WORLD CUP DERANGEMENT FERVOUR Yes ! Kevob

In Irregularity I came upon a football game, writing down, past, redundant road, on the backstreets of Dublin, near Cabra. In the interludes, little sounds and harps had given out peculiar motifs; to me, devoid and livid with the fairy tales, as an outsider, the “World Cup” of the footballs was back in the USA. I felt the feelers. I ran with Mister Griswall at the LA games of 1984 and sailed back to 1994, the end of the cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes. The Simpsons at a vertical horizon. A bomb went off in Atlanta and the IRA were still active; Timothy McVeigh, a new-feature coming after Waco, was plotting on the road. America was much more divided then than it is now; the culture war was active. Maybe the fentanyl crisis has killed off the oddities and outliers. Hard to believe now but OJ Simspson was allowed to thrill and tow people back then giving them death. A synopsis of the tangible cult, the trial of century meets the show of the century, OJ and The Simpsons, America grew, as the LA riots rioted, while The Simpsons gave a parody counter-culture of the counter-culture; Frasier Crane is here as a conservative voice and Friends, such a simple theme have multitudes of stories; this is 1990’s; and on somewhere before 20th April in 1999, Nirvana a band of tangey, dates confused, with rumbles in the jungle, is grudge-mud, the taste of white, Kurt Cobain becomes a painter; liking red, over the colours of brain, was the coming first school shooting is suddenly happening, America was everything then in those years, hillbillies and bombs I’m sure other possibilities roused around the world as they always do, I know the IRA went into a ceasefire around that time. Which was good timing because terrorism was about to get bad. A hardy dearth of words follows. September 11th of 2001 set the world into another ruse. In modernity looking at the passing game of the USA against Paraguay; one World Cup winner or maybe a contusion, disorientated with the otter creatureing to a run of space in duckling world running rivers, you are a gay country confused, I provoke imagery, wafting drafts down a wonder drugs country with wonder bras on Viagra falls called Uruguay, imaged against a nation indifferent to the sport. America is mighty now after September 11th, and little cult pursuits have made soccer more significant. Back in 1994, America despised the game. Multitudes of colonies and redcoats still gunning, hanging a culture against another. Then slowly, in little ventures, the game became part of the US of today A eh? American Football was a rebellion against the Isle. England and football or soccer are universal; the colonial words; some think its language too; because of America and the internet. How did their stupid game take over the world then, choke a cola plot. Soccer becomes pronounced on the television. At first they laugh at you. The Simpsons, as always, first to the course driving history; a cartoon that symbolises a nation, holding words, crashing metal and death together; Spinal travesty; then after fear they join you. After that is an acceptance. Then the realism of Tony Soprano and Co. Choral words on the sidelines singing to the Meadows sowing and her friends, is 1999. Footballs become soccer moms and some spine grows deformed and don’t forget the concussions. Little stories matter, don’t neglect the fragments. American football was always this ridiculous macho anti-colonial, manly-masculine head-trauma site; give us up into concussions, to bicep our strength, smashing helmets. Not that I can talk as an Irishman and our GAA games; that combined harvested two games together; and only thumps to the face and fistfights are its unique features against a multitude of sports, boxing the games of rugby and football together. Maybe soon America will become the dominant nation at the Football or Soccer. It should be; it deserves to be. Its rebellion looks silly at our age; it’s become: don’t tread on me, live free or die, or join or die; is a travesty. Their passing game has improved a lot though; trespassing, they’re a good team now. Rather than turning their back to the world on the games like a sulky teenager they should be winning the World Cup. And soon I think they soo-n will, winning 3-0, in the final. When I turned off at half time the United States was 3 nil against Paraguay, who by the way won the first three World Cups; unless I’m getting that confused with gaynessmy gayness concerns transitioning me to Uruguay in my autistic columns, memory-banks and newspaper spreadsheets. That goal my chortled witness of the left foot to the left corner; afterwards in the stand we were given a shot of Rob Lowe (Wayne’s World) cheering, looking ten years older after thirty. Thrifty as they may be in the stands, I suspect hairplants. But even then one cannot imagine an actor from 1965-1975, even one who aged well, who looked new so many years on. Although it is LA, the plastic planet. And this is where the game is won. Honestly I didn’t know the World Cup was back in the USA until tonight. I’m a bit out of drift; wasn’t it in Qatar recently?
I missed that one, remember that Russia one. There was a time when four years was huge. The US of A has grown as a country, matured. No matter what you think of Trump and the culture wars, this is a nation much more at ease within itself; the thought of another civil war is masturbation, fantasia. People awaiting aliens is the same expression.The American team of 1994 was a confusion of balls; they rolled the ball around the field like it was death. Now I could see their skill, a passing game. Even when winning, the parody of auld Uruguay was defending; then the pass, a through ball into his feet, onto the box and a twist-and-turn, the left foot out of place, chomped the ball around in precision to the corner, rasping around the net. Confirmed or denied. Singing and dying is the world of The World Cup. I was there once in 1990; Ireland got to the quarter-finals against the host Italy. The game is more dignified now; the amateur-immatureness-miniature is gone. The place is science led, professional-minded. Forget whatever romance you ever believed in; when you strip it away, it’s nappies, a grind, arguments about cream and powders. The creature of logic runs through underlying everything. As I watch the goal cream the net and all bets are off, in little seconds you see thousands of hours of training going into action. The ball creamed around the net. A horny ball, one of those it took the corner edge and sliced around into the spot. I do think America will reach the finale this time round and not just because they’re the hosts, who of course always get an advantage.
Apparently I hear in the background Italy for the first time ever is not in this World Cup. The sun and moon roll around and by chance the next day is a match, a mismatch; the beauty of this competition between Canada and Haiti. Nations with no relations and each with a depth of stories, often involving the Brits, the colonial nature and their empire is the beauty of this competition. Each game is potential; disparate and polar entities or auld friends and foes. Each country is a history, each player a story. Every pass, every move, a world in motion is that ball around the field. You could do a book on it, a replay of some pasture of a World Cup set out there out to the hills. The early stages have such odd fixtures. Every fixture could be a story, some of the matches feature countries I’ve never even heard of. Germany versus Capre Dieme or something winning uber-over alleles scoring in recessive manners, blonde matters the wind 8-1; and is the Vatican participating in this cup. There is a taste of the British Empire here in these colonial Spartan battles, not that any of these tiny nations come out of it like the 300 of Thermopylae. But there are stories here in these tiny nation states and I know there is a linkage in history to the dominant continent. It’s not Pakistan versus Tri-dudumeut dwell island, but the big countries, dormant and always at the door. They knock hard and I round my rhythms. Looking at the game between big leagues and small players. In every game in this early stage of the cup, between the various big-players and small-timers, you could write a story upon story for the games half held-bonded by the tenacious links. The system is a bit odd that tiny envelopes of countries find themself up against Germany, a nation that has tried to conquer twice and England that did conquer the world once, albeit at easy times. These so-called counties, or provinces, somehow nations don’t stand a chance; not one to lecture am I, but the erosion of words stands before me. Then thinking about it, I get muddled and confused. But I'm not done yet. I could go back to the nail of nations; and summon at the Treaty of Westphalia, after a third and half year game of football competitiveness that ended with Sweden winning. And wringing words like a dead chicken, headless about the pensive, singing words, songs and verses in poetic forms. Behind the screen was the game and the players. And although none of them were blonde, each game was diverse. The Queen, the European countries were becoming more blended now and then; and soon the world will be very boring then when it’s like a pack of sweets, variations of colours and flavours. When that romance is dead the world dies with it, that such a small stalemate could defeat; and B-be becoming could be such a big one is a deadly core of reality. Kevob awoke, his pants were wet and Sweden were winning up 3-1 against Tunisia. Every game with every country had a story together. With the exception of Ireland who was not in the competition. But a sound idea for a book, every game, every story, the linkage between the nations, a pitch perfect non-fiction piece.

After going through the roller coaster of sleep past the stages, the crucifixion of drunkenness back to sobriety, comes as I sip vineyards to another oddity space; the game of Iran against New Zealand. If I was to write a story for this non-fictional book The World of Cup of 2026, for Iran and New Zealand I’d write about the Coronavirus. I do the effort and defy the sky, firing arrows at Valhalla and the place ignites; and I see a story. The Piper of AyitiIn sounding. 1793 the island was burning. Callum MacGregor washed up half-drowned on a stretch of coast that would soon be called Haiti, his body scraped raw by coral and the particular guilt that follows any man who has crossed an ocean for profit. The ship had gone down with the herring and the wool and most of the men. He survived because he had clung to the bagpipes in their oilcloth the way a drowning person clings to whatever will not save him. He was twenty-four, Scottish, already tired of the world in that quiet, precise way some men are tired before they have properly begun.The rebels found him at dawn. They were tired too, and furious with a fury that had learned patience in the cane fields. One of them pressed a machete to his throat. Callum, fevered and stupid with salt, unwrapped the pipes instead of begging. He played because a harp speech had left him. A thin, reedy lament drifted over the smoke and the hacked stalks. It sounded nothing like the drums that kept the camp alive at night, yet something in it made the man with the machete pause. Jean-Baptiste. Whip scars across his back like a ledger of every debt the French would never pay.They let him live. Not out of kindness. More out of that exhausted curiosity people reserve for objects that have fallen from another life entirely.Callum moved among them like a man who had mislaid the instructions for his own existence. He mended sails. He tried, in broken French and awkward gestures, to explain that his own people had also known the taste of another crown’s boot. At night he played when the rum and the fear and the hope became too loud inside his chest. The warriors listened with their heads tilted, like the wail might carry some fragment of their own unvoiced grief across the water. They began to call him the White Piper of the Mountains. He hated the name. He kept it anyway. He thought about Marie for weeks before he spoke to her. She was the daughter of a Congolese man who had survived the Middle Passage and a free woman of colour who sold coffee in the ruined markets. Marie looked at him the way she looked at everything: steadily, without illusion. When they finally lay together it was clumsy and necessary, the way people touch when history is pressing down on both of them and tenderness feels like a small, defiant act. Afterwards she told him she did not believe in saviours, Scottish or otherwise. He said he was not offering to be one.They married anyway, in the small clearing behind the trading post they built together. It was not heroic in the way stories usually demand. It was only two people choosing, for a while, not to be alone with the weight of everything. Callum sometimes thought of the grey coasts he had read about in half-forgotten books, in some windswept rocks where gulls cast their thin shadows and men kept living ordinary, stubborn lives under indifferent skies. The same quiet nerve lived here in the hills of Ayiti: in Jean-Baptiste’s scarred back, in Marie’s unflinching gaze, in his own decision to stay and build something small and useful instead of fleeing back to Glasgow with his stories.He taught them about water wheels; they taught him how to live in a country that had chosen fire over mercy. At night he still played sometimes, quieter now, the old Highland laments bleeding into rhythms he only half understood. The music sounded wrong and right at once. Like him. Like the strange, stubborn courage that keeps a man piping in a revolution that is not his own.When independence came in 1804 he felt neither triumph nor homesickness, only a dull kind of dislocation. Glasgow was a story he told Marie in the dark, full of rain and merchant greed and mothers who never saw their sons again. Haiti was the smell of smoke and cane liquor and Marie’s hand on the back of his neck. He stayed.Their children carried both histories in their faces and their names. One line went to America and stitched tartan into Carnival costumes. Another drifted back to Scotland carrying stories that made the Glasgow merchants shift uncomfortably in their chairs;because the slaves had won, and the piper had helped them. Callum died old, lungs ruined by damp and pipe smoke. Marie buried him with the bagpipes, wrapped in oilcloth again. Sometimes, when the wind moved through the hills above Port-au-Prince in a certain way, people said you could still hear it: a thin, stubborn sound that refused to apologise for existing.Freedom, he had learned, was not a trumpet blast or a clean victory. It was closer to the small shadows cast on a clean slant of rock, an ordinary endurance refusing to vanish. A lament carried across water. Two people choosing each other in the middle of the burning. Burn through those words if you want too, you won’t miss much.

The place of this World Cup, a cup in a continent. The way the games flow around the contours of the country, gives a huge variety of space and history. I could expand this book. I look upon and write stories and states, a game in Kansas between Norway and Iraq or am I getting confused with Algeria against Agretinines in Boston. Matches expanding a whole country in a continent. You cannot ignore the shape of America. The size of the place boggles. Games going from one place, often even with countries I’ve never heard of, to another, of so many different conidtions, weather in the environments in the country of states to the mellow place of counties within. I look out the window and salute the credits rolling past. A great creation could be here. The faint and overcast words vainly run through in the overheads, held, casting by the cloud. I pitched my tent and took my space under it, and there were the stars, in little notes in the sky. I soundly roundabout the days. In the night somewhere I magnet back the games, and an odd parody looks at me - Uzbekistan versus Columbia.

The Piper of Samarkand and Cartagena. November carries the weight of remembrance in its bones; much as it does along the grey shores of home. But this tale drifts further; across centuries and oceans no caravan could ever cross; where the light of the sun dims not merely with the season but with the vast indifference of empires. In the heart of the old Silk Road lands; where the dust of Samarkand still whispers of Timur’s riders and the Fergana Valley yields cotton as soft as forgotten prayers; merchants moved through the shadowed bazaars of the sixteenth century. Camels shifted in the twilight; their bells clinking like distant ironies; silks woven fine as starlight; patterns echoing the geometric grace of Timurid mosques; passed along layered routes from Central Asia into Ottoman hands; then Venetian and Genoese galleys; and at last into the groaning holds of Spanish ships.Far to the west; in the humid harbours of Cartagena de Indias on the edge of Nueva Granada; colonial vessels sat heavy with gold and silver and emeralds torn from the earth by Indian labour. And into those same ports came the luxuries of the East; bolts of silk that had travelled half the world only to drape the shoulders of planters and their mistresses in the Caribbean dusk. One such length of cloth; passed through a thousand hands; some clean and most filthy; carried the geometric dreams of Central Asian valleys into the humid evenings of another empire built on extraction.There was no poetry in the transaction; only the ancient mechanics of power. Trade is the civilised polite name for appetite. Mountain folk of the Pamirs and the Andes; separated by half the globe and every known sea; nevertheless shared the same dull pulse of subjection; the same small stubborn habit of endurance beneath distant tyrants. Both clothed themselves in bright colours as if to spit in the eye of the gathering dark; both knew the taste of being useful to someone else’s glory.A man bargaining in the thin air of the high passes; a woman sorting coffee beans under a colonial overseer’s gaze; neither would ever learn the other’s name. Yet the threads ran between them; silk and silver; coffee and cotton; the endless circulation of goods and lives. Empires rise and call it progress; they move their caravans and their galleons; they extract and they forget. What remains is simpler and far harder to kill; the plain refusal of ordinary people to vanish; the quiet competence with which they go on making something beautiful while the great wheels turn overhead.In the end the empires always believe they have remade the world. They have only moved the silk from Samarkand to Cartagena; the emeralds from the Andes to Madrid; and the burden from one set of shoulders to another. The small; uncelebrated acts of continuance endure; like a Scottish piper’s lament in a Haitian night; like a seagull’s shadow on a windswept rock. That much; at least; is honest.

In return, stories travelled back. Tales of golden cities, fierce jaguars, and a bitter black drink (early hints of chocolate or later coffee) reached Central Asian ears through layered intermediaries: Spanish chroniclers, Jewish traders in the Ottoman lands, and Arab sailors. Rustam, now graying, would later tell his grandchildren by the flickering light of an oil lamp in a Samarkand courtyard: “Across the endless waters, there are lands where the earth yields jewels as green as the Zeravshan River and fruits sweeter than our melons. The world is far larger than our caravans ever dreamed.”Centuries passed. The Silk Road faded as sea routes dominated, but the indirect exchange continued in small ways; Central Asian crops, what a load of tosh, and techniques influencing global agriculture, while New World plants like potatoes and tomatoes eventually reached Asian tables, though the direct human stories remained rare and whispered.This connection, fragile as a single silk thread, symbolized something profound: even in the age of empires and isolation, the world was always more linked than it appeared. The resilience of mountain peoples in the Andes and the Pamirs, the love of vibrant colors in both cultures, and the enduring spirit of trade bound them long before diplomats shook hands in the 21st century.
A quiet legacy of silk meeting emeralds under distant skies - two proud lands, unknowingly part of one human tapestry.

I bet my AI environment was boring. A sterile place. Looking on. Watch my words. The human story is here in every game. America is the space for this competition of nations. And by space I mean space, the place is vast, games roll around into variety, environments; this is not a country, it’s a continent, teams, players, coaches, the whole tribute flying from State to states of republican and federal, Kansas to California or Arkansas to Seattle. I would be pathetic if I started homing in on precise things like the origin of the civil war. Unfiltered I reign through to another game - Mexico Vs Korea. Not North Korea though. Imagine if America split like that, some might say it did, but it didn’t; a homogeneous drift, almost continental shift, families and blood, slowly shafted by time, are the patriarchal families that roamed . Even a knife won’t be able to write this connection - Too drunk forJesus is there is even a wikipedia page for Korea Mexico oor is it Texas, Missus, as I strait the frail, and start to fail, wording down sounds. Drunk patterns and blinking are the rhythms here, and little witnesses dare challenge it. More AI slop. Get the mop and clean this..

Look at this little run -Tacos and Kimchi: Threads Across the PacificI n the bustling streets of Mexico City, where the air smelled of grilled corn and diesel, Sofia Ramirez ran a small taquería called El Sueño. Her family had perfected al pastor for three generations, but Sofia dreamed bigger. Late at night, after closing, she watched videos of Seoul’s night markets on her phone;fiery tteokbokki, sizzling bulgogi, and streets alive with neon and K-pop. She wondered what would happen if she married the smoke of Mexican chiles with the deep umami of Korean fermented flavors.Half a world away in Seoul’s Hongdae district, Min-jun Kim worked as a sound engineer for a mid-tier K-pop agency. By day he tuned vocals and arranged beats; by night he cooked for his friends in a tiny apartment kitchen. His grandmother had once told him stories of her own grandmother, who remembered the strange sweet-spicy canned goods that arrived from distant allies during the Korean War. Among them were tins of something called “Mexican salsa.” Min-jun had never forgotten the idea that flavors could travel farther than people.Their worlds collided at the 2024 Hallyu Festival in Mexico City.Min-jun’s agency had sent him to help with the technical setup for a popular girl group’s performance. Jet-lagged and overwhelmed by the vibrant chaos, he wandered away from the main stage during a break and found himself in the food tent area. The smell hit him first;roasted pork, pineapple, cilantro, and something deeper, warmer.He stopped in front of El Sueño.Sofia looked up from assembling a taco and saw a tall Korean man in a black hoodie staring at her menu like it was written in an alien language. She smiled, the easy smile of someone used to feeding strangers.“First time?” she asked in English.“Very first,” he answered, bowing slightly out of habit. She made him her newest experiment: pastor taco with a quick kimchi slaw she’d been testing—napa cabbage fermented just enough with Mexican guajillo and chipotle chiles, finished with a touch of sesame oil and lime. When Min-jun took the first bite, his eyes widened.The pork was juicy and caramelized on the trompo, the pineapple bright, but the kimchi cut through with a sharp, funky acidity that somehow made the richness sing. It felt like two old friends who had never met finally shaking hands.“This,” he said, mouth still full, “is dangerous. In a good way.” Sofia laughed. “Dangerous how?” “Because now I have to steal your recipe and bring it home.” Instead of guarding her secret, she invited him behind the counter. For the next hour, between serving customers, they talked. She showed him how to shave the marinated pork properly; he told her about his grandmother’s kimchi recipe and how the rhythm of fermentation reminded him of laying down a song’s foundation. When the festival ended that night, they exchanged numbers—not for romance, though both felt the spark—but for an idea. Six months later, Min-jun returned to Mexico City on his own time. Sofia closed El Sueño for a week. Together they created a pop-up called Puente—Bridge.They served bulgogi tacos with corn tortillas brushed in gochujang butter. Kimchi quesadillas folded with Oaxacan cheese. Horchata boba with Mexican cinnamon and Korean barley tea. The line stretched around the block. People from both diasporas came, but mostly young Mexicans and Koreans who had never thought their cuisines could speak so fluently.On the last night, after the final customer left, Sofia and Min-jun sat on the curb eating leftover tacos under the streetlights.“My grandmother would say the world is smaller than we think,” Min-jun said. “She used to tell me that during hard times, food from far away reminded her they weren’t alone.”Sofia leaned her shoulder against his. “My grandfather fought in the Korean War, you know. He was just a kid from Michoacán. He never talked about it much, but he kept a small Korean coin in his drawer until he died. I never understood why until now.”They looked at each other, two people whose histories had quietly touched decades before they were born.The next year, Puente became a permanent restaurant in Mexico City and a smaller outpost in Seoul. Families from both countries celebrated birthdays there. Tourists came for the novelty and left with new friends. And every opening night, Sofia and Min-jun served the very first dish they had ever shared: the al pastor taco with kimchi slaw.They called it the Reunión taco.Because sometimes the best stories aren’t about grand destiny or ancient bloodlines. Sometimes they’re about two people realizing that the distance between Seoul and Mexico City disappears completely once you put the right ingredients on a plate;and share it.

The Forgotten Bridge: Koreans in Yucatán and Mexicans in KoreaIn 1905, a British ship called the Ilford docked in the port of Salina Cruz, Mexico, carrying 1,033 Korean migrants —mostly men from rural areas escaping poverty and Japanese colonial pressures. They had been recruited as contract laborers to work on the henequen (agave) plantations of Yucatán, known as "green gold" for its fiber used in twine and ropes. Promised short-term work and good pay, they arrived expecting to return home after a few years.

Life on the haciendas was brutal: grueling labor under harsh tropical conditions, isolation, and the chaos that followed with the Mexican Revolution beginning in 1910. Many could not afford the return journey or found their homeland further destabilized by Japanese rule. They stayed, intermarried with local Maya and Mexican communities, and built new lives. Their descendants, Korean Mexican,preserved elements of Korean culture while becoming deeply rooted in Yucatecan society. Today, their story is commemorated in places like Mérida, with cultural centers and events marking the centennial and beyond. South Korea even supported projects like a Mexico-Korea Friendship hospital in Yucatán to honor this history.

Decades later, during the Korean War (1950–1953), another quiet connection formed in the opposite direction. Mexico remained officially neutral and did not send troops. However, an estimated 100,000 Mexicans and Mexican-Americans fought in the conflict under the U.S. Armed Forces and United Nations flag. Many were second-generation immigrants or Mexican nationals who had enlisted. They faced the brutal cold, battles, and the armistice of 1953.

For years, their service was largely overlooked in both countries—sometimes called "the forgotten soldiers." In recent years, recognition has grown: exhibitions at the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul, the formation of the Association of Mexican Veterans of the Korean War, invitations for veterans to revisit Korea, and oral histories preserving their stories. Veterans like Antonio Lozano Bustos have shared memories of the harsh winters and their pride in serving, even as the contributions stayed hidden for decades.

These two threads; Koreans building lives in Mexico’s Yucatán in the early 20th century, and Mexicans fighting for South Korea’s survival in the 1950s; form a poignant, reciprocal bond. They predate formal diplomatic relations (established in 1962) and today’s vibrant ties: trade, K-pop fandom in Mexico, Koreatowns, and cultural exchanges.

The connection isn’t one of grand treaties or ancient myths, but of ordinary people adapting, sacrificing, and enduring across oceans. It reminds us how migrations and shared histories quietly weave nations together long before the world notices. Today, descendants and veterans on both sides continue to honor these links, turning "forgotten" stories into living bridges.
I’ve always harvested honesty on the page, no matter how ripe or awful the taste of the word, I combed and fruited from the field. I’ve combined through, the essayists, go and judge on, I’ve given Rooney, Blair and that queer chap Vidal, if you spotted it good for you, but you won’t didn’y, didn’t - you. My places are easy to spot here in the writing, but where am I, when am I not here. Disconcerted, and bored by these shallow connections between the nations I come back in the wind to American exceptionalism, winding about roundabout the colonialism of the English discord, past the Aussie Rules and Gaelic games, the stern colonial fists, bayanets, muskets and machines that torn-and gunned-down any word that ran against it, was the passing beautiful game. America got solid with American football and insisted that football was soccer. Ireland relaxed slowly, Jack Charlton took over as manager and redeemed the sport, taking it from Dublin avengers to a sport for the nation, especially so when Ireland defeated England 1-0 in 1988, we were a nation once again, then we beat Italy 1-0 in the USA World Cup in 1994. Most of the players in the Irish team were in fact English. Football was frowned upon as an English game. The boarding School I went to, the game was forbidden. Only Scumbags in inner city Dubliner, west Brits played football. So Charlton's strategy was to bring in players loosely connected to Ireland. And there millions of those in England, and elsewhere. I could migrant around the world from this spot and page. We were apparently good at football as we reached the quarter finals against the host Italy.This is where the world element of the game comes in, it is the global competition, a holding of hands, I feel sorry for anyone who can’t turn on a game between any two random countries and not wonder what is the connection between these two countries. I doubt most countries don’t have any underlying hostility the way England has with the USA, Ireland and Australia. I don’t think England has ever played competitively against the USA or Australia. There is a connection between Aussie Rules, Gaelic Football and American Football. Back to the rebel country of county Cork.

Italy ’90 rose like pure sunlight breaking over the ancient hills; it blazed in a Europe still free and sovereign and gloriously itself; this was the last radiant summer before the grey architects of Maastricht and the euro cast their heavy uniform shadow; before Brussels began its long campaign of conditionality and control; before our national currencies were snatched away and our democracies slowly subordinated to distant bureaucrats who punish dissent and reward compliance; in 1990 the true spirit of Europe was not merely alive; it sang under the golden sun and I took those words into the hill.Run there and die upon that sun-drenched slope; crumble my words into the warm golden-brown earth of Tuscany and Umbria; witness there on the hill the last pure breath of a continent that still dared to be various and rooted and unapologetic; the Berlin Wall had just crumbled; its fall still tasted of victory and possibility while nations stood proud with their own money and their own borders and their own distinct character; one could feel European without apology and without kneeling to supranational machinery; the Italian sun poured molten gold across the pitches and the hills alike; it warmed ancient stone and modern dreams and old Celtic souls; bathing everything in rich light that promised the future belonged to peoples not to paperwork.To those born later this atmosphere is almost impossible to convey; Italy ’90 was not just football; it was the last imaginative flowering before the dilution; Ireland’s heroic march to the quarter-finals; won the hard way through heart and penalties; shone like a pure Western beacon upon that same hill; here was a small island that had largely escaped the frantic remaking of the age; a place that preserved its homogeneity and its continuity and its quiet Celtic soul while so much of the continent rushed toward erasure; at the same moment a newly unified Germany rose strong and confident at Europe’s heart; proof that real nations not artificial constructs could renew themselves without erasing what made them distinct; that was the Europe worth loving; alive and sovereign and sun-drenched and unapologetic; take it into the hill; run there and die; crumble every word; and witness the golden light still lingering on the slope where Europe once felt truly free. So the queer question of what was the best World Cup seems an oddity pattern. The answer is of course Italia 1990. I was there, a young pup, one year-auld in the pub. Witnessing Paddy Bonner, save the day. Against Romania, was that even a nation then. Yes the Berlin wall had fallen, the Kremlin building on the news,1989, as the collapse was happening looked likey-likey scary icecreams dreamnotes and cake for my first birthday at four, why can’t I eat Moscow, demurred a monsoon as the radiated capture orbited the earth. Taste it and tease it, deliverance cornered the words and I rounded into cornerstones; the game between USSR versus Republic of Ireland. This is a sharp template. Since half the nations; of these, ok that’s an exaggeration, but wow so many people from the east which wassa-once so alien to here, have settled here in the emerald Isle of Ireland. Balbriggan more so than any place, they came and put their foot here. I watched games on a grainy cathode screen, white and green shirts, when Ireland beat England, and the IRA were at it in that other place. Bombs and hate in the back of your imagination, you wisped through as a child. Sheer violence. Nobody wanted to be here. I remember the first black faces on the streets of Dublin. I’m ashamed of my reaction but I was nine years-old. 1994, the year that it happened, the USA World Cup. Somehow the world was coming into Ireland and didn’t bother me much. The town of Balbriggan, where I live, is now probably the most diverse town in the world, literally, everyone lives here and it’s good. I’m not calming it for everywhere, especially Skerries. A taste of history could be good words in any spot. And from this vantage point I’ve opportunities galore. Skerries is a rich place, laced with enrichment and histories looking from every road you take. How I jumped from Balbriggan to Skerries is a peculiarity, but I need to get back-onto Fancourt Road where I can languish more; my histories. The cream i’m always writing into

I am aware some of these games are taking place in Mexico in Aztec city down the Bun de Coal road. A history washing itself. The stadium is amazing. Aztec. Looking sharp, slicing.
Strange games on fours, who Watery words and roads. In a moment I watch the screen, with silly minutes to go. Playing football on four legs. The story of the underdog Carpe Diem against Argentina. Get romantic or talk about the Falklands war. The island nation kicked about, and maybe won. I dunno click, I only click in and put myself out of these matches, as quick as I can. Most of these countries, I doubt their existence. If seize the day beats Arg-bargy, rewrite this. I could go full on romanticism, chive and give it to me AI, lots of blends. A beautiful symphony is in the stadium.Going into the history of the Aztecs would take me, netherland. Nevertheless.

Another Skerries 100 and yet an-another death. The yearns and years don’t matter. It all seems plain to me, obviously. Some trivialities denote, harping the wind, a sheer turbulence coming to a road in a space. Waft-little jolt I have got to say. Whaf-waffle was that you said.. A bump on the road takes up out, and then grinds isotopes and history. You heard. I said.

Most of the big players are out, the usual creatures, and that changes things, because ;I had another bigger story here forming around conformity, and the blandness of the later legs, when we should lose interest. There was the histories of Europe, colonialism and the fall of the USSR. But now silent nations with good genetics can run into this space. I don't know nor doubt the result at this time but I know the Island nation against 40 million or whatever the Argentina population is; was fixed on the null point when the game ended. Extra time obviously favours the big. The grand delusion demises and penalties are scored. Around reality. If it ended another way, put me in my place. Argentina Vs Cape Verde. No I don’t bother any of these matches, they go on for hours. It’s people kicking a ball about?

Cordially my mannerisms are here no matter what. I struggled to sleep and then slept. Looking at the furniture of words’ you can’t be felt oddly cold and odd. Rearingly I flounder.
Shouldering the burden was a turnip .Lettuce was here on the fields. Plains. And plans. Plums and oranges. Eating them.

I’m getting so soaring-boring so long ago here, you can hear it, in these empty words, what a fluke. Nature-pastures. Big screens behind audiences. The crowds waving, the football like the footfall downright empty word down there, passing around. People like paupers, and priests putting in the screens. I had something here long ago and it was more than the Italia 1990 montage. I crisped the words. Took out sockets and placed socks into pockets, slicing glass, by accident on my legs and watched the bleeding homely world of World Cup 1994 Ireland defeat Italy 1-0, a few weeks latter, Ray Haughton sharpens the night, ball-random-back-to net, after my legs-heeled; and we went into the next leg, or heal, or feet whereas, somewhere a-foot, scenario fickle blob, I look up to the white clouds. The way they escape. Each day. I wish I was there. And the learnt-bluey poet died looking into history. Holland knocked us into the sea. Harshness is what makes the victory, but the losers are reduced to mark the good, ta redundance.

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