GOL?

by Shannon Teoh (Photos by Ariff Hashim in Kuala Lumpur)

I’d been waiting here at the Cedars Road bus stop for awhile now. Several calls to Suja (who had told me to wait at Siddhar’s Road, and I was wondering why they’d name a road after an Indian dude down in Clapham until she spelt it out for me) reached the cold female voice that informed me that I had not, in fact, reached Suja, who is a pretty warm female.

The problem was that she’d been wanting me to stop at a different Cedars Road stop, which, thanks to the vagaries of Transport For London’s naming conventions, was actually ON Cedars Road, rather than on a main road NEAR Cedars Road.

What was supposed to be an arrangement to cut down a few minutes of backtracking for me ended up in an extra 15 minutes of kicking our heels, wondering what was up. The best laid plans of mice and men indeed.

In any case, brunch was to be somewhere along this street with some nifty looking cafes and ‘lepak’ spots. You know, macam Bangsar la. This is where the middle and upper-middle class people come and kononnya be Bohemian and slum it. But in fact, the food here costs twice as much as other places this far from central London.

The saving grace? Supposedly the best hollandaise sauce this side of the North Sea (for the benefit of those that don’t get this lawak bodoh, the North Sea is what separates the United Kingdom and Netherlands. Holland-aise sauce ma…) [sigh – ed.] and hence, awesome eggs benedict. Or florentine, for those like me, who wanted to fool himself into thinking he was eating healthily.

It was a 1pm brunch, and with only six hours to go until it was time to park oneself in front of the telly for the final, everyone was making plans. Adam, Suja’s antipodean squeeze, was going to head over to the pub with some friends… now. As far as they were concerned, parking yourself about five hours early was the best way to ensure great seats.

Suja, on the other hand, preferred to let her friends park themselves there for five hours and get pissed drunk before the game while she herself waltzed in at 7pm and weaved her way past the throngs of people who, like her, had better things to do on a Sunday afternoon and did not arrive five hours early.

Me? Simple. Watch it at a friend’s who had a flat widescreen LCD TV. Better yet, Jeremy would pick me up and send me home. All I had to do… was get the beer.

Easier said than done. Every damn supermarket here closes at 5pm on Sundays, so I had to scurry over to the nearest off-license, which was still a good half a mile away. Got in, checked my phone, still 20 minutes to kickoff. Now, which would be the best beer?

If you’re one Cina like me, sure must look for the best offer… but wait. Got San Miguel, and we were supporting Spain. Set. Pay a bit more and get, well, Filipino beer but with a Spanish name.

Got out of the shop, just in time, Jeremy pulls in and I get in the car and we whizz off to his house. We miss… exactly four seconds. Not exactly the best timing, but hey, it’s still 0-0.

Now, as we all know by now, the game was hardly a classic. Some frankly horrific challenges came flying in from the Dutch, most notably, the attempt by Nigel De Jong to perform open heart surgery on Xabi Alonso with his studs. He was only moderately successful.

Spain were also not their normal self, passes were going astray and the midfield pyramid of Xavi, Alonso and Andres Iniesta failed to fully mesmerise their opponents as they usually do. To be honest, I missed quite a few minutes as Jeremy, myself and his flatmate got into two different debates.

One, which is the best cuisine in the world. Two, who is the most widely known sportsman – Tiger or Becks.

I’ll save you the specifics but suffice to say, there was no conclusive answer by the time Iniesta had slotted home the goal to make Spain the best team in the world.

Or were they?

They were ‘better’ than the Dutch on the night for sure, but it would be difficult to argue that after they scraped through with five wins, a draw (extratime wins officially count as a draw as far as I remember) and a loss, their record was not superior to the technically (by the same token of an extra-time defeat) undefeated Netherlands. Meanwhile, Germany had accumulated the best goal difference in the tournament.

To make things more opaque, Howard “Wants To Have Fergie’s Children” Webb [Oi! – ed.] had a shocker of a game. I don’t care how tough the teams made it for him (be it Netherlands kicking lumps out of the Spanish, or the distasteful way the Spanish dove, exaggerated and waved imaginary cards), nor the fact that the game would have been less intriguing if players were sent off early in the game. He did not make the correct decisions early on and therefore encouraged ever more extreme examples of the beauty-less game.

Should I really have expected more than that? All day long, plans had gone awry.

But you know, they had not gone awry enough to have spoiled what ended up being a rather enjoyable Sunday.

There may very well be some parallel universe where Suja and I had met at exactly the right bus stop and I had gotten actual Spanish beer and actually got into Jeremy’s place in time to watch the national anthems. We’d also have settled the questions of best cuisine and biggest sports star while watching a World Cup Final that ended up with a 4-3 scoreline only because both goalkeepers saved about a dozen goalbound shots between them.

But in this one, I’d just capped off a month’s worth of decently watchable football with the best hollandaise sauce in London. Well, possibly the best.

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