Day -738. WorldCup2018
Every World Cup little booths pop up around Toronto selling flags of
every country in the World Cup, plus of course the Canadian flag for
those people who seem determined to say, "I a Canadian and am going to
stand up to all you Portuguese/Italian/Brazilian/English etc flag waving
soccer supporters", even though that Canadian is probably of
Portuguese/Italian/Brazilian/English etc. descent. But these parking lot
salesman have also popped up this year with the Copa America and the
Euros going on this month. And of course there are more countries taking
part in both, with it being a special Copa and the Euros having now
expanded to 24 teams. More countries, more flags to sell to immigrants
from the participating countries and Canadians of descent from said
countries. I'm sure Albanian and Icelandic Canadians never thought the
day would come when they would be able to participate in the
flag-on-the-car fun. And for Hungarian and Northern Irish Canadians,
their last participation in a World Cup was before the advent of this
enterprising little business.
There are eight country flags
missing from all these stalls, those of the participants in the OFC
Nations Cup. I may suggest it to my local man in the parking lot, but I
do expect him to question whether New Caledonia and Vanuatu are actually
countries, and that they play football. "Small islands in the Pacific?
Little rocks? How do they have a big enough flat surface to play on?"
One of group of island nations gave another multi-island country a good
old hiding at the OFC cup. Hosts PNG walloped Samoa 8-0 and they were
in need of a good bumping up of their goal difference. With that win and
the draw between Tahiti and New Caledonia, PNG topped their group and
moved onto to the semifinals. New Caledonia join them and Tahiti, while
eliminated from this competition, will move on to round 3 of World Cup
qualifying.
The eight goals that PNG scored were eight times the
number of goals scored in all 3 matches at the Copa yesterday.
Brazil-Ecuador and Costa Rica-Paraguay were scoreless and Peru beat
Haiti 1-0. Exhilarating stuff. I'm sure the Americans are so happy they
offered to host this football spectacle. Kissing sister in-laws has been
probably mentioned a few times already. So far today Venezuela beat
Jamaica.....wait for it....1-0. And Mexico have just gone 1-0 up against
Uruguay. It's 10 minutes in so I'm sure there are a lot more goals in
that one. Luis Suarez is not playing, so maybe not.
I usually
have a funny World Cup memory on Sunday. Today, in honour of the
forgotten about OFC Nations Cup it is from the Confederations Cup in
2013. Here is Tahiti's historic goal against Nigeria and the incredible
celebrations that followed. It was an amazing moment of glory for them
and for the goal scorer, Jonathan Tehau. I shouldn’t remind you that
this was Tehau's second goal of the match. He had earlier scored an own
goal. It was 3-0 when he scored at the right end and Nigerian ended up
winning 6-1. Small details that shouldn’t spoil their fun.
As an interesting side note, Jonathan Tehau was the oldest of 3 brothers in the squad and they also had a cousin on the team.
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