While millions around the world watched the World Cup match between Germany and England yesterday, soccer fever also came to Brewer Park for the sixth annual Ottawa Community Cup.
The recreational soccer tournament and celebration of international culture, food and music, organizers said, is a way of bringing immigrant communities in Ottawa together.
A big-screen TV in the community tent was tuned to the World Cup, but to head organizer Chris White, the game is almost beside the point.
“The whole, central purpose of this entire project is to bring people together … with a particular outreach to newcomers to Canada, which currently comprise 22 per cent of our population in this city,” he said. “It’s not about soccer when it gets right down to it.”
Ottawa Centre MPP Yasir Naqvi, who co-chaired the event this year, agreed that at the Community Cup, sharing comes before soccer.
