The love.

Day -12 WorldCup2018

I love the World Cup. If it isn't obvious by how many times I've mentioned it, the fact that I've dedicated time everyday for the past 983 days to write about it, and 365 days plus the duration of Brazil 2014 before that, might be a good indicator.

But first a quick aside to get this out of the way. I read a suggestion today that all pre-World Cup friendlies should be an hour long. Once they go beyond an hour they all fall flat as substitution after substitution seems to make all the players forget who they are actually playing with. The irony, of course, is that the players sent on are very often the ones that the coaches want to have one more look at but very often, not always, the players look like they are going into a match where nobody seems to really care anymore. What I find most amusing is when a fringe player (the ones who will probably not make it) are sent on in the last 10 minutes. Really? By then everybody else is looking at the scoreboard clock willing it to count down to the end and the poor player coming on must be thinking, "why? what am I here for?"

I feel this is a special one. Russia as a venue has it's controversies but the football and the fans are what make it. Maybe it's because of the time I've spent, the emotional investment for 983 days that make me feel like the end of this road is going to be the start of something wonderful.

I loved Brazil in 1982 and Marco Tardelli's celebration, Maradona's win in 1986, everything but the football about Italia '90, the enormity (literally, in everything) at USA '94, France's huge win at home in '98, Ronaldo's revival and redemption in 2002, France's unexpected almost run to victory in 2006, Spain's finally-making-it-happen moment in 2010 and the fun of Brazil '14 plus the uniqueness of how and where I watched the final.

I love that I live in a place where everybody seems to be World Cup crazy and this is especially so because it is so surprising. When I was first moved to Toronto I imagined I would be struggling to find any interest in football. That worry slowly diminished as the strong following of the Premier League and Serie A became apparent. During South Korea/Japan 2002 it was obvious what a great city this was to watch the World Cup.

Do you want to do the samba with the Brazilians, dance with the Colombians, shout at the TV with the Italians or Portuguese, be down at the pub with the English, march with the Koreans? You can do it all. Across the city all 32 countries are represented somewhere, be it a street of bars or one room in a restaurant, everybody is looking for a reason to celebrate their country of origin, of descent, through football. .

We have NHL hockey, NBA basketball and MLB baseball here but nothing gets as many people talking as the World Cup does. That was the reason for my daily updates in 2014: a request to know what was going on everyday from somebody who didn't have time to watch the football but still wanted to be part of the conversation.

It is for all these reasons that I find myself able to look through the moral dilemmas about Russia hosting. I don't think about the politicians or the stories attached to them and why this is happening in Russia. I think about the children in Nizhny Novgorod and Saransk, Kazan and Samara, Ekaterinburg and Kaliningrad, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don and Sochi, and St. Petersburg and Moscow who are counting the days that the World Cup comes to their part of the world, when they will be begging their mums and dads to take them to watch training sessions or to hang around hotels to catch a glimpse of the stars. And the lucky ones will be looking at their tickets everyday, wishing for the moment to come that they get to go to the stadium and then hoping that the day never ends. And the bus drivers and taxi owners, the waiters and bell boys, the bakery owners and shop attendants, all of them so proud and excited that their city is going to be part of this.

Too romantic? Are there problems in these cities on which this money could have been better spent? Probably. But if I was one of those children in one of those cities, it would be my heaven.