by Wow. I’ve just watched Germany get out of jail against Sweden. With only ten men and staring probable elimination in the face, a jaw-dropping last-gasp free kick winner from a crazy angle on the edge of the box means they’ll make it to the knockout rounds now in all likelihood. I felt sorry for Sweden.
For me, this feels like the last-ever World Cup, so I’m trying to enjoy it. Everything is wrong about Qatar, the hosts in four years’ time. Then in 2026 the competition will expand to 48 teams, planned to be drawn into 16 mini-groups of three. Too many teams. Terrible format. Just ugh.
During tonight’s game the Romanian commentators kept referring to the German team as the Mannschaft, which sounds pretty funny in English. Sometimes they would put it into (I think) the genitive case: mannschaftului. Plenty of other languages have borrowed this German term (it probably sounds very German), but curiously the Germans don’t use it themselves: for them it just means “team”. Or rather, they didn’t use it until after they won the last World Cup. They then rebranded the national team as Die Mannschaft for marketing purposes, capitalising on the popularity of the term in other languages. This reminds me of the term Bahasa, which some English speakers use to refer to the Indonesian language, presumably because it sounds cooler than “Indonesian”. But in Indonesian, bahasa just means “language”.
I should have mentioned that on Tuesday night we all tried a papanași, a quite wonderful dessert that’s a bit like a rum baba, but without the rum, and bigger. Delicious, and well worth the long wait before we eventually got it.
Tomorrow morning I’ll try my hand at fishing, without Dad’s help. Who knows if I’ve rigged up my rod in a way that it won’t all fall apart.
