Posts Tagged With: Football

This year the World Cup (soccer for the Americans among us) is being held in Qatar. The Netherlands is playing the Unites States shortly for a place in the quarter finals. (If you’re wondering, my allegiance is for the Dutchies.)

Due to the summer heat, the tournament was moved from the summer to the winter for 2022 only. This of course creates the unique opportunity to buy Dutch football Christmas ornaments:

These are some of the items on sale over at Xenos on the Grote Marktstraat. A few orange Christmas balls, orange clogs and a lion dressed in orange holding a football. Decorate your Christmas tree to show your orange pride!

Not to be out done, you can also buy football shaped bread at Albert Heijn:

You didn’t believe me, did you? Yes, they have football shaped bread. (I will wait for my Christmas tree bread, thanks.)

Lastly, if you’re at a local bar you can get free bittenballen with every goal the Duchies score against the Americans:

If you are wondering what bitterballen are, check out English Wikipedia. It’s basically a fried meat snack. The meat inside is a meat paste. You want to get high quality bitterballen so that you know the meat inside is also (hopefully) high quality.

Ride the orange wave, everyone!

As you know, diehard Dutch fans are covered from head to toe in orange during major sporting events. Here is a photo Marco took a few weeks ago of someone walking down the street.

Note: I actually cropped this a bit to hide the dirty street. The photo is a bit blurry because they were actually further away.

Speaking of sporting events, Jumbo (a national grocery store) is under fire for their commercial (YouTube) advertising their European championship gear. The main sponsor is Albert Heijn, another grocery store. However Jumbo uses a song that is widely associated with the 2017 women’s team and the commercial features a parade which is also generally associated with Dutch national football. See also: Jumbo the winner in dispute with KNVB over Euro 2020 advertising from dutchnews.nl.

Today’s story can officially be labeled “cute” – a boy in a nearby town decided to pretend he was also a football referee. And get his exercise in at the same time, apparently.

The full article at omroepwest.nl (in Dutch) can be found here. In short, it talks about how the five year old ran down to the edge of the stands with about 10 minutes to go in the game and started following the movements of the referee. He even had a whistle he was using. His mother tried to get a photo with the referee after the game, however the referee hadn’t realized what was going on so he declined (he was busy with end-of-game activities after all).

After the referee went home he saw the viral video and realized what the mother had been asking. He then got in contact with the boy and brought along some football related items (a shirt as well as autographed red and yellow cards). And just to mention what kind of world we live in in 2020: the mother also mentioned that he politely took photos with her son at the door, rather than going inside. If you click on the article I linked to below the video you can see pictures of the items the boy received.

And, yes, the boy said he now wants to be a football referee when he grows up. Awwww.