Obligatory World Cup Post

I support Tunisia.

Somebody has to.

Okay, okay, so I know they don't have a hope in hell of winning (actually, I don't know anything of the sort - in fact, I can safely say that I know absolutely nothing about Tunisian football. Or about football. Or about Tunisia. Except that Dizzy Gillespie seemed to like the nights there.), but wouldn't it be fun if they did win? I mean really, what's the point of going through all this brouhaha if at the end of it all Brazil is just going to take the cup. Again.

The trouble with competitive sport is that its fans still cling to the patently ridiculous notion that the winner should be the one with the most skill / talent. As if that mattered. As if the only civilised basis for deciding who wins wasn't gender, or nationality, or general under-dogness. What's with all this objectivity anyway? When are sports promoters ever going to realise that the sweetest moment in any contest is when the winner gets announced and everyone goes "The prize goes to Who?!! How the hell did he / she win?". Think about the Booker. Think about the Nobel. Dammit, even an organisation as inherently stupid as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has got this figured out. Each one of these regularly gives away prizes to people who demonstrate no merit whatsoever, and consistently overlooks the truly deserving. That's what I call a competition. It's all about mixing it up. The thrill of the contest isn't finding out who won, the thrill of the contest is arguing endlessly afterwards about whether or not they deserved to. The day they start judging World Cup matches based on the intensity of the leg-work and the beauty of a team's post-modernist explorations of the off-side [1], instead of on something as crude as goals, is the day I'll actually start watching football [2].

At any rate, I still maintain that it would be a much better cup for everyone if Tunisia won. Just think what wonders it would do for World Peace. All the football playing nations of the world (a list, which, conveniently enough, now includes the US) would come together in instant solidarity, drowning their common sorrows in a hazy mix of stale beer and nuclear non-proliferation treaties. Of course, Tunisia itself would have to be instantly liquidated with thermo-nuclear devices, but that's easy enough - we can always think up some excuse...say they were developing WMDs, for instance...what's that? That's already been done? Hmmm. Oh, well, we'll think of something. And let's face it, it's not like anyone's going to miss Tunisia once it's become a large cloud of radioactive dust. Most people won't even notice. As for the Tunisians themselves, well, at least they'll die happy, knowing they won the World Cup. What's a little casual annihilation compared to the thrill of that?

In fact, the only downside I can see to Tunisia winning the World Cup is the astronomical amount of money I stand to lose because I'm too stingy to bet $5 on them at current odds (specially since all the other people betting on Tunisia would have been liquidated in the airstrikes). I could have retired on that money. (Or at least, I could have gone on not working, which is the same as retiring, only without the farewell parties). Damn you Spain! Damn you Saudi Arabia! You haven't heard the end of this!

Or have you?

[1] I'm not entirely sure what the off-side is, btw. I've never been able to decipher whether it's a real side or just a notional concept the guy running around with a whistle uses when he feels the whole thing's looking too easy and the sponsors won't like it. Kind of like the wrong side of the bed.

[2] Which is not to say that I never watch sport. On the contrary, I am frequently captivated by all kinds of sporting events, usually when there's tons of work to do and I don't feel like doing it. The zenith of my interest in cricket, for example, occured during the 1996 World Cup, which happened to coincide with my CBSE Board Exams. Even watching cricket was more fun than NCERT textbooks.