WC2006: All Hail Beckham

MAINZ (9:21am local time) -- I got dropped off at the "Fan Party" to watch the balance of England vs. Ecuador. Not a very large crowd, probably tilted 70/30 towards England fans among those expressing a preference. The advantage to that was that I could find people speaking English as their primary language. I strike up a conversation with a guy from Glasgow - and it's massively entertaining to hear a dyed-in-the-wool Scot say "Claudio Reyna" - and two girls who are studying at Leeds and haven't slept in 48 hours. The Scot is totally winding up the two girls, but they love the attention.

Free kick England. Becks threads it perfectly outside the wall and inside the post. There is much rejoicing.

After the match, I kick around a bit with a ball my Scottish friend has found while the sky gets increasingly darker. I take this as my cue to leave, but only manage about half a block when the skies open up.

By this point, I've caught up with the two English girls, who seem to think they might melt Or maybe that their makeup is going to run. We decide to share a cab. Now it's starting to hail, for the third time since I got here.

Naturally, the cabbie doesn't speak English. We try to get him to take us to the closer destination first, but as we pass the Hbf, I'm pretty sure he's gotten it wrong. When we get to the girls' stop, he writes down that it's 30km to where I'm going, so I tell him to just bring me to the Hbf, and I'll take my chances with the rain from there.

I guess it doesn't count as a real trip until you're caught in the pouring rain - and hail - and have to contend with a cabbie who doesn't speaking English, with barely enough local currency to get where you're going, only you're not even 100% sure where that is. If you can deal with that, you're clearly a world traveller, right?

After arriving at the apartment soaking wet, I had my hosts take a picture, joined them for dinner, and watched the slugfest between the Dutch and the Portugese. If US-Italy was such a black eye for soccer, I can't imagine what will be said about this match, which had a much, much nastier tone to go with four red cards and too many yellows to count. It's a vicious cycle, because the only way for the referee to try to gain control of the match is with more whistles and more cards, when clearly that ends up only making things worse.

So the U.S. wasn't the worst team in the tournament, and did not have the ugliest match of the month, either. The silver linings just keep on coming!