The World Cup starts today with Brazil vs. Croatia, and many of you will celebrate by not watching the game. Many of you will celebrate by being completely unaware that the World Cup has even started, or that Brazil is hosting the games and the game that they are playing is soccer.
Many of you will put down the hoots and shouts emerging from various bars and homes as you go about your day as simply the exhortations of a particularly vigorous exercise regimen, or a hot bingo game. If you even think of soccer at all, you couldn’t imagine that people would be cheering for it, right out in the open like that, standing three deep at a bar. It would never cross your mind that it would be on television.
“Nonsense,” you will tell your nephew. “They’re watching the Super Bowl.”
So, here is our reminder to pay attention, at long last, to the beautiful game, for once in your miserable life. Football. Soccer to you. This is Purin, a dog who plays soccer. She plays rather well, dribbling downfield and launching the ball into the corner of the net, grabbing fast strikes as a goalie, and doing that insane thing where she walks around with her hind legs in the air — what is that?
Purin is something of a legend in Japan as a dog who performs tricks — she knows 70 of them — showcasing many on her YouTube and Facebook sites. She tends to go viral; This video of her playing soccer has had more than 200,000 views in three days. Watch her play:
Watching her bat all those balls down, you’d almost think she really knows the game, like she’s the second coming of … well, crap, we don’t know any actual soccer players.
The World Cup starts at 1 p.m. (PT), with Brazil vs. Croatia at Arena Corinthians, Sao Paulo. There’s still time to catch up.
Read about dogs in the news on Dogster:
