I don't talk about football (North American = soccer) much, but today it is appropriate. Yes I am interested (originally from a working class family in the North of England, what would you expect? Rugby League if you want an alternative - not that the sport seems to exist in Germany). But there are more important matters on the face of this earth than sport. Eventually the world does not go into an economic slump if your team loses.
One of the more intriguing things about living in Germany is that the excitement ratio is low. Even when important matters like elections are on, the viciousness and name calling that you get in other countries tends to be more restrained ("restrained viciousness"? Intellectually possible actually. Saying something nasty in a moderate tone of voice using a clever phrase).
Whereas the quality press in the UK is dwarfed by the overwhelming daily nastiness of the tabloids, here there is one national tabloid (Bild) and a load of interestingly intelligent quality papers. There is plenty of lively gutter stuff on television if you want it, though (as my wife has discovered to her delight and to my consternation - usually I am left wondering whether it is real or fabricated).
The tone though, in most of the Western part of the country at least, is pretty restrained (that word again!). So when the major opposition party, the SDP, pick their candidate (Peer Steinbrück) to run against the Chancellor next year, they pick someone who is fiscally conservative, hardly emotionally challenged, and could easily sound like a member of the conservative CDU.
My own choice if I could vote would be Claudia Roth. If she won it would at some point lead to an interesting meeting - Green German Chancellor meets US President Mitt Romney, who used, for convenient political reasons, to believe that global warming exists, and now, for convenient political reasons, believes that it doesn't. Frau Roth would make him look stupid, but then that is not difficult! Why having clean air to breathe and a healthy environment to live in is such a bad idea, I do not understand. It would cost jobs? Since when has Bain Capital been concerned about jobs being cut, or if jobs are going to be created (according to their philosophy) let them be created in cheap-labour, highly polluted China!
Move on.
My wife is not that happy with her boss. Usually I offer her the platitudes that it cannot be that easy for him, all the stress and the schedules and the deadlines to meet usw. Yesterday though I could have throttled him.
She works a split system at the airport. This normally means 3 to 4 morning shifts, followed by 3 to 4 afternoon/evening shifts (always 7 or 8 days in total), then 3 to 4 days off. Yesterday, after 4 days on mornings, she was supposed to switch to afternoon/evenings. The day before, he informed her that his teams were out of balance (due to illness) and he needed her in the morning instead.
This should affect me? Alarm clocks going off for four consecutive days at your peak sleeping time (about 0320) do affect you, and when you are prone to insomnia, getting back to sleep is a problem. Yesterday afternoon I was walking round the park in Bockenheim feeling as ill as I have at any time since I came out of hospital in 2008, but this was probably the 5 days worth of interrupted sleep taking their toll.
As significant as this was though, more importantly I had planned to spend the evening watching the football (North American = soccer) international between Germany and Sweden. She hates football (given her background that is hardly surprising), and while I can normally hide myself in the bedroom while it is on, she has the habit of going to bed quite early (given the fact that she got up yesterday at 0320, going to be bed at 2130 was late enough for her).
Consequently I managed to watch the first half, during which the German side resembled the team that they were in the World Cup in 2010 when they drubbed England and Argentina. 3-0 at half-time, switch off, let her sleep. Went to bed early, but as chronic insomnia does not allow your mind to switch off, I lay there awake thinking of business contract translations and what was happening in the match in Berlin.
Finally at 2320. I rose to check www.kicker.de to find out the final result. 5-0, 6-0?
No. 4-4. A draw (North American = tie). How the Swedes who had looked so bad in the first half .... And at one point it had been 4-0. No particularly dramatic excited comments on the German news on ZDF this morning (though no doubt the sports page of Bild will be foaming at the proverbial mouth!), more a sense of shock. The defence unit suddenly fell apart.
Well as the goalkeeper, Manuel Neuer, (often described here as the "best goalkeeper in the world" - personally I do not think that he is even the best goalkeeper in Germany, that honour, and his place in the national team, should go to Hamburg's Rene Adler), made one ghastly error and as for the rest .... If they were not used to playing together at international level, it could be understood, but as the goalkeeper, three of the back four, and the two defensive midfielders all play for the same club team (Bayern München), that explanation does not work (unless you blame Arsenal's Per Mertesacker, and I would hardly expect that he alone played badly).
Anyway congratulations to the Swedes for a gutsy performance.
And let us repeat till we are blue in the face that it is, eventually, only a game. Even if over-excitement often takes over at such events (one of the rare occasions in Germany - see the beginning of this piece!), even if the ugly spectre of football hooliganism is beginning to rear its head more frequently again here, even if huge amounts of money are involved (don't mention how much these guys get paid to my wife, she is liable to throw a tantrum!). It isn't war, it isn't the end of the world when your team does not win.
At the end of the day the wrong side winning a political election (e.g. Romney winning the US Presidential election, maybe Merkel winning here again in 2013, although Steinbrück will not be much of an improvement) is far more significant. Sports events do not impact people's lives directly. Sadly politics and economics do often affect them radically, and very often make them worse!
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