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First of all, I want to apologize to the girls reading this article, because what I am going to tell is a story about about football. It might be the only thing they dont quite get about guys (in Europe at least): why are they all so crazy about football?! I could not remember myself actually, because I had not juggled a ball in a while.
You can travel throughout the world and you will just need a small spot of grass and then, sooner or later, someone will turn up with a ball-obviously to play with their feet. The most amazing thing about football is how a quite simple thing (and sadly, quite monotonous too sometimes, if you are just watching) can bring people together: there was much talk last summer about how the World Cup so strikingly outlines globalization like nothing else.

I was in Germany last summer, the World Cup was just over and Germany had finished a good third. Sometimes we faced problems while trying to talk to people in German, but we still could communicate well enough, because we all spoke the same language, the language of football.
One day Ylva and Jutta, our two wonderful German Betreuerinnen, fixed a match against a local team for us guys of the Sommerkurs. On the day of the game we were all very excited, even those (many more than I expected) who had never kicked a ball before. During the class in the morning, you could have heard things like this: "I dont understand a thing today, I am focused only on the football match later." There were just 11 of us, and during the class sheets were circulating showing our positions on the field.
By afternoon we were still in high spirits, but an anxiety had crept in us upon our arrival to the pitch. We were all dressed in the same shirts, and for the first time we looked united like a real team.
When the game started we would run after every ball like crazy. After 10 minutes we surrended anyway; they scored the first goal and a few minutes two more. At half-time we were down 4-0. We still shared the belief that we playing decently and that it was worth going on anyway. Unfortunately our full back scored an own-goal. Then our teacher, who was our coach for that day, called us to him: he revealed to us that our opponents were playing with a sort of handicap, being not allowed to give the ball more than touches a time, because they were a real team, and they thought they would have crashed us otherwise.
Offended we reacted scoring a wonderful goal, like in those Japanese cartoons, every of us had taken part in the action. A few minutes later the game was over and we were happy, the girls were cheerleadering for us, we took pictures of ourselves celebrating. We had lost the game 6-1. Go figure why guys are so crazy about football.

Learn more about this author, Stefano Di Lorenzo.
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