World Cup Fever

I should probably be updating everyone on our ministry work here in Sydney, but the past few weeks have been dominated by one thing - the World Cup! Dan and I have been very busy trying to watch all the teams we’re supporting and between the two of us we have four teams we’re rooting for – Korea, USA, Argentina, and Australia. Supporting so many teams makes watching the World Cup so much more fun (but we’ve had a highly erratic sleep schedule). And not only do we have to watch the games that our teams are playing, but we have to watch the games of teams that are in the same groups because we have to scout the competition and make sure they win/lose/draw to help our teams make it out of the group.

Now what makes watching the W.C. even cooler this year is that FIFA set up an official FanFest location in Sydney's beautiful Darling Harbour. (one of only six in the world) So, they sell jerseys and scarves, have all sorts of international food, coffee, desserts and most importantly, they have 3 giant big screens floating in the middle of the harbor so up to 20,000 people can watch together!

Dan and I have gone out for both of the Korea matches and the atmosphere is awesome. I think it’s been universally recognized that South Korean supporters are some of the best football fans in the world, and on both nights, there was a sea of red out in force to support the Red Devils. I wish I had taken some photos of what some fans wore, but I do have a very blurry video that I took with my phone. Please excuse my extremely sharp and annoying voice. That happens when I get excited and Korea just scored a goal.

Flames actually shoot out from behind the big screen when a goal is scored, but I wasn’t fast enough with my phone to capture that. Still, I hope you get a sense of what an intense atmosphere it is. And although the temperature dropped to about 9 degrees Celsius at night, all the fans were pressed against each other, chanting, cheering, raging, jumping up and down at different points of the game that the cold didn’t really affect us.

Now I won’t go into the many simply atrocious calls Australia and the US have suffered because of poor ref-ing, but both countries have had their full share of rotten luck. However, that’s football and especially in the World Cup, crazy things, good and bad, happen. Let’s just keep rooting for our teams as they finish up the group stage of the tournament. Since Argentina’s pretty safe, we really need to cheer hard for Korea, Australia, and especially the US of A!!

Below is a group shot of us with about 30 other Korea supporters including students from SOW UNSW, USYD, UTS, and the Campus Outreach Short-term mission team from Alabama.