Cairo comes together to drink in World Cup atmosphere

One of the pipe dreams of deposed dictator Hosni Mubarak was to bring the World Cup finals to Egypt. The Pharoahs failed to qualify for the current tournament in Brazil and the prospect of hosting the event seems more remote than ever as the country gets to grips with the contradictions of life in the aftermath of both the 2011 revolution and last year's counter-revolution.

But the World Cup has nonetheless been a huge presence in Cairo this month. Watching the semi-finals in downtown Cairo, it seemed undeniable that the city has a strong claim as the best place outside Brazil to watch the games.

On street corners and along freeways, national flags and team jerseys mingle with the bright lights and colors of Ramadan decorations. Huge billboards carry the smiling faces of European and South American stars, usually joined by Mohamed Salah, the hugely talented Chelsea and Egypt forward. The World Cup has fully inserted itself into the sights and rhythms of Cairo.

On Tuesday night, the Germans and the Brazilians kicked off a few hours after iftaar, the evening meal when Muslims break their fast. People were happy and full of food and excited about the game.

All across the city, from the poorest to the richest neighborhoods, Cairenes watch the World Cup under the night sky with shisha and friends. From the Semirames hotel in Garden City, which charges wealthy patrons a whopping $30 cover to sit on plush sofas in front of a vast screen, to the Coptic Christians of Garbage City who sit out among millions of tonnes of Cairo's trash to cheer on their favorite teams.

Everybody is watching the games, but it's in Borsa, where the football cafes blend into each other and the streets are crammed mainly with young men from the area and kids wearing the shirts of local giants Al Ahly and Zamalek josh with others in Messi and Neymar jerseys that the city's devotion to the World Cup reaches its highest pitch.

Borsa in downtown Cairo is crammed with cafes and eateries, many of them with names like "Champions League." The streets are filled with plastic chairs, shisha pipes and enormous screens, and as the different crowds at each cafe merge into each other a larger crowd fuses together, extending across several blocks in all directions, and all transfixed by the astonishing events beamed in from Belo Horizonte.

Of course, there's a political edge to the screening: the choice cafe owners must make is between Qatari BeIn Sports (at a time when Qatar is deeply unpopular and the jailing of Al Jazeera English journalists has been welcomed by many) and an Israeli channel. Almost everyone seems to have plumped for BeIn, which meant we got to see former Brazil captain Dunga's scowling, hangdog face throughout half-time in the BeIn studios.

Early signs were that most Cairenes were behind Brazil. But after 20 minutes, as Luiz Felipe Scolari's side collapsed and the Germans began to score at will, the mood shifted from general support for Brazil to disbelief to noisy admiration of the Germans. It was a warm, pleasant night in Ramadan and footballing history was unfolding before our very eyes.

Passersby who weren't interested enough in the game to have planned to watch it kept stopping in front of our screen, gawping open-mouthed, and demanding to know if the score was genuine or whether there had been some mistake.

When the final whistle at last put an end to Brazil's torture and sent their exhausted players sprawling to the turf, most of those watching in Borsa rose to their feet and applauded the extraordinary German achievement. David Luiz wept for the dreams he had seen broken, and he too was applauded.

Football is a spectator sport, but the fact is that most of us are watching on TV. Still, there's watching on TV and there's watching on TV. The view from the couch gives us one sport – a quiet, solitary experience now often supplemented with the buzz of Twitter – but the view from the raucous street cafe offers quite another, a game constituted through social and collective life, a game whose memories, joys and traumas are shared bonds between us.