Reichweite heraus zur Schale - <i> the Cup is within reach</i>

Over the extended weekend (courtesy the off on Labour day), I got to catch a lot of football centric programs on TV, including (hold your breath) one on Discovery channel! It is quite a surprise that an American channel is taking fondly to football. Somehow the lead up to this world cup seems bigger than that to any of the previous editions. This program on Discovery was a profile on the Brazilian teams of the past, covering both masters and duds. Strangely, the program only covered the world cups up till 1970, missing out on a few special occasions, the biggest of which is undoubtedly their win in 2002, when the Brazilians finally got to redeem themselves and shake off the nightmare they endured on that Paris night in 1998 (more on this program in a later post).

I initially took to this Discovery program with subdued enthusiasm despite football being one of my prime passions. An hour later, I was completely awash with emotions (the game can do that to you). Consequently, I spent most the next day (Saturday) seeing other soccer (sounds blasphemous eh.?) programs on ESPN - a few were official FIFA films of different world cups, one a compilation of the top 20 World cup moments (this was amazing), and another, a program on the drama called penalties. My evening was consummated on seeing Chelsea majestically waltz past ManU in their premiership title defense.

Surfeited with so much of the beautiful game, I felt inspired to write about it. Till that moment I had no intention of doing anything of that kind, but as I said, the game does really reach into you, want to make you reach out and talk to others about it. So starting today, I regularly plan to pen the odd word about football here, culminating with the finals in June (I am sure once the tournament is over, I will feel despondent, gloomy and with no visible means to fill the sudden void I would experience; but that’s for later to worry about). At the moment I have some topics in mind to write about; not the usual news update kind of posts, but perhaps more reflective and personal in nature. So hold on, the wait is almost over. Ole ole ole ole…ole…ole….

PS: The Bable Fish translator apart from being a pretty useful tool, is also an ingenuous source of entertainment. All you need to do is translate your text from English to a foreign language and then translate it back - a few laughs are guaranteed. For instance I got the title of this post by converting “Reach out to the cup” into German. When a re-translation of this into English is attempted, you get the very comical– “Range out to the bowl.”