Lee Davy explains why he believes the land of the Stars and Stripes is the worst place in the world to watch the World Cup.
In 1982, I remember Harald Schumacher sending Patrick Battiston to hospital and not even receiving a yellow card. In 1986, I saw the worst and the best of Diego Maradona after he punched the ball into the back of the England net before scoring one of my all time favorite goals.
In 1990, I remember Gazza getting that yellow card, and the penalty misses by Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle. In 1994, I remember the embarrassment of not qualifying and not really giving a fuck because I went to Glastonbury Festival instead.
Fast forward to 1998 and I remember hating David Beckham for getting sent off, and believing Michael Owen was the best player in the world. In 2002, I remember expecting to get beat by Brazil and that’s exactly what happened.
Onto 2006, and another sending off, and penalty shoot out loss, this time against Portugal, and before you know it, we have landed in 2010 where a lack of goal line technology means we are hammered by Germany after Frank Lampard’s goal is wrongly disallowed.
With the exception of 1982, when I was a seven-year-old kid, the whole world stopped during each and every one of those tournaments. Up until 2010 it had been the single most important sporting event of my life.
The UK goes World Cup nuts. Even the hard-nosed bosses, at work, allow their employees to watch the games when they are on. Particularly, the England game.
Then I fell in love with poker.
The more poker I played, the less football I watched. I never thought it would happen, but eventually poker became more important to me than football.
But the World Cup remained something special.
2014 is the first time I have been at the World Series of Poker (WSOP), during World Cup year, and if there is one thing I will take away from the experience it is this.
THERE IS NO WORSE PLACE TO WATCH THE WORLD CUP THAN IN THE USA.
My son asked me to buy him a New York Bulls football shirt while I was in America. I drove to the biggest sports department store I have ever seen. It was like an aircraft hangar.
No football tops.
No football anything.
There was fishing, scuba diving, skateboarding and mountain climbing; but evidently football was lower down the pecking order than that.
Two years ago, when the European Championships were held, I arrived at the Rio to watch England take on Italy, and the tiny television screens were showing the Women’s Billiards final.
PartyPoker Pro, Jamie Kerstetter, is a football fanatic. During a break in a recent event she asked me what the score was during a game because she couldn’t watch it in her room because they had the golf on.
Golf?
I always assumed that the World Cup matches would always been shown for free, irrespective of what country you are in. Not in the US. This is because there is nowhere in the US that you can watch the World Cup games for free, because of a deal that Disney struck to own the rights of the 2010 & 2014 World Cup footage.
What the fuck is Walt doing sticking his oar in?
My abiding memory of the 2014 World Cup will be trying desperately to watch an illegal live stream link of the England game, with the commentary from a laundry detergent advert, and a picture of an Asian anime girl with her tits jiggling in my face.
Seriously, they are so mesmeric I missed Wayne Rooney’s goal against Uruguay, because I kept staring at them.
And don’t get me started on the American TV commentary.
What on earth is an ‘end line’? What is an MVP performance? Why do they call them Goal Shooters? Why are the goals called ‘frames?’ And when America scored their second goal against Ghana why did the commentator scream ‘It’s a deuce for the Stars and Stripes. A Deuce!”
Was he watching us whilst we were trying so desperately to watch them?
And the adverts!
Are you kidding me?
Being a guest commentator on ESPN must be the easiest job in the world. They don’t even get a chance to string two sentences together before another advert comes on about Viagra; and what on earth does a truck; two horses and a geezer wearing a Stetson have to do with getting a hard-on?
I know the Yanks love their rodeo…but that’s taking it a tad far.
Seriously, we gave this country the World Cup in 1994 so they could learn about this beautiful game, and it seems they have learned fuck all, although I will tip my hat to a few American poker pros who are trying their hardest to get into the swing of things.
Galen Hall wore his American football shirt for the Ghana game (probably purchased in Europe). Hall loved the game that much he even busted from the $5k at 2:51pm, just nine minute before his beloved Stars and Stripes were about to kick off.
When asked how he thought the USA would fare against Germany or Portugal he said, “We are likely going to get slaughtered.”
Now there’s a man who knows his football.
And then he let himself down in classic American sports statistical style.
“We are 100 to 1 to win the World Cup, but every day we are substantially worse than 100 to 1 to win our poker tournaments, so anything can happen.”
No it can’t Galen.
Two other big fans are Adam ‘Roothlus’ Levy and Byron Kaverman. Kaverman is a keen Liverpool fan, and Roothlus has his money on a German victory.
Both Levy and Kaverman have been watching their coverage on their iPads. I mean talk about an own goal here. Jeff Lisandro recently complained to me about the lack of atmosphere in the Rio.
Think about it.
They have the biggest cup competition, outside of the Olympics, going on during the WSOP. Why haven’t they got huge TV screens in every room? Surely, that would get the adrenaline running?
But no.
Not in America.
So what will my abiding memory be of the 2014 World Cup?
Thanks to Walt Disney, and the WSOP, a set of mesmeric jiggling boobies that belong to an Asian anime character that I have just fallen in love with.
