FIFA

Even being born and brought up in India, I was never much a fan of Cricket. That guilt had its own space in my heart. However, I used to watch it when Sachin was playing, particularly against Pakistan. That too, when I was a child. I remember, once in my college, Ind-Pak match was showed in Auditorium, but I was busy watching FRIENDS with laptop on my stomach. So, the point is I was not interested in Cricket. I had few sports fanatic friends. One of them was boosting, once, about some match. Surprisingly, it was not about Cricket which made me curious. Later I came to know that he was talking about Football. Apparently, this world cup finale was watched by 46.4% of world population. This is quite a big number. This statistics made me wonder how much I know about Football. All I knew was

1) There are 11 players from each side and all of them are in field at a time, unlike Cricket.
2) Soccer was the American name for Football.
3) There is this great player called Zidan who ruined his team's chance to win finale over verbal fight with opponent.
4) There are 3 great players in Football Realm, whose names are quite similar and confusing. Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Rivaldo.
4) I have seen all GOAL movies.

The basic indifference or you can say hatred, I perceived for football during my Engineering days. There were these cool dudes around who used to play FIFA on the laptops. I tried to imitate their Coolness, but I failed terribly even to play football on laptop. There were 2 sets of 4 keys which we have to manage simultaneously. Due to lack of ambidextrous key strokes, I gave up much earlier than I anticipated. That sulkiness took me away from Football. Suddenly, few days ago, I saw 30 days to go, 7 days to go, kind of status of Facebook and I decided, lets take this chance to understand football better. Why should I just not follow FIFA 2014. 'This is a great learning opportunity', screamed someone inside me. So, here I open the FIFA official website and checks Match Schedules. There are many matches everyday, obviously!! Now I will have to choose few teams and follow all their matches.I am choosing Spain(I have a perception that Spain is that to Football what India is to Cricket), Portugal (Christiano Ronaldo belongs to this team and I follow him on Facebook so my mind is kind of Brainwashed) as big teams, otherwise if I choose a small team and if they fail to qualify in final rounds, I will be heartbroke, pun intended. I will also follow Russia (because I don't want to follow U.S.) and Ecuador (because this is one bad ass country who gave refuge to Assange and Snowden). Today is the first match and I am excited. By the way do you know on which channel are they broadcasting the matches??....[after telepathically listening to bad words from football fan readers].....I am just Kidding!!

Let the dice roll..I mean football!!