Being the Underdog

If you're even vaguely interested in sport, and maybe even if you're not, it probably won't have escaped your notice that the Football World Cup is currently in full swing in South Africa.

If you live in New Zealand, well you would have to live under the cliched metaphorical rock to have missed it. Every newspaper, TV screen and website is plastered with the exploits of our glorious All Whites.

Why? Because last night our plucky team of amateurs, part timers and all round good guys took on Italy, the team of the smooth, well seasoned and ludicrously paid and drew 1-1.

For those of you in the US I think the comparison would be if a team from Down Under, publicly derided by the media as everything from the "filler inners" to the "no hopers" took on the Red Sox and came out the victors.

It's completely unfathomable.

I've been struggling with my writing lately. To be honest that's probably an understatement. I haven't opened my manuscript in weeks. I've been suffering from my own personal case of "underdogitis" - the one that has slowly been convincing me that, in the midst of a crazy life, continuing to slog away at this writing "thing" tens of thousands of kilometres away from the people who "matter" in publishing makes me a couple of fries short of a Happy Meal.

And then the All Whites show up. The part timers and amateurs. The guys who have slogged it out for five years when no one was watching and very few people even knew they existed, let alone cared. The guys who got up at 5am, when they could have been in bed, and trained anyway.

And, after all that, when they qualified for the World Cup, when you thought they would have finally gotten some respect, they are paraded across the world stage as the team that made up the numbers, the filler inners and the no hopers. In the overpaid star powered world of professional football, there were underdogs, and then there were the All Whites.

And so, on Friday night, during some crazy hour of the morning, this previous non-football fan, along with hundreds of thousands of other NZers, will be hauling herself out of bed to cheer on the team who are showing the world what it means to earn the dream. And who give you hope that maybe yours isn't so impossible either.