Last night while Princess Christina Ronaldo was packing his handbags and preparing to leave Manchester for the even richer playing fields of Madrid, the rest of his of his team mates were outplayed by an Estonian football team rated 113th in the FIFA World ranking.
Tiiu and I headed along to the stadium in the hope of witnessing a valiant defence from the boys in blue against the multi-millionaires rated 11th, but expected them to eventually be overwhelmed.
Yet last night something astonishing happened, actually there were two equally amazing events. The first was that the minnows from Estonia did not lay down and die in front of a team that were European championship runners-up in 2004, in fact at the end of the goalless draw it was the Portuguese who were lucky not to be heading home well and truly beaten.
The match was a light year away from the performance that Estonia put up against Armenia a couple of months ago. The crowd truly were the proverbial twelfth man. Admittedly Portugal did not send their strongest team but who cares?
Certainly not a single person in the crowd, in fact we loved it.
This may have been Estonia’s finest footballing hour and we were there to see it.
The second was something that I would have missed had Tiiu not pointed it out to me. Yesterday there was a young boy with his father cheering on Estonia. What makes this seemingly normal event exceptional was that the boy was Russian, albeit Estonian- Russian. For months I have been complaining how Russians living within these borders were isolationist, apparently resentful of all things Estonian including their language, but not any longer (or at least not as much).
Here was a Russian boy, speaking his adapted country’s language, cheering on his team alongside his father.
Unlike the late and great Liverpool F.C. manager Bill Shankley, I don’t believe that football is more important than life and death, but football can heal old wounds that I never thought possible.
Tiiu and I headed along to the stadium in the hope of witnessing a valiant defence from the boys in blue against the multi-millionaires rated 11th, but expected them to eventually be overwhelmed.
Yet last night something astonishing happened, actually there were two equally amazing events. The first was that the minnows from Estonia did not lay down and die in front of a team that were European championship runners-up in 2004, in fact at the end of the goalless draw it was the Portuguese who were lucky not to be heading home well and truly beaten.
The match was a light year away from the performance that Estonia put up against Armenia a couple of months ago. The crowd truly were the proverbial twelfth man. Admittedly Portugal did not send their strongest team but who cares?
Certainly not a single person in the crowd, in fact we loved it.
This may have been Estonia’s finest footballing hour and we were there to see it.
The second was something that I would have missed had Tiiu not pointed it out to me. Yesterday there was a young boy with his father cheering on Estonia. What makes this seemingly normal event exceptional was that the boy was Russian, albeit Estonian- Russian. For months I have been complaining how Russians living within these borders were isolationist, apparently resentful of all things Estonian including their language, but not any longer (or at least not as much).
Here was a Russian boy, speaking his adapted country’s language, cheering on his team alongside his father.
Unlike the late and great Liverpool F.C. manager Bill Shankley, I don’t believe that football is more important than life and death, but football can heal old wounds that I never thought possible.
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