Some of my best friends are soccer hooligans

Most local online commentary about the first week of the FIFA World Cup consists of conflicted remarks about how this city feels like quite the multicultural wonderland – but do those people whooping it up in certain neighbourhoods after each game have to make so much damn noise? Prior to the legendary celebration on St. Clair Ave. W. after the Italian victory in 1982, such exuberance might’ve been confined to the occasional riot at a rock show, leading to antiseptic concert venues with a gauntlet of security personnel, as if mass-produced music could inspire such tribal devotion anymore. Now, each victory lap by a clown car packed with painted faces, traversing the avenues for seven hours after a winning goal, should be considered an organic triumph for public space. A posting at ecozine Treehugger takes note of the crowds huddling to watch midday games in front of the William Ashley China shop on Bloor, “a scene reminiscent of when people gathered in front of TV store windows to see Neil Armstrong step onto the moon”. Mercifully, the campaign to make Toronto qua Toronto seem more interesting for its own sake can also take a month off in favour of these siestas of football fixation. A couple of blogspots are keeping track the action from a local perspective, too: T.O. World Cup is a daily chronicle from blogger “Harding” – a diversion from his other sites T.O. Crime and T.O. Homicide – which has included a trek to Roncesvalles after the elimination of Poland, where the slated-for-closure Revue Cinema looked particularly forlorn, especially in contrast to the halftime clanging captured at College and Ossington leading up to Brazil’s victory, complete with cameo appearance from provincial NDP leader Howard Hampton. World Cup of Toronto is a similar guerilla caravan, although blogger “Cupcake Man” seems eager to seek out the fans of countries more likely to respond to a match result by getting even more inebriated, rather than marauding through downtown streets – like his ambitious trek to the Golden Lion in Etobicoke to share in the humiliation of Ukrainian fans, suddenly discovering that Hemingway’s in Yorkville is an Australian bar, and getting barred from a German bash at the Goethe Institute. Blackberry blogger Andrew Spicer, meanwhile, is letting the party come to him by trying to keep score of every flag that he sees.