I love
football. It was not always like that. The first time our family owned a
television set was way back in 1998, the year France hosted and won the World
cup. I was around a decade old but my least concern was football. I remember
not leaving our house entirely due to the T.V, watching shows as boring as
‘Good Morning Kenya’ and ‘Dunia Wiki Hii’ with my small sister and as the two
suggest, K.B.C was the only station we had access to!
But then the
World Cup began and it was time to leave the house…that is how much I hated
football. Fast forward and Japan with South Korea are the World Cup hosts in
2002. Three factors got me hooked to the beautiful game; a certain Brazilian
with a unique hairstyle called Ronaldo, Kilosh, a neighbor who used to pin all
the football pictures from the dailies in a blank book and my school mates who
already were in tune with the English Premier League.
If it was not
for my strict mum, I would also have gotten the ‘Ronaldo’ hair style like
almost all boys my age. He really was the best footballer of his generation and
his record speaks for itself. Period. I always wanted to be opposites with
Kilosh and so when he started fancying Real-Madrid, I decided to be a Barcelona
fan. But the biggest influence was listening to my classmates discuss, argue
and boast of teams like man-U and Arsenal. That made me curious for I wanted to
be part of the ‘pundits’.
For the next
three years, I faced a football ‘identity crisis’ when I knew not where to
pledge my allegiance to. The aforementioned Kilosh tried all tact to convert me
into a Man-United fan but I was not convinced and so when Arsenal booked an F.A
Cup final with them on 21st May 2005, I decided that was the D-day. I was finally
gonna choose which among the two English soccer giants to pledge my allegiance
to…
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