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Day 19

THE IMPACT

All day long it’s soccer. In the bars, cafes and hotels, nothing else was being talked about or watched. As I walked along the city streets, EVERY bar, café and store had a television playing a game on it.

People from all walks of life are in Germany to enjoy the world’s greatest game. I met an older man on the train the other day from Brazil who has been to the last NINE World Cups. He was showing me all his tickets that he proudly had laminated and hanging around his neck as his daughter, who didn’t speak much English, helped translate my Spanish (which I hope made some sense) into Portuguese for him. .

Can you say Brazil without a smile?

For everybody else, those three group games were the fight of their lives. For the Kings, those couple of weeks are just the beginning of a tournament that always seems to last them an entire month. Their quarterfinal match-up with France could be a tough one. The Brazilians no doubt remember losing in the 1998 Final to a France team who took advantage of an ailing Ronaldo’s ineffectiveness to capture their first World Cup ever.

I’m seriously bummed that the referees and cards are overshadowing what is otherwise a very exciting World Cup and that many quality players are missing crucial games due to FIFA’s two yellow card suspension rule. You can seemingly get a yellow card for breathing too heavily in this tournament and the game is only killing itself by having quality players miss crucial games..

Nothing like a large beer and a shot of culture.

I think that people (most of all the referees) are forgetting that it’s the referee’s job to keep the game UNDER control, not to CONTROL the game. With all the cards being issued, you’d think that every game is a total bloodbath, and that simply isn’t the case.

I’m sure FIFA will address these issues and make some changes within the next 100 years to keep the referees from becoming the center of attention. They also need to make sure that the best players in the world aren’t being out of monumental matches for minor infractions.