One Year and two Days ago: The World Cup 2006 kicks off

By: Jan | June 11th, 2007

I had hoped to post this two days ago to properly commemorate the first anniversary of the World Cup 2006. Yet the fact that I was enjoying the weekend and that I was still putting together a rather long article about Bayern Munich caused a slight delay. Anyway, German media is currently full with retrospective articles, appraisals, analysis, what have you. From what I’ve read the World Cup supposedly had a positive economic effect and then again it didn’t, but what everyone agrees on is that it surely helped the image, mood and confidence of the country. It was also the cause of a significant baby boom that occured nine months after the tournament ended. It’s also worth pointing out that I found my way to the World Cup Blog during that tournament, subsequently moved on to The Offside, waited most of the season for a Bundesliga Blog to appear and then decided to try out this Web 2.0 thing myself. That should be enough introductory banter. To make it short: I just found another reason to waste a couple of blog posts while waiting for the new season to begin.

June 9th, 2006. It’s World Cup kickoff time. Something I decided to sit out with a little TV marathon. The opening ceremony was very campy and a bit heavy on the Lederhosen side, but at least went over pretty quickly. Expectations, predictions and hopes for the match? I would have answered all those questions with a couple of those: ????. I really had no idea. The friendlies leading up to the tournament were sometimes pretty scary and discouraging. I wouldn’t have been too surprised by an embarrassing first round exit at that time. The match didn’t really help to answer any of those questions. It was a win but the defense had been just as vulnerable as it had always been during Klinsmann’s time as coach. The match got liveblogged here and extended video highlights were still available on YouTube.

The second match of the day was Poland vs Ecuador. Ecuador won 2-0 setting up a must-not-lose match against Germany for Poland, which should turn out to be my personal favorite of the tournament.