Day -560 WorldCup2018
Oh what a night, it was last night. That Toronto FC epic win will be remembered for a long time. Yes, we will tell our grandchildren about it.
My story will be about not being able to be there, and the excitement of planning how to watch it on TV at home. I knew I was going to be competing with the rest of the family watching Survivor when the second half started. "Survivor, the grandchildren will say, we love it. Season number 387 is the best! And did you see that alliance? Can you believe it?" "Stop, this was my story!" So my plan included setting up the laptop at halftime, connected to the second TV, and the obligatory commercials at the beginning of an online stream played. All good, the second TV is bigger anyway. It was the first TV until we decided the second TV fit the space better, so the number 1 got relegated.
All good, until the warning popped up: "you should plug your laptop into a power source RIGHT NOW or it will lose power and then you will need to restart and go through all the online stream set up again and in that time you may miss a goal or a sending off and you'll want to check Twitter and waste time and then possibly miss Giovinco taking on the entire Montreal defence and scoring the goal of the century". Yes, you know that warning. Off I ran up the stairs from the basement to find the magical wire, knowing I probably only had about 30 seconds. I was doomed but, like Toronto FC, I believed. No power cord. Not here where it should be, not there where it could have been if I didn't put it where it should have been. And not even there where I knew it wasn't anyway but in desperation you hope that by some miracle (or because of an ageing brain) it made it's way to where it definitely couldn't or shouldn't be. Left it at work. Great.
Plan B. Follow on Twitter as I have with Aston Villa for many Saturday's now. No, not tonight. That's not good enough. Plan C? Convince the ladies that this is history in the making, it may never happen again. Survivor will be on next week. No, Wednesday is Survivor night after all. That won't work. Plan D will do: watch on PC which is quite close to Survivor TV. No volume. How can I watch football with no volume? Yes, I found a pair of headphones in my work bag a couple of days ago which I didn't know existed. Perfect. It was actually very good, a better picture then the slight distortion that happens when I project the laptop screen onto a TV.
TFC scored the go-ahead-on-aggregate goal just as Jeff P snuffed out the latest flame and told the poor, exhausted, in-need-of-a shower (but the girls still have make-up...huh?) contestant that the tribe had indeed spoken and he could go off and have a shower and shave and come back next week to sit on the jury, looking completely unrecognisable from the person who just took the lonely walk down the dark trail to Survivor oblivion. Now I could watch it on TV. Not quite. First we have to stay tuned for scenes from next week.
And then it was done and without any opposition we all watched, and all enjoyed, the end of the most glorious Toronto FC night ever. Until that cold night on December 10th, that is.
Aston Villa, all that time spent watching you on TV and listening to nerve-wracking radio commentaries, they were all great, and there will be more but....And, Maltese football, all those Sunday afternoons at The Stadium (and probably cracking jokes at some point about North Americans and 'soccer'), the no-atmosphere stadium atmosphere was unique, but.....This Toronto FC thing is here, I'm part of it, the excitement is real. And I'm loving it.
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