World Cup Fever

Vamos España!

We’re Socis and Culers and love Barça. And this year, the Spanish national team (“La Roja”) was HEAVY Catalunya, and had eight players from FCB (should have been nine, poor Fermín!), so we were all-in on the World Cup. Plus, the fact that Real Madrid had zero players on the team made it so we were never even conflicted.

So, we were obsessed watching every game (except one — more on that in a sec), cheering for the players we love to watch. And of course, we all created a bracket with Spain as the eventual winner (our brackets). We were all right about that!, but Cameron did win overall.

We watched games from home, with friends, from pubs in London, and from the countryside in Ireland at sunset.

The one fail was the semi-final against France. We booked our flight home from Ireland before we knew the schedule, and took off just before the match started. Try as we might, we could not get a signal for even a score for most of the flight (airplane mode off!), but when our phones finally did ding with us up 1-0, then 2-0, we were high-fiving across aisles, and with people we’d never met. We watched the game end at the Barcelona luggage carousel, where every screen had turned to the game, and shouted our excitement with fellow travelers.

Then, the final. Our normal setup has always been streaming on a VPN, but we realized that we often hear others cheer before we see it happen, and that would not do for the World Cup Final. Especially with Argentinian neighbors. So we connected to an antenna and tuned to a local channel. We kept a backup in English, which, with the latency, was like an instant replay whenever we wanted.

And of course, despite the dark arts and whining of Argentina, we came out on top 1-0. To make it even better, Kate’s favorite player from FCB, Ferran Torres (who she thinks is so handsome!), scored the winner. She literally threw her arm out cheering! First time I’ve ever seen that particular injury. We held off a late flurry with Cameron’s favorite, Pau Cubarsí, showing last-minute heroics. We jumped. We screamed. We headed out to the streets where it was pandemonium.

Spain and Catalunya have a very complicated relationship (some Catalan friends were cheering for Argentina & Messi), but on this night, in this city, after this win from Barça players, it was all about the Spanish team! Lilly and I headed to Plaça de Catalunya, where we ran into friends of course, and Cameron toured the whole city, celebrating with friends ’til past 3 am.

Oh boy, was that fun!