Spain Vs Italy

I've been watching Euro 2008 for the past week and a half or so. For those of you who don't know, the Euro tournament is like the World Cup but for European teams only. One could argue that the Euro Cup finals are harder than the World Cup itself since every team is extremely strong as opposed to the, being realistic, the relatively weak African and Asian teams. While some of the teams are strong (Senegal and S. Korea come to recent memory), over all they are weak, especially compared to a European only tournament. Anyway, not surprisingly, I am a huge Spain fan, and they beat Italy 4-2 in penalty kicks after regular time was tied 0-0. Certainly nerve-wracking for a Spain fan considering their penchant for crashing in big tournaments. However, they finally cracked the quarterfinals and are on to play Russia, a team they killed in the group stages, but it's the semi-finals and you can't take anything for granted with the Finals on the line. Anyway, the point of the entry isn't to talk about this Spain-Italy game, but rather the last Spain-Italy game I saw, World Cup 1994.

So 1994...Year the World Cup was in the US (I went to a Saudi Arabia-Morocco game with my dad. Don't remember anything about it except that there were a bunch of ethnic fans, I say that because I don't remember what country they rooted from at the time, and they were playing drums and such and it was awesome.) and the first time that I was sent to sleep away camp. Except, I wasn't like every other 11-year old being sent away to sleep away camp, I went to sleep away camp in Spain which is an interesting experience because sleep away camp is an interesting enough experience without it being in a language I was semi-capable in. I will say that my parents didn't completely abandon me to the wolves. I technically did the camp with the son of a family friend of my parents who I was friends with. However, he slept in a 2 bunk room with a friend of his and I joined up in the 6 bed room with some guys I didn't know. Probably my first real independent experience, and I think I passed it pretty well. There is actually another fun story from that sleep away camp, but you'll have to ask me about it another time. Overall, it was a pretty good experience. I think it was for about a week, met some cool people, did some neat things, and was probably the first time I really started to notice girls in a non-cootie way. Back on track, soccer, I'm sorry fútbol, in Spain, like many other European countries, is a huge deal, and one of the things I did with some of my camp friends was watch fútbol, including the Spain-Italy quarterfinal match. I don't remember much of that match, but I do distinctly remember Spain losing 2-1 and, more specifically, remember a Spanish player getting cracked in the face by an Italian player in the box, necessitating a penalty shot, that was not called. Now, to describe how egregious of a blown call this was, the Spanish player had blood streaming down his face from the elbow ot the face. It's not like he took a dive or something, he got fucked up. To make things worse, this was fairly late in the game, so that penalty shot, and presumed goal, would have changed the landscape of the game, sending it to extra time and a possible Spanish victory. Also would have changed the landscape of history since Italy went on to beat Brazil in penalty kicks in the final game. That game is also imprinted on my mind because I was watching it with my abuelo and he somehow predicted every single penalty shot. To this day, I can't figure out how he did it because I'm pretty sure we were watching the match live.

Anyway, I think back on that whole sleep away experience as my first really good memory of Spain. Not to say that Spain was a bad experience, but most of my time in Spain on vacation was spent in la casa de mis abuelos doing not a whole lot. Really, until I met my peña in Marcilla I didn't have a lot of fun Spain memories. Sure, it sounds great that I went to Spain every summer, but my immediate family was small and most of my primos, and I use that term in the loose way that Spanish always uses family terms with virtually no attempts to distinguish degrees of separation, were older than I was and didn't live near boy so I didn't spend much time with them. Also, I didn't speak the language well until high school, so that played into the difficulty of enjoying Spain. Anyway, the point being that sleep away camp in a foreign country speaking a language I was okay at, could have been a very intimidating and sucky experience. Instead, it was pretty fun and paved the way to the future awesomeness that was my Spanish experience in high school. Today's Spain-Italy game brought back those memories, and I thought it would be fun to share with whomever actually reads this blog.

Music listed to while writing this entry: Girando bari-Ojos de brujo Nouveau Flamenco music that I think is pretty cool.