Bren O'Brien's Top Five moments - No.2 2006 World Cup

Tim Cahill

The 2006 World Cup was an extraordinary rollercoaster as a journalist and as a fan, but was no doubt the most enjoyable and rewarding experience of my professional career to date. The memories and moments of the five weeks I spent in Germany will live with me for a lifetime.

MORE: No.5 Leo Barry's markNo.4 Matthew Scarlett's toe-pokeNo.3 Black Caviar and So You Think

In ordinary circumstances, having two of us to cover Australia's first involvement in the world's greatest sporting tournament for 32 years would be a challenge, but to have to do it based out of the honeymoon suite at the not-so-salubrious RelaxWellness Hotel of Stuttgart made it an exercise in bloody-mindedness.

Upon realising that our accommodation booking had been so spectacularly stuffed up, me and my colleague Paul Gough had a choice. We could kill each other or we could roll with the punches.  It was borderline there for a while, but the moment I finally got the air-conditioning working proved a turning point in relations.

We had a job to do and it began at Kaiserslautern, where I travelled on match day eve to sit through an appalling translated press conference from Japan's coach Zico.

Q: Mr Zico, what has been the biggest challenge in your build up to this tournament?

Zico: Four minute answer in Portuguese

Portuguese to Japanese Translator: Eight minute translation in Japanese

Japanese to English Translator: Mr Zico is very happy with that situation

The next day, we negotiated the packed public transport system and Goughy's phobia of being abandoned at train stations and arrived at the stadium for Australia v Japan.

Australian fans need no reminder of the drama of that day. Faced with World Cup oblivion after Shunsuke Nakamura's controversial first-half goal, Australia looked to have rescued a point when Tim Cahill struck six minutes from time. Then on 89 minutes, he bobbed up again before John Aloisi sealed Australia's first-ever World Cup victory.

The challenge of writing and re-writing the story that day is spoken of by football writers the length and breadth of the country. Goughy sweated a river filing that day, while I knocked up about seven stories post-match. By the time we had negotiated our way back to the Relax, albeit with a detour after catching the wrong bus, we were utterly spent.

We woke the next day to an uproar. Australia's heroics had awoken a sleeping giant and suddenly the Socceroos were the biggest news in the country. The expectations on us to be on top of things had grown significantly, but I was confident we could deliver as long as we were both on our two feet.

Australia's clash with Brazil in Munich pales in significance to the Socceroos' other matches in the tournament but it was the setting for one of the more dramatic moments of my time in Germany.

It is doubtful that Allianz Arena has ever felt an impact like that when Goughy hit the concrete after the game. The big man went down like a sack of the proverbial, badly injuring his ankle and it took all of our collective will to get him on a bus, then on a train, then back to Stuttgart and up the five flights of steps to our room.

He didn't leave that room for three days. I hurried around the chemists of Stuttgart trying to find a suitable German translation for anti-inflammatory, while he texted me orders for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is on this basis that we formed a lifelong friendship.

Ankle injuries and cranky large humans aside, we still had to cover the tournament. Australia were playing Croatia in Stuttgart for a spot in the Round of 16.

It was a bizarre night in the Stuttgart stadium. Firstly, I was stung by a bee which had fallen into my hair and secondly I had spilt an entire pint of water on one of the volunteers at the stadium. As it turns out, it wasn't the worst error that night, Zeljko Kalac and Graham Poll had me covered.

When Poll showed Josep Suminic a second yellow and didn't send him off, the night looked to be descending into total farce. Thankfully Harry Kewell spared FIFA some blushes with his late goal to draw the game and put Australia through to the last 16.

The heartbreak of the match against Italy at Kaiserslautern has been written of many times. Our accreditation circumstances meant we were seated much closer to the famous collision between Lucas Neill and Fabio Grosso than the rest of the Australian journos. My reaction was that it was a penalty and I believe that to this day.

Mark Viduka walked into the mixed zone post-match and summed up all our moods 'Ah well boys, what do you do, these things happen'.

I stayed in Germany until after the final, albeit without attending any more matches because of the way our accreditation had been worked out.

That gave me an insight into the effect of the event on the German people and how they embraced the opportunity to show themselves to the world. It was simply an awesome experience, as much for the challenges and the triumphs.

Much more, we blazed a trail and created a legend. That's every journos fantasy.

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