Yesterday I realized that all my remaining twenty or so articles for the World Cup could be about how amazing Steven Gerrard is, but my Editor, the fascist Manchester United supporter that he is, refused to let me entertain such wonderful thoughts. He in fact threatened to end me and my family if I wrote one more article about Liverpool or Gerrard. Okay well that’s not true. But what IS true is that my editor is a Manchester United fan and has been since the year of my birth, and therefore all that I have written will most likely BECOME true at some point in our lives. It’s a prescient cautionary tale.
Today’s article, however, is not about Liverpool nor is it about how horrible Manchester United fans like my editor, and “friends” Toffael Rashid and Aneek R Haq are. Today’s article is about coffee. Coffee, if you don’t know and it is perfectly okay if you don’t (after all coffee’s ubiquitous greatness is nowhere close to Gerrard’s), is a beverage made from coffee beans that can be served either hot or cold, and is a vital ingredient for cheap “White Russians”, a beverage not a xenophobic slur.
It turns out that Brazil is in fact the largest producer of coffee in the world. That possibly explains why the Brazilians display more energy supporting France than the French do. Among the nations represented in the World Cup, the Netherlands has the highest per capita consumption of coffee. In light of this fact, it is no great surprise that De Jong runs around and tackles like Gennaro Gattuso on crack cocaine.
The most interesting piece of information about coffee and World Cup nations, however, is that Costa Ricans feed their infants coffee. I am not making this up. They really do put coffee in the milk feeders of one year olds. Google it. Search “coffee, infant, costa rica”, or “babies, costa rica, coffee”, or any two of the three words.
I suspect that coffee has a latent impact on one year olds. After all we have not heard of any Costa Rican infants tackling like De Jong. And I also suspect that this practice of giving coffee to humans barely young enough to smoke (Costa Rica also has one of the highest per capita consumption of cigarettes in the world though I have not come across any information regarding infants and smoking) started around twenty-six years ago. That is the average age of the Costa Rican squad in this World Cup. Now the coffee has kicked in. And the rest is history.
Other than Suarez’s knee and Prandelli’s bizarre decision to change the formation that worked so well against England and play Motta in the starting eleven, I have found no other explanation for how Costa Rica has taken the World Cup by storm, and broken English hearts. They had just won just one international friendly in 2014. Clearly Suarez’s absence and Prandelli’s brain breeze are side notes. The real news is, as of June 12th, 2014, the Costa Rican beans have started taking effect.
Be afraid world. Be VERY afraid.
