Appassionato

We (NZ) are the champions!

Categorised as Miscellaneous & tagged with competition, new zealand, sports.

That’s right, I’m talking about the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

I went to bed just after Italy scored the penalty goal against New Zealand to make a 1-1 tie. I woke up to the news of the game finishing at the same 1-1 tie and I was like, “Holy shit”.

Game summary at FIFA.com

And not only me, my Facebook homepage this morning is filled with status messages announ­cing the surprise.

Now, the big players such as the German and Italian teams receive unlimited budgets when they attend the World Cup tour­na­ments. They get paid BIG bucks, sleep in the most luxurious beds, but all that the Kiwi team strives on is simply the spirit of sports­man­ship. First we tied 1-1 against Slovakia (rank 25). Now this? We were ranked 73 places behind Italy, we were made up of half part-time players, and dude, that 1 goal we scored is the second ever goal scored by New Zealand in the FIFA since the 1980s.

More embar­rass­ingly for the four-time FIFA World Cup champs, if it wasn’t for the badly called penalty shot for which the referee is now being verbally bashed, it would have been Italy 0 to New Zealand 1.

Aside from the FIFA, New Zealand Olympic gold medalists are similarly part-timers who compete for an interest in the sport, and upon returning to New Zealand, need to continue working in their other jobs to feed them­selves. Consider how Chinese par­ti­cipants are pushed into hard training from a young age, and that winning a single gold medal for Taiwan equates to not having to work for the rest of your life.

Despite what the score­board says, despite being an underdog, New Zealand is a winner. We are the biggest champion of all for having the true sports­man­ship that is supposed to ground these sports com­pet­i­tions.¹

Woooooooooooooooooot!

1. This reminds me of the Disney/Pixar movie Cars. [↩]