What do they know of soccer who solely World Cup watch?

There are a bunch of those that trigger immense heartburn to Indian soccer followers: Those that don’t observe the sport at another time however abruptly crop up with opinions throughout the Fifa World Cup. The World Cup-only soccer followers. I’m one in every of them.

When it’s not the World Cup, we don’t know what’s occurring – which participant went to which membership, which coach obtained fired, and who performs the place. Not solely that, we scoff on the silliness of Ronaldo vs Messi social media threads, we decide 20-year-olds who by no means having left their hometown in India applicable the working-class historical past of Liverpool fan as their very own, and we make jokes like “If one is known as AC Milan, why is the opposite membership known as Inter Milan as an alternative of DC Milan?” and “Why did the NRI commit a foul? To get a inexperienced card.”

As a result of we solely watch soccer throughout World Cup, our frames of reference are solely these few weeks. So, Messi is the man who lastly received a Cup and Ronaldo as soon as winked after getting Wayne Rooney red-carded, and David Beckham married a Spice Lady.

The storied historical past every soccer legend has is invisible to us as a result of we don’t observe the sport when it’s actually performed, within the skilled leagues of the world. Nonetheless that doesn’t stop us from leaping proper in with opinions. In days passed by, we at the least needed to make an effort, purchase the particular journal points earlier than the World Cup and browse up on participant profiles, however now we simply Google earlier than we tweet.

And even that will be tremendous if we additionally didn’t make soccer about cricket. Since cricket is the factor we actually observe, our expertise of soccer is parsed via cricket. So we’ll say issues like “England is the India of soccer World Cup. Has the richest home league, typically selects stars previous their prime, fanatic fan base, can’t appear to win the trophy” or “Croatia is the New Zealand of soccer World Cup, strong crew which does the small issues proper.” Very profound, or so we expect.

Present individuals like me the purple card. If we need to watch the sport, we should always sit on the sidelines quietly and accomplish that. Solely these actually devoted all 12 months, yearly, have the suitable to verbally dribble.

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