World Cup madness

According to a survey by SIC Gallup Media Survey/TNS, 77 percent of Lithuanians, or 2.5 million people, were watching the football passions of the World Cup. They could watch it live, even in 3D format, in the Vilnius Forum Cinemas Vingis theater.
On the eve of the final match, Holland vs. Spain, lrytas.lt organized an Internet voting poll which gives an idea about the football watching habits of Lithuanians. The result is as follows: 29 percent said that they would not watch the final while 55 percent said that they would watch it at home with family, nine percent said that they would watch it with friends and seven percent said that they would watch it in a pub or cafe. Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius was among those seven percent. On July 9, Joep Wijnands, Dutch ambassador to Lithuania, visited Kubilius in the Lithuanian government office.

“This is your survival pack,” Wijnands told Kubilius, inviting the Lithuanian prime minister to watch the final in an outdoor cafe in the courtyard of the Teachers’ House and presenting him with the traditional uniform of the fans of Holland: orange T-shirts and an orange baseball cap. The diplomats of the Netherlands and Spain as well as the Dutch and Spanish expat communities and their Lithuanian friends were there. The orange color prevailed in the crowd there during the final match in the evening of July 11, though the Dutch community in Lithuania has just some 20 people.

Kubilius and Vilnius Mayor Vilius Navickas were dressed in orange and were blowing vuvuzellas in the courtyard of the Teachers’ House, scaring the Spanish diplomats who were sitting there. Kubilius also brought Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip to watch the final match. Ansip preferred to look more neutral and was dressed in white. He said he was a supporter of Germany during the World Cup. The wives of Kubilius and Navickas, for sake of diplomacy, were dressed in Spanish red.

The battle of Johannesburg was as brutal as the Dutch independence fight against the Spanish oppressors in the 16th century. The final’s decisive moment in the eyes of a Dutch supporter looks as follows: the English semi-blind referee Howard Webb won the World Cup for Spain by the strange refusal to give the right for the Dutch to have a corner kick, and by allowing Spain to organize a quick attack instead - that quick attack finished with a goal and Spain won with its traditional result, 1:0. The Spanish fans would probably have a different version. Anyway, Spain proved to be the world’s strongest team.
Lithuanians traditionally support the Germans (they like the German character features), England (they like English football clubs and have relatives in England) and Holland, which is supported mostly by liberal-minded Lithuanians who fell in love with the Dutch free-style team of 1974 and 1978. The devoted supporters of Holland are Gintautas Babravicius, leader of the Liberal and Center Union, and Leonidas Donskis, who was the No. 1 candidate for the Liberal Movement party during the last elections to the European Parliament. Donskis was so depressed by the defeat that he did not want to comment on the final match.

The sensation of this World Cup became Uruguay, which took fourth place. Uruguay and Lithuania have the same population, i.e. 3.5 million. “If at least half of those millions [of litas] which Lithuania pumped into basketball, without any big result, would have been given to football, this year our national team (which even now in the FIFA ranking occupies a quite high 49th place) would be almost for sure playing in South Africa and making Lithuania not less famous than Uruguay,” wrote political analyst Audrius Baciulis in the magazine Veidas, emphasizing that football is incomparably more popular throughout the world than basketball.

The Lithuanian media reported extensively on the World Cup, but without big emotion. Basketball provokes quite a different mood in Lithuania’s media. On July 7, during a press conference on the national basketball team issues, Vladas Garastas, president of the Lithuanian Basketball Federation, who is a man known for his political correctness in the style of Prince Philip (Duke of Edinburgh), described the Lithuanian media reaction to a lost international game in basketball. “Our newspapers write then: the Mongols occupied the country and all women were raped,” Garastas said.