Costa Rica, the country you gotta like!

If you are anything like me, in major sports tournaments where there are a bunch of competing teams as in the World Cup, you have your favorite which is usually your home country but beyond that there are the teams you love to hate. So if you love Argentina, you hate Brazil, if you love Germany you love to hate England. And this type of animosity fuels the passions just as much, if not more, as the desire for your team to win, the desire for the hated ones to lose.

Those sentiments are normally reserved for the powerhouses about whom we all have opinions as far as skills, merits, old feelings lingering since whenever. Then there the minnows, those underdogs you just want to do well… well, just because- because they are no threat, because they are usually tiny in every way, and because if they won it would be big, big news. And most importantly you also know that they will get nowhere in the modern super hyper world of soccer where winning the cup would be the equivalent a nation landing on the moon or inventing a substitute for gasoline… no, it’d be bigger! Lovable Costa Rica is there, in the group of countries where only another CONCACAF dwarf Trinidad and Tobago is smaller. But Costa Rica is a kind of a sentimental favorite: they have been around now, on the world cup finals for the last three times so you know them a little, and they always play the USA and Mexico, so you have seen them play, and often win! And what reason is there to hate them? They always play their heart out, they entertain, they try against hugely prohibitive odds. And the beauty of the beautiful game, you never know! Think Bulgaria in ’94, Cameroon in ’90, and of course Greece in 2004. Miracles happen.