Any wintry afternoon in England (1930) by CRW Nevinson. Painting held in the Manchester Art Gallery in Manchester, UK. Public domain.

The FIFA World Cup has made me feel a bit isolated. It’s winter down here, so it has been hard to get into the summery, festive atmosphere we were seeing on TV. It’s also in the middle of the night, if you watch the live matches. Strangely, none of my colleagues — even fellow immigrants — were following the event, so there was no football-related small talk in the kitchenette or elevator at work. If it hadn’t been for my seven-year-old neighbour, who plays both soccer and Aussie Rules football in his backyard, I would have felt quite alone … To make up for the lack of a team, he tends to play everything: goal-scoring player, commentator and referee. ‘And … he SCORES!!!’ goes his little voice, and then he changes roles, ‘Play on, play on!’

I had to explain some of the rules of the competition to my partner. Luckily, in Dutch, we often use the English words interchangeably with the Dutch words. So, we may say corner — with an accent, of course — for hoekschop, penalty for strafschop and off-side for buitenspel. The competition is played in two stages: the group stage (groepsfase) and the knockout stage (knock-outfase). The latter consists of the round of 16 (achtste finales, literally ‘one-eighth finals’), the quarterfinals (kwartfinales), the semifinals (halve finales) and the final (finale). Quite logical compared to the AFL finals …

One oddity (compared to the AFL finals) is that, before the final, the two teams that have lost the semifinals have to play off for third and fourth place in the competition in a match unimaginatively called the third-place play-off in English. In Dutch, this match is called ‘the little final’ (de kleine finale) or, rather poetically, ‘the consolation final’ (de troostfinale).

Until now, the closest ‘my’ team had ever come to winning the world cup was the ‘consolation final’ in Mexico in 1986, which they lost. This time, they won the match and therefore the bronze medal, so c’est la fête after all!