The World Cup is the biggest single-sport tournament in the world – and also the planet’s biggest party.  In a brisk, entertaining new book, Fox Sports soccer columnist Jamie Trecker does a fine – if frazzled – job of chronicling both.
 
Love & Blood covers last summer’s World Cup in Germany from a number of different angles.  Trecker rides the trains, hits the parties and hangs out with the fans – when he isn’t incapacitated because German customs agents confiscate his epilepsy medicine, and the local pharmacists insist they knew better than the author’s doctors back home in the States.
 
Some of the observations are pure gold.  A huge mob of Korean journalists swarms Australia coach Gus Hiddink, demanding en masse that he answer one question: “What do you think of the Korean team?”  Going city to city on endless late-night trains, we repeatedly encounter exhausted fans sound asleep on the platforms, using their national flags as makeshift blankets.
 
Trecker offers a fair bit of in-stadium analysis of the games, as well.  But he’s far better as a social commentator.  His thoughtful analysis of various national characteristics is neatly illustrated in the wide variety of colourful characters he encounters. 
 
He also makes a couple of telling points.  Take the new trend of setting up giant fan facilities in the host cities, so the thousands upon thousands of fans who arrive without tickets can mingle with the locals, and watch the games live.  Trecker suggests these zones – which instantly become non-stop parties – are changing the very focus of the World Cup, making soccer less important than socking back of the drinks.
 
I found myself wishing that Trecker had stayed with the fans.  Much of the book’s second half focuses on analyzing the games, and I don’t really think much new insight is added.  French captain Zinedine Zidane still casts off age and apathy to haul his once-great team into the final – and once again goes crazy, headbutting Italian hardman Marco Materazzi, getting red-carded, leaving the field forever as France loses the World Cup to Italy.
 
The tale’s been told a thousand times, and there really isn’t anything new here. 
 
I realize Trecker was covering the tournament first and writing a book second.  Any such memoir will always have its focus lurch awkwardly as the endless month of World Cup intensity unfurls.  But Love & Blood would have been a better book if its author had stayed on the streets, among the fans, when Zidane’s skull settled things. 
 
Having said that, this is still a breezy, enjoyable read, with some nice insights and a lot of fond memories of the World Cup that was.  A lot of passion and intensity is captured cleanly.  I ended up seeing the tournament differently – and I watched sixty-one-and-a-half games live!
 
It’s a nice addition to your bookshelf, and should keep a lot of soccer fans amused and entertained come Christmas.
 
Good effort.
 
Onward!