Editorial, by Stone Korshak
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Unbelievable, how can Brazil get absolutely devastated by the Germans 7-1 in front of a home team crowd in the World Cup semi-finals? Granted, I’ve only watched a handful of soccer (just kidding futbol) games, but it was like nothing I’d ever seen, being used to way too many 0-0 and 1-1 ties.
The Irish or British commentators seemed to agree as I watched on my laptop streaming video because my parents house in Vermont (U.S.) doesn’t have ESPN and the match wasn’t on the regular TV networks here. After groaning at the fifth turkey-shoot goal, my Dad (who has probably never watched a full 90-minute soccer game) offered the consoling “maybe they can come back?”
He didn’t realize how unbelievable the whupping was, or how shocking it was for Brazil as a country. I’m not even sure I can fully grasp it after living in Rio for over five years. The only thing I knew as I watched was that I was happy to be sitting on my parent’s porch, and not in the stadium, or on Copacabana beach.
Yet I was working still – and shortly after I was editing our match report by our senior sports reporter Robbie Blakeley – who by the way has been doing an unbelievable job keeping up with almost every single game in the tournament while also writing for other publications and doing radio and occasional TV appearances.
After pressing the “publish” button on such a high profile article I tend to check our site readership stats which can show us real-time information. At any given moment our real-time simultaneous readers are usually about 20-40 people, depending on the time and day, which adds up to around 6,000 page views per day… but at that moment it was about 1,400 simultaneous readers. At the end of the day we had 84,000 page views.
In the next few days the fog will clear and only in hindsight we’ll grasp the gravity of the match. I truly am sorry for the team, the Brazilian fans, and legacy of hosting the World Cup. The final will be on July 13th and then we’ll all start putting it behind us… hopefully.
On another note, it’s unbelievable that José Dirceu, imprisoned on corruption charges in the landmark “mensalão” case conviction, has been granted “work release” from the jail. It is such a ridiculous concept that this guy is working at a pal’s law firm to rearrange and digitize the library on a salary of R$2,100 per month (he make this per hour probably, on a bad day).
This guy is so wealthy and well connected they literally can’t keep him in jail. The corrupt Brazilian political machine slides this under the radar of the World Cup news hoping to keep it quiet. Absolutely unbelievable.
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