This last week, I watched a couple of World Cup games with my fiance and friends (Germany-Ghana and USA-Portugal).

Engaging once more with the game of football, I was transported back to my years playing in junior high. The smell of fresh-cut grass, the heat of summer, the crisp evening air, the joy of a perfect slide-tackle.

Another thing that struck me was how overwhelmingly important it is in football to be on the right foot at the right time. No fewer than three times in the USA-Portugal game, a play failed to happen because a player’s weight was on the wrong foot.

This takes me back to fencing, footwork, and tempo. Modern fencing is very double-weighted – fencers tend to have their weight split equally. Historical fencing tends to have more weight on one foot or the other, which makes it more applicable here, since when these play moments came up, almost every player was in-motion, so moving from full weight to full weight in terms of their balance.

In fencing, as in football (and tango dancing, too, but that gets to a larger blog post), it’s hugely important to know how many steps or movements it will take to get to where you’re going, and where your weight will be when you need to make a critical action, whether that’s the perfectly-timed lunge in fencing, or the critical one-touch shot-on-goal in football.

This blog brought to you by my brain relating everything to fencing.