The Hindu : Sport / Football : Missed the action? log on for replays

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jun 29, 2006

Sport

Sport - Football

Missed the action? log on for replays

N. Nagaraj

CHENNAI: Well, the round of 16 in the 2006 FIFA World Cup is over, and here is looking forward to the games at the next level. While there were many turning points in the course of the tournament, you are likely to have your favourite `moment', a moment that will remain the turning point as far as you are concerned, a moment that is seared in your memory, that you will never forget and mention every time the talk veers around to the world cup.

One website has done a masterful job of recreating these moments for you, virtually. Check out the Virtual Replay website at http://bgi.dr.dk/sporten/index.php for goals from all the matches till now.

You can view the goals from eight different camera angles and in four speeds. And to add to this feast, you have a delightful option of watching the moment from a player's perspective or watch the particular player at that moment.

Whether it is a moment of agony or ecstasy, you don't need to rely on a fanciful memory or wait for ages for a rerun in a sports channel, you can re-live that moment and control the experience as well!

The downside to the whole experience is that the site is not in English and you need to play around with the options for some time before you can figure out how to re-create your favourite moment.

And just to repair that fact, the BBC website has a similar feature at its Virtual Replay page in its World Cup 2006 section. It offers more match information and match stats, but doesn't have all the knock-out matches as at the time of writing. This correspondent also found that while the controls are better at the BBC site, the animations at the Danish site load more quickly.

Every exit from this point onwards will be heartbreaking, if not for an entire country at least for its most fanatic followers of football.

As a wit once put it, some people can make money out of misery, and here is a website that proves it - http://www.vorrundenaus.de. Vorrundenaus roughly translates into "knocked out in the first round", and this site panders to the pessimistic outlook some German fans have for their team.

Of course, the phrase no longer holds true, but one can enjoy the way the site has modified the World Cup 2006 logo to represent people bawling their heads off. Print it out and hand it to your friends who supported teams that have been knocked out.

And if it so happens that you are stuck late at work during a match and want to check the score quickly, just enter the word `fifa' in the google search box and you will get a brief scorecard.

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