So it's 11:00 PM and after listening for almost an hour to chanting and cheers out my window at and me wondering how they hell they could possibly be yelling that often for considering goals are a bit of a rarity, I went down to watch a World Cup game with Ukranians.
It was like I described before: a crowd standing just beyond the waist-high fence surrounding an outdoor beer garden, watching the latest World Cup game (Ukraine vs. Switzerland) on the beer garden's television. In addition to being very drunk and waving Ukrainian flags (Ukrainians are obsessed with flag waving), they were also chanting this, call-and-response style, in Ukranian:
"Treba? Hol! Treba? Hol! Treba? Treba? Treba? Hol! Hol! Hol! Scho takoye? Hol! Scho takoye? Hol! Scho takoye -koye -koye? Hol! Hol! Hol!"
I knew "treba" and "scho takoye" in Ukranian: "Need" and "What's this about?", respectively, but I didn't know what "hol" was. In fact, I first heard "Ho" because enounciation and vodka don't go together, and thought they were yelling "[What do we} need?" "[A] ho!" Then I realized they were doing the transliteration of "g" to "h" that always happens in Ukrainian and that they were actually screaming for a goal, not a whore.
After half an hour of carefully listening to the noise in reaction to various events on the television and presicely coding it, I felt confident to be able to gauge the game by their cheers and went home.
My findings:
*Crowd cheering of 3-8 seconds, entirely male, starting low and building to high decibles: this means that the ball is within a few meters of the opposing team's goal.
*Crowd yelling of 3-8 seconds, entirely male and with a touch of franticness: the ball is within a few meters of Ukraine's goal.
NOTE: by the above I could, sitting in my apartment without a television or radio, tell you where the ball was on the field at any given time. If I heard nothing, it's because it was somewhere in the middle of the field, or a ref was making a call.
*Crowd cheering of 1-3 minutes, with some female voices, wild and ecstatic, possibly accompanied by burts of an air horn: the other team just received a penalty.
*Crowd cheering of 5-10 minutes, both males and females, to the point of ear-drum bursting even through glass and brick: Ukraine just scored.
*Continous screaming, car horn blasts, chanting of "U-kra-ina!", the national anthem repeatedly being sung, cheap fireworks fired into the sky and people (I'm not making this up) shooting guns in the air until almost four in the morning and possibly later because that's when, despite the noise, I finally got to sleep: Ukraine wins.