When I was a little tacker, there was nothing more exciting than the school athletics carnival, or as we simple country folk called it: Sports Day.

Apart from the opportunity to wear a big ribbon on your chest for coming fourth in leaderball*, one of the greatest joys was the fervour with which we barracked for our faction. Was it even Sports Day if we didn’t have moderate sunburn and a hoarse voice from chanting “Sliding down a waterfall, landed on a cactus, Blue can do anything without any practice” for six hours? No, no it wasn’t.

And that’s why I’m particularly impressed with what all the international fans are bringing to the World Cup.

If your heart isn’t stirred by the sight of thousands of Norwegian fans doing their Viking row accompanied by a guy banging on a drum and thousands of voices rhythmically grunting, then you need CPR. Sure, part of the appeal is that Norwegians are a fantastically attractive people, but also, how cool.

Then there’s the passion of the Scots who took over Boston with their bagpipes and their kilts and their stirring renditions of Proclaimers songs whilst watching a baseball match. And their determined placement of witch’s hats on public monuments. How delightfully Scottish. Oh, and if you haven’t seen the video of a stadium full of Scots singing Flower Of Scotland when they took on Haiti in their first match, do yourself a favour. It’s emotional. I’ve got something in my eye.

Oh and the Dutch! They sure know how to get involved. They have a big orange bus and literally thousands of them, all dressed in orange, follow the bus to the games and they have a fun song which causes them all to hop to the left and hop to the right. Sounds simple, but when you see about 10,000 people doing it all at once, it’s impressive.

And then there’s the Latin American countries like Argentina and Brazil who just look like every day is Carnivale. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

When we compare the Aussie efforts in the stands and in the streets, it’s not quite as impressive as a Viking row, but there was something disarmingly charming about seeing a bunch of Aussie fans who had written a chant that, while I won’t say the actual words, was less than flattering (although technically accurate) of the current US president. And it rhymed, so there’s that. It’s tough to compete with mass bagpipes though.

Sport has an enormous power to unify people, even those who only have a passing interest in the sport of the moment. And yes, I’m talking about me. When an international competition kicks off, I’m suddenly an expert. Just wait until the Commonwealth Games when I will amaze you with my passion for the great sports of lawn bowls and weightlifting. If we can win a medal in it, I’m suddenly interested.

And maybe that’s the beauty of sporting passion. It doesn’t actually seem to matter what the sport is. We have an extraordinary ability to become deeply, irrationally invested in things we barely understood three days earlier. Give us a national jersey, a catchy chant and the faint sniff of a medal and suddenly we’re transformed.

One minute you’re a normal functioning adult. The next you’re standing in your lounge room aggressively explaining the finer points of curling strategy like you’ve spent 20 years on the professional circuit. “No, no, she released that stone too early. You can tell from the line.” Can we tell? Can we really?

The Olympics turns us all into experts in sports we only see every four years. The Ashes turns otherwise civilised Australians into people who consider losing to England a matter of national emergency. Wimbledon basically turns me into a Lawn Bro with an encyclopedic knowledge of grass blades, and that’s before an unknown Aussie ranked 172 in the world wins an opening round match and stirs my patriotic fervour all over again.

Maybe deep down we all just want to belong to a tribe for a little while; to paint our faces, lose our voices and scream ourselves silly over people throwing, kicking or hitting objects around. And frankly, that sounds like excellent fun.

*Obviously I was joking about coming fourth in leaderball. I was an excellent leaderballer. I was even the leaderball leader. I led our leaderball team to interschool domination and some would argue that it’s one of my greatest achievements.