younger siblings looked on gravely, feigning comprehension of the terrible injustice that had befallen Argentina and me, while the older ones laughed at how worked up I was getting, and rightly asked why I cared so much.

I don’t really know why. I just did. As an experience, that match has stayed with me more than any other game of sport I’d seen before, or have seen since (with the notable exception of the Round 19 Geelong/ Hawthorn game of 2012). I think this is partly because it acts as a bridge to an age where I could just jump around and shout nonsense about things, expecting all the while to be challenged about it by Edgar and Adelaide, but at the same time relishing those challenges and savouring the excitement of picking an argument on a whim and defending my opinion to the last (I usually lost). On another level, I just really liked Argentina, and was sad to see them knocked out, apparently unfairly.

On Sunday evening, Germany will face Argentina in the final of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Judging by their blistering performance against Brazil, they’ll probably win – and for the sakes of the people I have already met and befriended here, I hope they do. But part of me will insist on seeing Sunday night as an opportunity for retribution and closure eight years after the most memorable sporting defeat I’ve ever witnessed. How’s that for a conflicted viewpoint? Germany 3 – 2.

You can't argue with that.

Word of the day: fallsüchtig