After three straight weeks where we've had three or four games (occasionally six games!) every single day, now... we only have 16 games remaining over the next fifteen days. There'll only be 1 or 2 games per day from now on. Heck, we'll even have four days with no football at all - I don't know what I'll do with myself!
It is a bit of a relief, I have to say. While I think the expansion of the tournament this year to 48 teams is a thoroughly good and necessary thing - in giving more teams and players the opportunity to compete on the biggest stage in the sport, and giving more countries and supporters the ability to experience a direct emotional investment in the competition - the one downside of it has been that.... it is now an overwhelming watch. There were 8 more games in the group phase alone than we have seen in the entire competition before, and we now have twice as many knockout games as previously to get through in the last two weeks. And I've been finding it all just a bit too much to keep track of.
For most of the previous World Cups in my lifetime (at least since I was about 4 or 5!), I have somehow or other managed to watch just about every single game in its entirety. But this year, I've probably only managed a quarter of them (and most of those not actually live: the games are all on in the middle of the night in my timezone!). I haven't even bothered to watch proper extended highlights for all of them, but only the rather shorter reels that pop up on Youtube - and even them, I fear I'm sometimes skimming through with glazed eyes, not really paying much attention. There are probably a few games that I've overlooked entirely. Oh, the shame.
We're probably all unaccustomed to this much larger roster of participating countries, and perhaps we'll adapt and deal much better with the memory challenge it presents better in the next iteration of the enlarged event. But I am starting to fret that there is perhaps a problem with my aging brain as well: I'm really finding it a struggle now to remember what order the games came in, or what all the results were, or who was in who's group originally, or who scored the goals in a certain game,.... or who Curacao's goalkeeper is. You, the important details are not staying put as they used to. I hope it's just a lack of sleep rather than the beginning of the long decline into senility....
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