Euro 08 Final: Spain v Germany

Spain won. It was a very exciting game, and I thought Spain thoroughly deserved to win, but I'm not here to analyze soccer games. I thoroughly enjoyed the pregame closing ceremonies, which I also got to enjoy Irish commentary for, a treat I would not have enjoyed in the United States.

Let's be honest with ourselves; everyone enjoys listening to a pair of old Irish guys describing 16 balloon sculptures emblazoned with flag patterns of various countries dancing with each other. Everyone.
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Gaelic Football

Today Dublin played Westmeath in one of the Leinster semifinals for Gaelic Football. I watched it on TV, and it was a fascinating game to watch. It was the first complete gaelic football match I’ve watched and it was really quite entertaining. Gaelic football is played 15 v 15, just like hurling and rugby, and has a scoring system identical to hurling. You score points by putting the ball either into the goal (which is very similar to a soccer goal) for 3 points or over the bar and between the uprights (like a field goal in football) for a point. Here were some of my thoughts at the time, in bullet form:

Evidently when Dublin plays matches at Croke Park (their home stadium) the matches always start late because their supporters can’t get there on time. They have the shortest distance to travel there and are the only set of fans that are chronically late. Go figure.

Everyone seems to expect Dublin to crush Westmeath by 4 or 5.

Westmeath have a goofy prematch ritual in which everyone gets into a big crowd and throws themselves around trying to bounce off one another for about 30 seconds. Reminds me of the Hawaiian football team dance, except its less organized and decidedly less intimidating.

1st minute Dublin wins the throw in, which is very similar to a basketball jump ball except 2 players from each team are allowed to participate.

2^nd minute That was fast. Number 4 for Westmeath fouls a Dublin player, and with the resulting penalty a Dublin player scores a point. This looks like it might be high scoring.

4^th minute Two more shots from Dublin, two misses. We are no longer on pace for 35 points.

5^th minute Point! Maybe I was wrong, this could turn into a pointfest after all. This time its Dennis Glennon for Westmeath, and we’re tied.

6^th minute First blood (literally). Dublin player leaves the pitch to get treatment for rather extensive bleeding in the general face area. He is replaced by another guy, a “blood sub”. It seems like if somebody is bleeding you’re able to replace them temporarily while they are treated, after which you can put them back in.

7^th minute GOAL! Westmeath guy plays a long ball through the defense and a teammate gets there a fraction before the Dublin keeper to punch it over him, and it bounces into the goal. This removes any remaining doubts I may have had about how exciting this sport is. It seems to be on the high-scoring side.

9^th minute Another point. Westmeath are in danger of running away with this, they’re up 5 points to 1.

10^th minute Dublin respond with another point off a free kick. We’re 1/7 done with this thing, and we’ve already got 7 points between the teams.

13^th minute Dublin foul results in point for Westmeath. This just doesn’t stop. In case I’ve missed something, the score is Westmeath 1-3 to Dublin 0-3 (the first number is the goals and the second number is the points, so to get totals you’d multiply the first number by 3 and add it to the second number). To most people, that’s 6-3 Westmeath is leading.

14^th minute Basically the same play and foul leads to a free kick for Westmeath, which leads to a point. 7 to 3. The bleeding Dublin guy is back and no longer bleeding.

15^th minute That looked painful. A Dublin player was running at full speed and abruptly pulled up clutching his hamstring. I don’t think I’ve seen that while watching a sporting event in quite a long time. I’m happy I don’t see it more often, it hurts to watch. No surprise, he is subbed off nearly immediately.

17^th minute Dublin point!

18^th minute Times two. These points seem to come in flurries.

20^th minute And a bad Westmeath pass is intercepted and leads to yet another Dublin point. They’re only down by 1 now, 7 to 6 Westmeath.

22^nd minute That was odd. Westmeath got a free kick and immediately kicked it directly out of bounds. I’m not sure if that was incredibly stupid or somehow strategically significant. I’ll go with the former unless this is some subtle mind ploy that I do not understand (which is I suppose possible, considering that I understand very, very little about Gaelic Football)

24^th minute FOUL! And Dublin’s number 8 gets the first second yellow card of the match. I have no idea when the first happened.

26^th minute Another yellow card for Dublin now, and I’m very curious about that first yellow card that the announcers keep referring to but do not show a replay of.

27^th minute A pretty sequence of play from Westmeath following the yellow card leads to a point. The 3 or 4 passes leading up to it seemed to be the Gaelic Football equivalent of approximately what Spain have looked like in Euro 08

32^nd minute A yellow card for someone from Westmeath (the first one not to go to a Dublin player) quickly followed by two missed shots by Dublin. They’re supposed to be walking all over Westmeath today. Apparently Gaelic football commentators have similar powers of prediction to most American sports commentators.

33^rd minute Dublin point! That ties it up at 8 all

34^th minute Dublin number 9 is replaced again by number 18 as a blood sub. This guy bleeds a lot, evidently.

1 minute of stoppage time

35 + 1 minute Halftime. Whew, that was an exciting first half. These GAA people like their sports high scoring.

Aaaaand they’re back. Dublin made 3 subs, apparently. Or maybe it was Westmeath, he just said a manager’s name that I did not recognize, although it sounded very traditionally Irish.

36^th minute Dublin win the throw in and then score almost immediately. Their first lead, I think.

37^th minute A shot at goal! Those don’t seem to happen too often, no goalkeeper to block points. The Westmeath keeper saved this shot though. I’m not exactly sure what the goalkeeper’s special privileges are (if he has any) because everybody is allowed to use their hands.

39^th minute Wow, that was a bad shot. Westmeath player tries for a point, comes closer to the corner flag than the upright. Dublin crowd jeers.

44^th minute Long span of possession followed by missed shots ends with a Westmeath free kick that they convert for a point, tying the game at 9. The action has seemed to slow down, after this amount of time in the first half we had seen 7 or 8 points.

45^th minute And of course just as I say that, Westmeath score another point to pull ahead, 10 to 9. This is back to looking like it did in the first half, we’ll see if they keep up with they points in flurries theme.

48^th minute Evidently not. A Dublin player misses a painfully easy free kick that I think I could’ve made (20 yards out, pretty much centered between the uprights) off one of the posts. Dublin number 9 comes back from bleeding. I wonder how long this will last, he seems to be rather blood prone.

51^st minute Yellow card for Dublin number 19. I have absolutely no idea what for, that seemed really arbitrary to me.

52^nd minute Two quick points put Dublin in the lead again, although most of the action has degenerated into the middle third of the field (which, incidentally, is massive. Even with 15 people per team these guys must be doing an incredible amount of running.) Scoring and chances have cooled off in the second half.

56^th minute That was very strange. A Westmeath player fouled a Dublin player, resulting in a free kick. Dublin took the kick too quickly for the ref’s liking, however, and so as punishment he gave the ball back to Westmeath. That strikes me as bizarre and could almost encourage fouling in some situations. Maybe that’s just me.

A few subs happened in the past few minutes, is seems like each team is allowed a lot of them.

60^th minute TRICKERY! CHEATING SCUM! Or at least this is what they tell me. One of the Dublin players just threw the ball, which evidently is a sin similar to handball in soccer. All previous (legal) handpasses have been rather like an underhand serve in volleyball with the ball held in one hand and struck with the palm of the other. This motion looks (to me, at least) nearly identical to the underhand throwing motion this Dublin player was just penalized for. Go figure.

64^th minute After a few more assorted misses on either end, Dublin appear to be preparing a sub. How may of these are allowed?

66^th minute Man down! Man down! Westmeath number 5 is lying on the field in pain.

He’s ok now.

67^th minute Point! We have more scoreboard changing to do! That took long enough, and puts Dublin up by 2 with only 3-4 minutes to play. Westmeath are not in such great shape, but they aren’t down by the 5 or 6 that all the pundits were predicting before the match.

69^th minute Westmeath are reduced to playing long balls and praying for a goal. It does not look good for the underdog at the moment.

70^th minute And that is probably the final nail in the coffin. An impressive buildup of passes by Dublin leads to a point to put them ahead by 3. One minute of stoppage time.

70 + 1 minute A free kick for Westmeath is turned into a point, but it is not enough. The match is over, Dublin are advancing to the Leinster final.

Dublin 0-13 (13)

Westmeath 1-8 (11)

That was very interesting. And there is a Euro 08 final to watch later. Read more

Americans + Unrelated Picture

Today I ran into Americans for the first time since getting to Cork and starting my internship. We had a social sort of event with the participants in other similar internship programs at UCC and two of the students in one of the more biology oriented were American. Interestingly enough both are from the west coast (LA and Seattle). They lived with a bunch of other international students from their program, just as I did. I later ran into them by complete coincidence on my way home from the pub after watching the Spain-Russia semifinal.

The pub where I watched the semifinal seemed to me to be the complete stereotypical small, friendly Irish pub. When we arrived about 45 minutes before kickoff there were about 3 or 4 other patrons, so we more than doubled the number of people there. The bartender was friendly, joking and conversing with the few people at the bar. It was decorated in a rather quaint way so that it almost seemed like I was in someone's living room. It wasn't a big sports bar type place so the crowd watching the game was not huge, but it was, all in all, an excellent place to catch the match. Sadly, Russia lost. Even more depressing nauseating horrifying were the jerseys that Spain chose to wear. The Irish commentators generously described the color as "mustard" and proceeded to disparage its hideousness. I wholeheartedly agreed.

On my way home from the match I ran into the Americans, who were walking with their housemates to the Lough (pronounced lock, like Loch Ness), a large lake not too far from the UCC campus. I went with them. It was interesting to speak to Americans again. It also occurred to me that from their conversation they seemed to have very little social interaction with their Irish coworkers. I have spent most of my time with my newly made Irish friends, and for some reason this group of international students seemed to remain more a unit, in their own social sphere. Their approach to life and work in a foreign country ends up being a bit different than mine, I guess, although that may be because in their case they are living with other Americans.

In any case though, it was interesting to run into another American, and funny when they ended up being from places relatively close to where I live.

And the picture is of a sidewalk on the way to the grocery store (Tesco!) from my house.
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Sports, Shops, and Rain

People in Ireland like sports. A lot. It seems like there is always some form of sports on television and nearly half the people you see on the street are wearing some form of replica jersey, usually either something related to the County Cork GAA or an English Premier League team. Gaelic sports, specifically hurling and football, are huge. They vary in relative popularity depending on the part of Ireland you're in. In East Cork, where Cork City is, hurling is more popular, although football is quite popular as well. In West Cork football enjoys more popularity than hurling, although hurling is still quite popular there. You see a lot of red Cork shirts walking around town.

There always seems to be some sort of sporting event on TV. If no Euro 08 match is on at the time there is always something on, either cricket or rugby or non-European soccer or hurling or Gaelic football. I even saw a bit of of USA v Canada in rugby yesterday. All of this on standard television, with about 10 channels. I'm pretty sure you'd need uber-cable to watch that rugby match in the United States, and here its on their equivalent of NBC. They like their sports here, obviously.

Earlier today I saw the end of a hurling match. Its fascinating to watch. Everyone here claims that its the "fastest game in the world". I'm not quite sure what that means, but the game is very high tempo, although I'm pretty sure its impossible to quantify speed of play and compare across different sports.

Unfortunately, the Irish love of all things sports-related does not seem to extend to tennis. Yesterday I went into town and looked in at least 3 sporting goods stores for tennis balls and returned empty-handed. This could have something to do with the weather. It rains quite often here, making regular tennis training a rather difficult goal.

Speaking of rain, on the way back from town after looking for said tennis balls I got caught in a rather heavy downpour. It rained nearly 2 inches yesterday, and as luck would have it most of that came all at once in the afternoon during my 20 minute walk from the City Centre Center to my house near UCC.
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Soccer in Pubs + Unrelated Pictures

Last night I went out to a pub to watch the Euro match between Germany and Portugal. It was a very exciting match, so watching in the pub was fun even though not many people were there watching with us. It's a strange and wonderful experience to be watching a soccer match in a public place with random, everyday people who arn't very into sports but still understand what's going on. Not like that in America. Oh, and the picture is of the main quad on the UCC campus. Not a bad looking place.

Today we had our health and safety "training". It was, as expected, horribly boring. By the end of the hour when the instructor asked if there were any questions I was tempted to ask if it were ok to drink the chemicals we were working with. Sadly this guy probably would've thought I was serious. Either he really enjoyed repeating obvious things or he thought that pretty much all of us were completely oblivious about lab safety. But that is rather what is expected when someone tells you about a mandatory safety training.

And since people remember the first and last things about writing, here's a picture of one of the main shopping streets in the City Centre Center taken from the end of it where most of the activity peters out:

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The Silent Head Nod

The Irish do not use the same forms of silent acknowledgment as Americans do. In America the generally accepted way to say a silent hello while walking past someone is to make eye contact and then nod slightly. I assumed this was a universal form of greeting and that I could use it without any alteration in Ireland. I was, of course, completely wrong.

In Ireland they have a gesture that serves a similar purpose. Unfortunately, it is just different enough to have completely confused me for the first few days I was here. Their form of the greeting begins in exactly the same way, with eye contact (generally while walking past one another). However, instead of nodding as we do in America, they follow it with a short movement of their head to the side, like an abbreviated shake of their head rather analogous to the American abbreviated nod. Until today I was always confused when I nodded to people and they responded with their own shake of the head because I assumed that they somehow disapproved of me or my greeting. It was rather distressing because I thought that if I were interpreting their gesture correctly that the people of Cork were either generally not friendly or they just didn't like me for some reason. I am rather relieved to learn that this is not the case.

On a completely unrelated note, I got a (cheap) Irish cell phone today at the Tesco near where I am staying, which is evidently the largest supermarket in all of Munster (the southernmost Irish province). It was missing the back, so the battery and SIM card are exposed, although after paying 25 euro including 10 euro of credit towards talk time I can't really complain.

On another walk through Cork this afternoon I passed the large Protestant Cathedral (which was quite impressive and rather on the large side considering that the vast majority of the Irish population in this area is Catholic), a number of interesting shops in the City Centre Center, and a small, pub-type place that apparently is among the best microbreweries in Ireland. I haven't really taken any pictures to speak of so far, I've been trying to get my bearings walking around town and get a feel for where everything is before I go around snapping away with a camera. That should start soon though, I think I've figured out the main parts of the city decently enough to get myself around in a reasonable manner. I'll start posting then when I start taking them.
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Irish Euro Commentators and Cork City Centre Center

Irish commentators are infinitely better than American ones in terms of soccer. I feel strange listening to an account in English that coincides with a soccer game and is delivered by someone who has some idea about what is going on. Its awesome though. Not only do they have intelligent commentary, they also have insightful and extensive (taken to a ridiculous extreme, even) post-game and halftime commentary. The thing that surprised me most though was that multiple stations show each match live. It's bizarre. I guess if you don't like one commentator you get a choice, but it still seems strange to me. Sometimes you even get lucky and find hurling while channel surfing at halftime. Always a bonus.

I also went into the Cork City Centre Center today. Twice, actually. A very interesting town. At first I thought that they did not have any street signs to label streets at all but I have since learned that they cleverly hide them by posting them in arbitrary places, often on private houses or walls on the corner of streets. Needless to say, this makes navigation and direction-giving difficult and sometimes rather aggravating. On one of my trips I saw an Irish guy walking around swinging a hurling stick (hurley? I don't know what they call them). I've seen a bunch of people walking around in Cork GAA and hurling gear. Evidently all of their sports teams are the rebels, which I think is a reference to the county's history of resistance to British rule. The downtown City Centre Center district seems rather small but actually turns out to be larger than one would imagine from just looking at its several long, skinny parallel blocks on a map. It contains an almost American-seeming mall, which completely shocked me. I thought those sort of things did not exist in Ireland and it seemed completely out of place next to rows of shopfronts.

Sadly, I saw a Dominoes Pizza on the walk to the City Centre Center. Evidently Dominoes has invaded Europe. I personally think this is horrible news, Dominoes is very low on my list of American food chains that I want to succeed/advertise to the rest of the world. I didn't see any other unexpected American food chains except for a rather interesting-looking European version of Johnny Rockets called Eddie Rockets (and McDonalds, but that wasn't much of a surprise).

Food aside though, I did run into very surprising American items in a sporting goods store that I poked around in for a few minutes while one of my housemates was buying running shoes. Right next to all the Cork GAA and assorted professional soccer team apparel I found a bin of sports balls which held soccer balls, rugby balls, bigger rugby balls, and (to my shock) an American football. Next to it was a rack of 3 or 4 basketballs. They seemed very out of place and I'm sure those same 3 basketballs and 1 football have been in stock for the past 2 months because I can't imagine that there are many basketball courts or football fields in Cork. It seemed like just a run of the mill sporting goods store too, not a specialty store or an extra-thorough enormous one. It was very strange.

Oddly enough, I was almost killed crossing the street today and it was not my fault and not because I looked the wrong way. The guy in the car decided not to slow down coming around a blind corner when turning left on a red light. Fortunately he stopped in time, but rather frightening nonetheless, especially because when I first heard him honk I assumed that I had done something stupid, which didn't turn out to be the case.
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