Watch it all. Watch to the end.

Day -790. WorldCup2018

What a football match. It's days like this when you thank football for being able to be so exhilarating, for being so edge-of-your-seat exciting, the possibility of such an incredible turnaround in emotions, culminating in a injury time winner when all seemed lost 30 minutes earlier for the winning team.

It's days like this when I wish I didn't stop paying attention at the 60 minute mark. TV went off at half-time. Liverpool were losing 2-0 against Borussia Dortmund, 3-1 on aggregate in the Europa Cup quarterfinal. With so much going on at home it didn't seem worth having the TV on. The second best option, internet, gave me a flicker of excitement: 1-2. Should I go back to watching? No. Soon after it was 1-3 and I mentally turned off. So imagine my disbelief when half an hour later I checked the result: 4-3, 4 bloody 3! "Amazing", "match of the season", "an epic", "we have witnessed one of the great comebacks of all time". And on and on it went, all those online commentators torturing me, reminding me that no proper football fan ever stops watching until the final whistle.

There is precedent, of sorts; events that fall into the category of "great matches missed or not watched until end". First there's the comical one. And, ok, it wasn't great by any means. It was many years ago, long enough ago that I didn't have live football on TV at home, or internet at home, but recent enough that we had BBC on cable. I watched the sports news on BBC on a Sunday night eager to hear Aston Villa's result. A loss. 3-2, if I remember correctly. Ah well, it wasn't a result that made much of a difference in what was probably another unremarkable season. But news of a win is still better than that of a loss. Never mind. About 5 days later, I happened to be online and came across a mention of Villa's equaliser deep into stoppage time, a 3-3 draw, in their last match. BBC, you were a bit quick there. It's not over until the final whistle. Still it was a draw that probably didn't make much of a difference in what was probably another unremarkable season. But news of a draw would have been a little bit better than that of a loss.

Then there was the other Liverpool epic. No, not that one. The Istanbul one. Yes, there's been a few Liverpool epics. Apparently there was one earlier today. See it anybody? This was a few years after the Aston Villa loss-that-was-a-draw. Now we had TV that had live European football but lived in a country in a time zone that dictated that massive European matches, the Champions League final being one of them, happened in the middle of a work day. It was the time of VHS players and my lovely wife volunteered to record the Liverpool-Milan final while I taught an older gentleman or lady, who had absolutely no knowledge of the significance of the events taking place in Istanbul, how to get more speed on their serve. It was quite obvious, that try as hard as he or she would, there was no way that more speed was happening. But as I peeked at my watch to help imagine what stage the match was at, I offered numerous words of encouragement and was positive about the value of direction over speed. At some point a 15 year old student of mine appeared at the back fence and had fingers held up in each hand. I quickly realised, but not quickly enough, what he was doing. I shooed him away. The poor kid, knowing that I was a football fan, was trying to tell me the score of the big match I was missing. But what he hadn't yet learned was that you do not tell a football fan(atic) the result if they are recording it to watch later. But the damage had already been partly done, because even though I pretended that I didn't understand his signing so that I wouldn't spoil it for myself, I had a pretty good idea of what had happened. I got home to a smile and two VHS tapes. "It was really good," she said, "but I needed two tapes". The first half was watched in fast forward. 3-0, Milan. So was the second half, but I knew something incredible had happened so there were more periods of normal speed watching. 3-1, 3-2, 3-3. Extra time. Penalties. Liverpool win. An epic. I didn't watch it , really. I watched a taping of an epic. A big difference, if you know, or have an inkling of the result. A big part of the thrill is gone. Great kid, fantastic tennis player with am amazing coach. But I still remember him for standing at the fence with his three fingers on each hand.

But this is a World Cup countdown. So here is the World Cup entry in the aforementioned category. In the 1982 World Cup, France and Germany played out a classic semifinal. It was close, it went to extra time, France were up 3-1 in extra time and Germany came back to win on penalties. Michel Platini summed it up: "That was my most beautiful game. What happened in those two hours encapsulated all the sentiments of life itself. No film or play could ever recapture so many contradictions and emotions. It was complete. So strong. It was fabulous." It was, indeed, an epic. It was also remembered for the shameful tackle by the German goalkeeper, Schumacher, on Patrick Battiston, who was knocked unconscious and lost a couple of teeth. Incredibly, Schumacher was not sent off. I have written and spoken about this incident and this match many times. But, it is a memory brought about through descriptions of the events by my brothers and father and through highlights watched later. I did not watch it. That was my first World Cup and I watched as much as I could. But I do not remember the reasons for not watching that night. I thought it was because I had a school exam the next day. However, I checked the date: July 8th. No school. I probably had to be up early to learn how to get more speed on my serve.

There were more, so many more times when I thought how did I miss that? But France-Germany is the one that stands out. Russia 2018 is going to be a challenge, again. Unless I was there.