World Cup Day 1

Some early thoughts on the World Cup

-        Didn’t watch the “opening ceremony” – but read about Robbie Williams giving the middle finger.  Why the hell is Robbie Williams performing in Russia?  What a sellout – one of the American articles I read called him a “washed-up English pop star” which I found quite amusing.

-        I think this is going to be a bit like the Beijing Olympics, with extremely controlled imagery and coverage to make Russia look great.  I’ll be very surprised if there is any (reported) crowd trouble or suchlike.

-        Russia vs Saudi Arabia?  Hardly the most inspiring of opening games – one crappy team thrashing an even more crappy team.  It will be curious to see how the home side does during the tournament since all their players are probably on state-sanctioned performance enhancers.

-        I was having a look through the schedule – not exactly many must see group games.  It looks like there are more bad teams this year than in previous years – and they want to expand the World Cup to 48 teams in the future.  Ridiculous.

-        We already know that Russia bought this World Cup.  But their group seems suspiciously easy – makes you wonder if the group draw was also fixed.  Playing Saudi Arabia at the end of Ramadan seems even more suspicious.

-        The American coverage of the World Cup is going to be awful.  The announcing team for the first game were American and not very good.  I also read that a lot of the games airing here are not even going to use stadium commentators, but commentators watching the game from a monitor in the US.  That absolutely sucks.  For the last World Cup, they brought in some of the best English commentators and it made for critically-lauded coverage – a different network this time and apparently they are using predominantly mediocre American commentators.  I wonder if this is because the US didn’t qualify so they don’t want to shell out more than they have to.  I’m almost tempted to watch the Spanish language coverage.

-        Hopefully I’ll still be in the US, and living in or near one of the cities hosting World Cup games, in 2026.  I want to watch a game – even if it is between 2 bad teams.  Still so much better than a MLS game.