Nigerian Sour Grapes

For all you foodies hoping that this one's going to be one for you, my apologies for the misleading title. It's actually about the rest of the amazing sports story that's just recently unfolded here with the girls' soccer tournament.

Assuming you've missed the CNN coverage, the EGian women did in fact beat the Nigerian women 1-0 in the semi-finals. But it was not without some much needed controversy to keep things interesting. After the loss, some of the Nigerian women were complaining that the EGian team not only had a few Brazilian imports on their team, but they claimed that they were also playing with some women who weren't exactly all women. There's apparently a more diplomatically correct word for these "women" with excessive amounts of testosterone but, whatever the correct term may be, the Nigerian women claimed that they got screwed.

That sort of set the tone for the finals, which pitted our EGian assortment against the South African team. I'm not sure what the official betting odds in Las Vegas would have been for that one, but I believe there were plenty of folks who, like me, weren't holding out much hope for the local team. So you can imagine how wild it must have gotten when the EGian gang actually DID beat the South Africans, 2-1, and won all the marbles. While I wasn't there to witness it myself, I did have a report from an unbiased, impartial observer to suggest that there was at least one very masculine-looking player on each of the two teams. Apparently, the South Africans opted to just fight fire with fire, but still ended up on the short end of things. Perhaps they could have used a few Brazilian ladies. Or men.

So the celebrations have begun here. With the Christmas decorations already lit up in the streets, it's only right that the many women's soccer team fans around town are also getting lit up. Anyone who's looking to have any real work accomplished by the EGians might just want to wait till sometime in 2009.