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It's the sixth World Cup of my life (I don't count Spain 1982 as I can't remember it), but it's the first I've experienced from the southern hemisphere. It provides another interesting insight to life in Oz for me. The first thing I noticed is how interest picked up fairly slowly. There was a lot of fuss when Australia qualified after beating Uruguay on penalties several months ago, but it went pretty quiet for a while. Then the build-up was fairly slow, and didn't start months in advance as I expect it did in England. I started to wonder if there would be much made of it at all.
SBS won the TV rights, and they're one of the smaller network stations who tend to specialise in less popular sports, foreign language news, etc. They're showing every single game however, which is good, and turns out to have been a good buy for them! Martin Tyler who used to do commentate on games in England, is their commentator, which makes things familiar. Of course there are a lot of Italians, English, Brazilians, etc. who want to watch the World Cup, but the big and most important thing has been the interest from the average Aussie! After Australia beat Japan 3-1 in their first game (and by doing so scored their first ever goals in a World Cup) the country has come alive with World Cup fever. 2 million people watched them lose to Brazil 2-0 in a very entertaining game. That's 10% of the population!!! And the game started at 2am ... on a Monday morning! Even Ella got out of bed to watch the whole game - truly impressive!Ella and I are going to Tasmania ('The Island State') on Sunday. This will be the fourth State I've visited, leaving only Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory (which isn't actually a State) for me to visit. It should be great. 2.5 hours in a plane and we'll be on the island, where the temperature should be maximum 10 celsius in the daytime. Ella's quite excited about seeing a decent amount of snow (there's ski runs 75km from Hobart). Actually the weather has been 'pretty ordinary' of late - some much needed rain at last and temperatures down below 20 in the daytime.So we'll be watching England taken on Ecuador at 1am Monday morningin Hobart ... perhaps in a pub?Anyway I'll report back when we are, hopefully with some nice photos!
