World Cup for dummies: How not to 'float' in this season

I guess I have to get some World Cup soup down my throat. The aroma will be everywhere anyway so I might as well put on a bib and prepare myself to take a sip. [PHOTO: FILE]

During the World Cup in 2006, I was a young and restless recently-recruited employee of a magazine publisher. Though I was eager to see the world and experience everything like a toddler with a sugar rush, I was single and reluctant to mingle.

That was until my former employer, True Love magazine announced an event dubbed World Cup Widows. It is a party I will never forget as long as I live. What a way to click the 'ignore' button instead of languishing in the misery of being the only one in town who did not see what all the fuss about the World Cup was.

It was an all-female event. The music was hot, a mix of all the 'independent woman' classics you could ever think of. Just imagine Maina Kageni Monday morning picks, dress them up with some Power Puff Girls attitude and line them up. I don't dance much but I barely left the dance floor that night. I felt like the songs were giving me the license to go up against the world.

Really, what beats the feeling of listening to Tina Turner's The Best, Aretha Franklin's Respect and Shania Twain's Man! I Feel Like a Woman all in a row. The resulting energy is the type to make you want to stick a hammer in your belt-loops and change that light bulb in your corridor.

To be honest, this time around, it would be easy to say that I could care less about the World Cup. I'm married now and Dora the Explorer and toddler sing-alongs tend to rule the entertainment menu at the moment. My husband is not a football fan either but he tends to love being around people. Thankfully, I have a small TV so I will be saved from the task of hosting any noisy World Cup fanatics in my house  and if my husband will be in the mood for socialising over the next month, I will, inevitably, be a real World Cup Widow this time around.

I could bring the party to my house and enjoy some girl power dancing with my daughters, but as a more experienced journalist and being charged with the task of informing the masses about one of the biggest events in the world, I guess I have to get some World Cup soup down my throat. The aroma will be everywhere anyway so I might as well put on a bib and prepare myself to take a sip.

So I figure that even though I won't be sitting at the table waiting to be served (yeah, I'm  killing that metaphor, ain't I?), I figure the soup's going to be passed around anyway so I might as well find a way to make it more palatable.

It so happened that just around the time I was fiddling with the idea of straight-up going to Google and typing in "World Cup for Dummies", my two girlfriends Jane, Hellen and I sat with a seasoned sports journalist for lunch.

We ladies had varying degrees of exposure to the No 1 sport in the world but we all agreed that we didn't know as much as we should as journalists. So we asked Joshua Kemboi to name five things that we absolutely must know about the World Cup so that we don't embarass ourselves if we found ourselves in a room full of football fans.

I didn't have my notebook in the cafeteria so, just so I don't miss anything I've enlisted the help of the world's most enthusiastic sports sub editor Charles Sidney Odero. Here go my top five World Cup must-knows for dummies.

1. The World Cup championship has been awarded every two years since 1930 except in 1942 and 1946 due to the World War.
2. The World Cup is played by members of FIFA (no need for long French translation here), which is the governing body for football around the world. Currently, it has 32 teams competing for the title.
3. The host country is chosen when countries bid to host the championship. The country that can explain its case the best wins and gets to play in the World Cup whether they qualified or not. Also, the defending champions (the team that won in the last World Cup) qualify for free.
4. World Cup 2014 will be hosted by Brazil. So far, the 19 World Cups have been won by 8 national teams. Brazil is the only country to have played in every tournament. They have also won five times so if you're looking for a default team to root for, you can try Brazil or deliberately go against it just to kick the excitement up a notch.
5. The FIFA World Cup is played by teams of men only but there is a FIFA Women's World Cup. Of course it's not as popular but it's picking up quite a following. It currently has 16 teams competing. The next one will be held in Canada in 2015.

- Christine Koech