Daddy's cup.

With apologies to Gary Bettman and Lord Stanley, there is really only one cup that matters a great deal in sports. That's right all you sports call in show soccer haters— it's time for the quadrennial FIFA World Cup.

The show opens this Friday, 11:00 Am CDT in München at the newly constructed stadium with a match betwee hosts Germany and Costa Rica.

Some key early matches include:

6/10 8AM CDT England versus Paraguay on ESPN2
This match will tell us a lot about the real quality of the Three Lions. Paraguay are the sleeping giant of South American football (a region which boasts arguably the world's two best national squads, Brazil and Argentina) and a fashionable sleeper pick for the tourney as a whole:

Paraguay have one of the best central midfield partnerships in the whole tournament and if Santa Cruz is healthy they have a top 5 strike pairing too. They lack speed at the back but are extremely steady and experianced. They're the most dangerous sleeper in the tournament and underestimate them at your perrill.
Titan Fan post #14 (http://kffl.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2767582)

6/11 11AM CDT Mexico versus Iran on ABC
Chronic underachievers on the World Stage, El Tri must defeat upstart nuclear wannabes.

6/11 2PM CDT Angola versus Portugal on ESPN2
The golden generation of Portuguese talent (FIFA World Youth Champions in both 1989 and 1991) have aged a lot and were shock losers in the final to Greece at home-based Euro 2004, but this match still carried delicious colonizer/colonized political implications due to Portugal's lengthy refusal of the decolonization process.

6/12 11 AM CDT United States versus Czech Republic on ESPN2
For any realistic chance of advancing to the second round, The US needs to beat either the Czechs or the Azzurri and tie the other assuming they dispatch Ghana. Currently, the Czechs are ranked #2 in the world by FIFA.

The complete Cup schedule can be found here.

12 years ago I was lucky enough to be at Stanford and attended several World Cup Matches, most famously seeing Oleg Salenko put a World Cup record 5 goals past a demoralized and unpaid Cameroon on his way to 6 and a tie for the golden boot despite Russia being eliminated in the first round! The eventual champions Brazil were in this group, and their fans kept sleepy Los Gatos up nights with the samba beat. As a child, I also happened to be in Italy in 1970 the night Brazil famously beat the Azzurri 4–1. The Italians still celebrated!