Despite the tournament’s many heavy hitters, don’t discount the possibility of a Cinderella story. While the tournament’s smaller size may mean a higher concentration of heavy hitters like Spain, it also means the road to the championship is much shorter. The tournament’s minnows only need a hot streak – or a stingy defense – to have a shot at winning the whole thing, as a blue-collar Greek squad proved in 2004 in one of the greatest underdog stories ever in international soccer.
This year’s tournament is not without its longshots, including Denmark, Ireland, and, once again, Greece. Both host nations, Ukraine and Poland, are also likely to be on the outside looking in. But all it takes is a solid round-robin showing followed by two wins to reach the final – a very doable task by international soccer standards.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
