Chp 515. World Cup: Quarter Finals match-up

So here are the upcoming Quarter Finals matches of the FIFA World Cup 2014, starting tonight -

Match #1. Tonigh 9:30 PM – France versus Germany

Match #2. Saturday 1:30 AM – Brazil versus Colombia

Match #3. Saturday 9:30 PM – Belgium versus Argentina

Match #4. Sunday 1:30 AM – Costa Rica versus Netherlands

By Sunday morning we’ll know who the Semi-Finalists are. And hopefully, I can watch all four quarter final matches this time.

Being stuck at work, like I said in my previous post, I haven’t seen most of the matches so far. In fact, just day before yesterday our team stayed over for the night in office, and went home only last night around 11 PM - So that’s like 38 hours of work. We had a similar 36+ hours grind in office just last week too! Hopefully, today we’ll be able to release a new build of a *top secret* game project we’ve been working on, and release a beta test version before the Germany - France match kicks off tonight. Keeping my fingers crossed.

All four Quarterfinal matches are going to be pretty intense and exciting, and the entertainment will be a well deserved one for me having slogged my ass off the past few weeks (that is, if and only if we’re able to meet our deadline today. Otherwise it could even mean missing today’s two matches and even working over the weekend as well! Such is the life of a Start-Up company…)

Regarding the upcoming four matches, since the team I’m cheering for this World Cup is Germany, I’ll obviously be cheering for Colombia, Costa Rica and Belgium during their respective matches, so bring it on, all ye Brazil, Argentina and Netherlands fans! :D

And in other non-football sports-related news, millions of Indians were pissed off because when Maria Sharapova was recently asked if she knew who Sachin Tendulkar was, she said no. And thousands of hardcore Tendulkar fans took to Twitter, Facebook and various news article comment sections, abusing not just Sharapova but her mom, her dad etc. calling her a bitch, a whore, a bimbo, a prostitute … just because she fucking didn’t know somebody. I’ve never been more embarrassed to be an Indian right then. And as #whoismariasharapova trended worldwide on Twitter, with every new insult and misogynistic tweet thrown at her, I cringed more and more in my seat. This myopic outlook we have, where we think the world universe revolves around our country, definitely needs to be changed.

Just because cricket is extremely popular here doesn’t mean it is everywhere else. I have met my fair share of disillusioned and cricket crazy fans who consider the Cricket World Cup to be the one true World Cup, because they feel football is an unpopular game that not many people or countries play or watch!

And trying to justify all the abuses and outbursts by bringing out comparisons of the number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers both icons have is utterly lame. Of course Tendulkar will have more fans, but we forget the fact that a vast majority of those are Indians, and that India has 10 times the population of Russia.

Sure, in India, Sachin is considered as God, and millions of people worship him. I for one have a deep respect for him even though cricket is not my favorite sport. But that doesn’t mean one can cyber-bully somebody who probably has never seen a cricket match in her life. How many of us truly know the legends of other sporting events like Ice Hockey, Rugby, Baseball etc. I mean, are we even expected to know such legends? No. At best, maybe one can smirk at her for not knowing the icon of a game watched by a nation of billion, but cyber-bullying her, spamming her and verbally abusing her sexually and racially is taking it too far. And I’m sure a lot of these butthurt fans, angry because a foreigner doesn’t know who Tendulkar is, will not even know any of our own players in the Hockey or Football national teams. Or the names of all the States and Capitals of our country. Or the names of the Chief Ministers or Vice President of India. That is the sad situation we’re in today. But reading various comment sections across different media publishing this news, at least it feels good to know there are quite a number of people criticizing our criticism of Sharapova.  I raise my glass to such people.

So that was it. That incident came and went. Now it is time to focus back to football. Until tonight’s matches, cheerios everyone…