Footy, European Style

While I am a reasonably well-travelled, experienced and dare I say it, cultured sort of a fellow, there are definitely still some aspects of living in Europe which make me feel overwhelmingly foreign. For instance, growing up as a young ankle-biter in Queensland, there were three sports falling under the umbrella of the term ‘football’, and none of them was soccer.  In fact, up until the last decade or so, the ‘world game’ was basically considered a fringe sport in Australia, usually played by those kids who didn’t quite make the school rugby union, rugby league or Aussie rules teams.

Of course, things have changed in recent years, largely thanks to our inclusion (and respectability) in the soccer world cup. But when the office started a Champions’ League tipping competition this week to mark the start of the finals, I had a tough time explaining that ‘footy tips’ were a bit different where I came from.

(In fact, just the term ‘footy’ seemed to lead to all sorts of confusion and subsequent ridicule. I tried to explain that such suffixed abbreviations weren’t that uncommon in Australian slang, such as ‘brekky’ and ‘bevvy’ for breakfast and beverage, respectively.  The linguistic lesson quickly degenerated, however, and I now have to put up with such cacophonic bastardisations as ‘crickety’ for cricket and, worst of all, ‘eggy’ as an appalling lengthening of a breakfast ingredient.)

Faced with opposition from such football powerhouse nations as Portugal, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, it’s fair to say that I’ve been well and truly branded the underdog tag for the tipping competition. To be fair, the mockery of my soccer-betting abilities may have been amplified to some extent when it became known that I knew of less than half the 16 teams in the knockout competition. However, I feel I have several unique advantages that put me in good stead to record an historic upset and dispel all disparagement forever more:

• I have no intrinsic allegiance to any team, aiding me in putting emotions aside for fully rational tipping decisions;
• As a result of the jeers and low expectations, I am ultra-motivated to win and have invested much time that should be spent on my thesis on ridiculous sports analysis websites; and
• …My greatest weapon of all: the secret advice of my good friend Manuel Weeks, who has the triple assets of a strategic brain, Spanish genes and being an absolute gun at Football Manager.

 

This week, I’m tipping a 1-0 win to Juventus away against Celtics (Scotts can play soccer?!), a safe 1-1 draw between Valencia and Paris (because I don’t know anything about them), 2-1 to Real Madrid at home to Manchester (two teams I have actually heard of), and an ambiguous 1-1 prediction in the last game between Dortmund and some team I can’t pronounce, but sounds suspiciously like Azeri chess super-grandmaster Shakhriyar Mamedyarov.

You may be thinking I’m giving away all my secrets in this post about my tipping assets and predictions, but I highly doubt they’ll be reading this. And if you are, dear Tinbergen colleagues, here’s a picture to drive home the fear you should have in the Aussie tipping prowess. As Douglas Adams would no doubt have said, “There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.”