Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Producer Clark Boyd (TheWorld.org)
It’s nail-biting time for many soccer fans out there -- the World Cup playoffs. Over the next week, national teams will do crippling, brain-trauma inducing, war-like battle to try and snag one of the few remaining tickets to next year's World Cup in Brazil.
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| Icelandic bhumi-devi and pop idol Bjork's call for Tibetan freedom at a Shanghai concert unnerves Chinese communist officials (Hannah Johnston/Getty Images/Epoch Times). |
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| Kill 'em all in the name of my lord! |
The smallest nation with a dog still in this fight is Iceland, who plays Croatia on Friday. Now, Iceland has a very small population, and thus a small pool of professional players to choose from. And yet, they have a chance, however slim, of making it to Brazil. That's more than IRELAND can boast.
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| Yay, we have Saint Patrick's blessing! We have Saint Patrick's blessing! (theworld.org) |
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| Not my Iceland, Patty, no way! (DMSI) |
The Irish national [soccer] team has already been eliminated, and most Irish fans are already looking well beyond Rio. But not Eoin Conlon.
Over a drink of yeast-contaminated carbs with a Brazilian co-worker in Dublin recently, Conlon started wondering out loud about throwing his support behind ICELAND.
“And we kind of laughed, saying: ‘Well, that’s as close as Ireland's going to get to Brazil. It's only a letter difference. A “c” for an “r.” We might as well be brothers,’” says Conlon. Conlon and his friend work for a digital agency, so they did what comes naturally. They built a website in support of Iceland's soccer team.
Then, they started a Twitter feed urging Irish soccer fans to back Iceland. The campaign is called County Iceland. Ireland already has 32 counties. So, Conlon says, why not make Iceland the 33rd?
“There are only about 320,000 people in Iceland. So if they were a county in Ireland -- I'm calling them the 33rd county -- it would [be] only the fifth-largest county in Ireland. It's incredible the success they've had. And I hope it continues,” he says.
Conlon says the website is just a bit of fun. All a visitor has to do is click a "support" button. LISTEN
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