During the World Cup, as on any other occasion, the pub plays its social role, which is quite defined and specific.
It is not a substitute for home or the homes of loved ones. It’s where you can have fun alone or with others, without worrying about the mess in the room or the dishes to wash. It’s where you interact, sometimes to the limit of dangerous intimacy, with strangers you most likely wouldn’t invite into your home.
Watching football at the bar is a classic, but at the Cup this universe expands: in addition to the usual fans, there are children and people who, like me, are uninterested in the ball rolling in other circumstances.
The bar helps anyone who is on the street at the start of the game. Either because you left work, or because you are travelling. This is my case, and I prefer the pain of a sunken toenail to watching football alone in a hotel room.
Watching the World Cup at the bar is always a fun show. Paradoxically, the Copa has the ability to spoil, destroy and kill even the best pubs.
To show a game, a bar needs a TV. Therein lies the root of the problem: in non-World Cup times, the lack of a TV on is a prerequisite for every bar to reach the cut-off point.
Just don’t turn on the TV then. Too bad it doesn’t work that way.
The owner of the bar invests a lot of money in I don’t know how many UHD monitors, a big screen and the foursome. Invest in the Cup, but it’s a lot of money committed for such a short period.
Then he tries to render. He starts turning on the device in the Brasileirão, in the state B series, in the Santos bocce championship. Next thing you know, you’re in a bar that’s showing the 793rd rerun of the episode in which Chaves goes to Guarujá.
At this point, the TV hanging from the ceiling has already corrupted the spirit of a bar that was good before the World Cup. It has happened a lot in the past and it will happen again in the coming months.
During my short visit to Chapada Diamantina, a place with many tourists, I chose the peak of tourists who decided not to return home. People from all over Brazil who stayed here to work as trail guides, open a shop or, I don’t know, sell incense on the street.
The owner of the bar has borrowed an old and relatively small TV – especially if you, like me, sat on the other side of the street so you don’t have to balance the folding chair on the uneven cobblestones.
The TV was connected by cable to a computer, which in turn connected poorly to the internet. When the image loaded, we had a delay of a minute and a half. Or two.
Something even convenient, since we could hear the scream of the goal in the nearby bars and we approached the screen to appreciate, in all the details, the flight of the pigeon Richarlison.
After the second goal, the transmission stopped for good. No one at the bar complained. The beer was ice-cold, the joy of victory was not compromised and that friendly bar from the backlands of Bahia was saved from the curse of the World Cup.
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