World Cup Diary

Day 1 Friday 9th June

I was having a German dream when I woke up this morning. I was seated in a dark early morning room with some of my friends from the laboratory. In front of us was a floor to ceiling window shut off by a heavy blue curtain. To the side of this, in the corner of the room was an imposing wooden cabinet with a large television on top. It loomed over us like a master or like a scoreboard perhaps. We had just begun to watch Herzog’s masterpiece Aguirre, the wrath of God. The haunting music of Popol Vuh began from nowhere, from the pre-dawn light blooming outside, and it seemed to be coming through the room and through the dream into day. The ant-like procession of conquistadors down the mountain seemed to carry the sound with them. The action began and the characters began to speak in German which none of us could understand. I stopped the film and lost myself in the matrix of buttons on the remote trying to activate the subtitles. There was row after row of blue buttons on the device that confused me and a set them that activated different languages: ALE, ESP, ITA, ENG, JAP. I didn’t know which one to select. Which language would we all understand?

It seemed almost like a predictive dream since I spent about half an hour lost on the Deutsche Bahn website trying to find where my eTicket was, wishing the website wasn’t trying to offer me so many services in German.

The first thing I noticed to be different about the day was the increase in the number of ‘nation’ football shirts on the street and not the usual Barça uniform. By the time I was one stop inside the metro I had seen a Dutch, an Argentinian and a Brazilian shirt. Being Catalonia, there was of course a paucity of España officionados.

The people I work with weren’t really interested in the World Cup. I’d organised a sweepstakes at work, the first one that they’d seen. It was exciting, but a l ittle confusing. People kept asking me who was playing that day, but nobody was going to watch any of the matches. They were all going to play basketball. In the end, the first game kicked off while I was on a train rushing to a bar. I sat next to a man in an Ecuador shirt who seemd to have an air of contentment and pride. I made it to a bar just as Wanchope equalised for the Ticos.

I watched the game on my own having a strange conversation in Spanish with two guys from the Dominican Republic who worked behind the bar. They thought Brazil would win, maybe Germany or England. While I watched they wheeled in a new giant flat screen. Television sales must go through the roof every four years.

Klisnmann reminded me a bit of Arsene Wenger or a bus driver going to the opera. He didn’t seem like he lived in California. The crowd too seemed strange, like there was an applause machine lighting up at different times. But it’s a strange way to live, watching people like this. You see 22 men, usually less in each frame, who’s identity you can establish. You have a green earth bordered by words: Toshiba, McDonalds, FIFA, Coca-Cola. The names of our enemies. Behind that is the crowd who for most of the match we see like pixels, like units of colour, like light passing through leaves on a tree in a breeze. You don’t see many faces, just a rustling change, or maybe pockets of colour fluttering a little. They seem so peaceful out there, only watching.

Eight goals in the first two games. Some start. But it seems again like Aguirre: 32 teams of men parading down the mountain, but in the end, there is only Kinski and hundreds of monkeys as nature reclaims its territory. I’m not sure what sort of omen this is.

- Ramon