Hello Scorums,
Before I start with my first world cup, I would like to introduce where I am from. I am from Nepal, many of you may not know about Nepal. Nepal is a developing country in South Asia, in the lap of giant Himalayas, we have very minimal presence sporting events, and same goes for football. Sadly I have to mention that our national team is very poor, and we are ranked very low in FIFA, to be precise it is161 currently. But the craze is very high in Nepal, unlike other South Asian countries where people are crazy about cricket.
I was born in 1991 in a small village in central Nepal. I knew about football very early when I was around 5-6 years of age. We used to play football with home-made balls from clothes. It was very late when I first touch the real football or watch the real football in the stadium or on television.
We didn’t have a television in our house, nor anybody in my village. We used to have a radio in our house, I first heard the term “FIFA World Cup” on the radio when I was 11. It was 2002 FIFA World Cup held in Korea/Japan, it was for the first time in Asia. Because of this, there was the immense craze of football during that time in Nepal. We had already started talking about the football, taking the name of the countries and some popular player, fixtures, and results. Besides the football, the other thing people were crazy about was Ronaldo hair-cut. Many people already had copied his haircut in Nepal too. The other big news was about Asian team South Korea going to the semifinal of the world cup.
30th June was the final, and it was Sunday. Sunday is working day in Nepal, but 4 of my friends planned to go to watch football in a nearby town and leave the school behind. I was in grade 6 during that time. We have heard that during the semi-final, there was an arrangement of television in that town for watching the live match for the public. We walked for an hour to reach there, and we talked about football while in the way. Brazil and Germany were playing in the final. We discussed who each of us will support. I was supporting Germany along with one of my friend because I knew the name of the country from my history book but never heard of name “Brazil” before. Two of my other friends were supporting Brazil because they have heard how good Brazil. There was countable player's name that we could pronounce listening from the radio. Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, Roberto Carlos and Cafu from Brazil used to be a household name for us. German player was less known, and we only knew few of them. Oliver Khan was the one everybody knew, and we used to say "Goalkeeper be like Oliver Khan" every time we play.
We reached there an hour early, but the preparation to watch final was all set. We stayed there for the start of the match. There were around 40 people watching television (I think it was 32-inch television) with us. Since we were smallest, we were at the front. Among us, a majority were Brazil supporter, and a couple of them had Ronaldo’s haircut too.
I don’t remember nicely how the entire game went. The guy with that strange haircut(Ronaldo) was playing very well and came close to scoring many times but German Keeper made good saves. In the second half, that man scored twice giving Brazil their fifth world cup, giving Brazil their fifth World Cup. On the receiving end was the one German player whose name was familiar to me – Oliver Khan couldn’t win for his country. Brazil won the cup, and many people were happy there and they danced and celebrated the victory. They hold a rally shouting the name of Brazil and Ronaldo. But for me, I was happy too for watching my first football match live, but not that happy for Brazil winning the world cup.
This was my first world cup, but before I bid goodbye, I would like to present a highlights of the match and summary of 2002 FIFA World Cup:
- Winner: Brazil. (Brazil 2-0 Germany in the final)
- Runner-Up: Germany
- Third Position: Turkey (Turkey 3 – 2 S. Korea)
- Fourth: South Korea (South Korea reaching the Semi was another most talked topic among us those days)
- Golden Ball: Oliver Khan
- Golden Boot: Ronaldo
- Golden Gloves (Yashin Award): Oliver Khan
- Host: Japan/Korea
MYFIRSTWORLDCUP
Comments