The World Cup Is A Celebration Not An Adolescent Mosh Pit

After a moribund soccer-less June 29th, the party resumes today.  Sixteen teams and 2 more weeks of glorious celebration remain before the greatest world fiesta comes to end and FIFA crowns a new soccer monarch. Thus far the storylines on the field have lived up to expectation. The usual suspects, save for Germany, managed to move onto the round of 16.  God himself has been seen peering out from his sky box, smoking a cigar, giving us all several laughs with his godlike antics; a World Cup without Maradona is like Mezcal without orange slices. Japanese grandstanders are outclassing all others by picking up after themselves and leaving their grandstand neat and tidy after each game. Colombian grandstanders are bringing it hard and might be giving the Mexican fans a run for their money as far as visibility and numbers in the grandstand.  The very wealthy Mexican Federation was fined a measly $10,000 for their grandstand’s homophobic chant, but you can still hear a lukewarm version of it every time the goalie kicks the ball off. The idiotic VAR (Video Assisted Referee) seems to be here to stay, but none of us are clear as to when it does or does not come into play. In what may be the stupidest and most embarrassing celebration caught on camera 2 imbecile talking heads for Telemundo on one of those pathetic morning shows made a slanted eye gesture after South Korea’s win over Germany that gave Mexico the second round berth. Grandstand has officially excommunicated those 2 fools not only because of the gesture, but because they weren’t even Mexican and they were wearing the green jersey acting like damn fools!

But alas fools are everywhere. In Tijuana Mexico some fellow Green Team grandstanders having a difficult time coming down from the euphoria of their win over Germany took their celebration to a state of unchecked belligerence and burned a German flag in the name of who the fuck knows what. Here’s the thing my grandstanders you have to have a comedown routine after a win of that nature. Go to your local pub and tell stories, go home watch the game again and relive it all over so that you can hear the match commentary you missed because you were too busy being in a tantric state, scour the internet for literature about the subplot and subtext of the game, read on ahead to the next chapter, call your mother, etc.

If you do feel the need to go hang out with a mob do so, but keep it clean and only for a little while. Get out to the meeting point and give a few hugs, drink a beer with the crowd, yell some inane shit into the sky and then go home! Whatever you do don’t stand around with a mob for too long. Sooner than later you’re bound to get bored and cross your personal threshold of violence and risk engaging in some pretty stupid shit you did not intend to do when you woke up that morning. If you’ve ever attended a political rally you know what we’re talking about here. After the third or forth speaker there’s nothing doing, it all starts to all sound the same and that’s when you get the urge to do something stupid in the name of spectacle. So do yourself, your country, and the World Cup a favor keep your nationalistic grandstanding clean. Remember the World Cup is a celebration not a fucking adolescent mosh pit.