Flips GLORIOUS World Cup Blog-o-rama Extravaganza - I Love Football

I love football. I love it in a way that I cannot possible love other sports. Don't get me wrong, I love basketball and there is nothing more relaxing a game of baseball in the late summer. But football truly is the beautiful sport. No other sport can have me nervous before the game has even start. Screw biting my nails, I was way past the cuticles for this Germany vs Ghana match, I was chomping on my knuckles. And the match proved to be be worth the name "Preliminary knock out game".

Lets get this out of the way, so no one can accuse me of German-washing this game. If I were a Russian oligarch who had recently come into the possession of a Premiere league team, I would try my utmost to secure as many of the Ghanaian strikers as I could, legally and illegally. These guys were like a pack of cheetahs, and cheetahs are solitary hunters, That's how scarily good they are.  Unfortunately it seemed that being a pack of cheetahs often was a drawback. One of their number would break lose and scream past the German defense and make me very, very nervous. In fact, they should have struck at least two goals, if only someone had been there to shove it over the line. Ghana proved their mettle and proved that they more than deserved getting into the next round. Given my desire to see a African team succeed, I couldn't be happier.

Now to the German team. I love this team. In fact I would have to say, that this team is my favorite. That includes the teams composed of the old greats like Juergen Klinsmann, Oliver Bierhoff, Lothar Matheus. For me this team, despite its obvious and in numerous cases of youthful jitters this match, is the modern German. They have released themselves from the old guard of German football as well as the old methods. This team owes no loyalty to Franz Beckenbauer, Der Kaiser, whose grip on German football used to be suffocating. They use new training techniques and play a football that is as far removed from the Deutschen Tugenden (German Virtues) as those same virtues were from Brazilian football.

What is more, by their very existence they represent a new Germany. Die Mannschafdt has never been as culturally diverse as it is now: Ghana (Jerome Boateng, brother of the Kevin Prince Boateng who played for Ghana, both played well tonight), Turkey (Mesut Özil who is ridiculously good), Poland (Miroslav Klose, Lukas Podolski), Spain (Mario Gomez), Brazil (Cacau), Tunisa (Sami Khedira), just to name a few, are all represented. They are also young. The average age of the team is 25, and many of them are already competing in their second World Cup. While this youth works against them at times, the jitters were plainly obvious tonight, it marks them out as being part of the paradigm and generational shift that is currently occurring in Germany. Ones whose parents did not keep dark secrets about the past war, who did not grow up in the shadow of a Wall, looming tyranny and a nation divided for 50 years. For the first time, it feels like my team.

And now for a section I like to call...

---Separated at Birth??---

Mesut Özil and Frodo Baggins