Everyone remembers their first watercooler conversation, and mine came – conversely – in the dehydrated tarmac in front of the entrance to my school.
As 13-year-olds at an all-boys’ school, football was always a part of the conversation, a means to while away lunch breaks and buy yourself entry into conversations with the popular kids.
But it was almost always tribal, at least to begin with. Growing up in North London meant most of my year was divided into Arsenal and Tottenham – I’d occasionally been to Highbury on friends’ season tickets – and my West Ham fandom restricted my role to winding up whichever of those two crowds was easiest to agitate.
International football was largely an afterthought, save for those using France’s success to score points in their North London Derby arguments. This might have been in part due to England slipping out of Euro 2000 – the first major tournament to take place during my time at secondary school – at the earliest possible moment.
But just a few weeks later, as we were waiting for school to start on a Monday morning, we had a unifying factor. France had beaten Italy in the final, David Trezeguet firing home a Golden Goal winner after Sylvain Wiltord’s last-gasp equaliser, opening the door for those of us in early to engage in some dire, entry-level watercooler banter. It was glorious.
Fast forward two years and the environment had changed. The World Cup was being held in Japan and South Korea, bringing with it early morning kickoffs. Now 15, we were looking for any excuse to not do work, and we’d been handed it on a platter.
Now I’m not sure if you remember what you were like as a 15-year-old. If not, let me refresh your memory: you were a lazy f-cker.
This isn’t a personal attack. I was just as bad, as was everyone I knew at the time. It’s your last school year before the responsibilities of GCSEs, but you’re older (and, by that well-trodden school hierarchy, more powerful) than at least half of the kids in your school. By the time it gets to June, you’re more or less phoning it in and waiting for the summer to begin.
Thankfully, the staff at my school were well aware of this. While you can distract younger children by jangling keys and/or having class outside, 15-year-olds sometimes need a more elaborate distraction. You know, something like a projector showing international football during lesson time.
There’s something about a World Cup (it’s not the same for a European Championship – this is important) that gives it a special aura.
Maybe it’s the presence of players you’ve never heard of, or players you only know from playing Football Manager, ripping apart established names. There was certainly a bizarre enjoyment to be taken from computer game legend John O’Brien helping the United States open up a 3-0 lead over Portugal. Or maybe it’s just about watching Brazil, a team for whom a centre-back can throw his body in the air and hook a volley into the back of the net like it’s completely normal.
When you throw in the ability to watch matches in non-football locations, however, it gains a special sense of wonderment. In 2014 I watched on from the outside seating of a Colombian café in Tottenham, packed to the gills with families in matching James and Falcao shirts, as Pablo Armero scored the country’s first World Cup goal, and watched a Brazilian restaurant empty out like the end of a club night when Sami Khedira put Germany 5-0 up inside the first half-hour of their semi-final.
But when it comes to ‘non-football’ locations, nothing fits the bill more than a school classroom or science lab.
We watched a fair few matches that year. I can vividly remember a cramped English classroom ignoring Macbeth audiobooks to crowd round a tiny television and watch instant replays of Christian Vieri’s open goal miss against South Korea, heads in hands in disbelief. It was the same feeling we’d had a couple of weeks earlier, waiting for registration as Richard Morales’ late miss saw Uruguay fall just short of completing a sensational comeback against Senegal. But these moments were shared by only a couple of dozen of us – the England games were the main event.
I still remember hundreds of us coming in about two hours before lessons started, stifling yawns as England and Nigeria played out one of the dullest goalless draws in living memory, and I fondly recall the cheers that went up from a crowd of schoolkids when Trevor Sinclair completed a bicycle-kick clearance. It was inconsequential in every sense, but we were young and impressionable – like us watching live football at school, the idea of clearing the ball acrobatically just added to the sense that we were in a no man’s land were the normal rules didn’t apply.
There were lows as well as highs, of course, but these were felt just as keenly by the teachers. The same science lab that hosted Nigeria-England was used for the quarter-final against Brazil – maybe it was seen as a lucky charm, maybe we just didn’t have another room on the school grounds that could hold so many people. Either way, that morning 15 years ago today ended in heartbreak, followed by the horrible realisation that we had a full day of school ahead of us.
Well, not quite. Another teacher felt our pain and effectively cancelled one of his classes to allow us to watch the second match of the day around lunchtime. And it wasn’t just his designated class who got to see Torsten Frings break American hearts with an unseen handball – anyone who could physically fit into his science lab was invited, and our regular teachers weren’t going to stop us. As we’d already established, the rules didn’t apply.
Next summer, if I’m not in Russia, I’ll likely find myself scrambling for anywhere with a projector, where I can watch football surrounding by people I vaguely recognise but couldn’t name. There’s nothing like a World Cup to unite people in their desire to watch football and do nothing else.
Looking back, the 2002 World Cup was often dreadful, with Germany beating Paraguay in one of the dullest ever knockout games and Brazil’s win in the final providing 90 minutes of meh. However, at the time, there truly was nothing better.
