Megan Carpentier columnWorld Cup This article is more than 9 years old

The World Cup caxirola deserved to be banned. It's got nothing on the vuvuzela

This article is more than 9 years oldMegan Carpentier

This year's official noisemaker will annoy everyone, but it doesn't exactly announce enough delight to be truly ... fun

After the US won its World Cup match against Ghana on Monday night, my significant other stumbled out of our apartment in a daze, vuvuzela in hand, and joined our neighbors to triumphantly celebrate America finally not totally sucking at this whole "football" thing. He blew his vuvuzela loud enough to be heard for two blocks in either direction, delighting the neighborhood kids and scaring all the neighborhood cats into hiding.

The vuvuzela – South Africa's plastic trumpet literally heard ’round the world – was pronounced the most annoying sporting event noisemaker in the known universe after the World Cup four years ago, winning out over inflatable plastic sticks, "Sweet Caroline", air horns, that one guy who can be heard four sections away screaming epithets at the refs … and the occasional trumpet. In response, the Brazilian Ministry of Sport blessed the invention of famed percussionist-singer-producer Carlinhos Brown as the official instrument of the 2014 World Cup: a new, ugly, beehive-shaped tchotchke called the caxirola (pronounced kah-zheh-role-ah), which retails at $14 per noisemaker.

Brown's gift to the sport (and to the $4bn in expected revenue for Fifa – including hundreds of millions in merchandise sales) is made of recycled plastic, designed to be quieter than the vuvuzela. Yet the caxirola is banned inside the 12 World Cup stadiums by Fifa itself – which gives the grenade-size toy a much-needed outlaw cachet – despite its limited noise profile. (It's basically a slightly noisier maraca, with better handgrips.)

But the caxirola wasn't banned because it is slightly loud and pretty annoying – or even because it’s some sign that sports are an excuse to spend money on more junk you don't need. The Brazilian justice ministry actually banned caxirolas because they are too easy to throw at players and onto the field, which football officials learned after they distributed hundreds of them at a match last year, only to watch them land all over the pitch after a lopsided loss.

Even Brazilian fans didn't want to shake these wannabe wasps' nests, you see, because they're just not noisy enough to be "fun", even if it is quasi-illegal. Which is why, given the choice on Monday night, my boyfriend rushed outside with his vuvuzela, and left the caxirola on his desk. (I'd hidden the cowbell.)

The thing about noisemakers is that, in the hands of sports-loving boyfriends, the rule is simple: the louder, the better. Double that for toddlers – unless either is watching Frozen or a televised sporting event about which others don't care, in which case it is incumbent on everyone else to be perfectly silent. (Trust me, I got shushed a bunch this last week.) While the caxirola will annoy everyone in its immediate vicinity, it doesn’t exactly announce enough delight to be truly … fun.

The much-decried vuvuzela does have something on the caxirola: despite the overwhelming amount of noise a human adult can create with a plastic horn, a small child is reduced to banging it against things (which is, insofar as I can tell, a pretty constant state of affairs when you give almost anything to a small child). Or those toddlers can shout into it, which makes them only moderately louder than any given child would otherwise be.

Effectively using a vuvuzela requires you to blow with lips pursed, like playing any old brass instrument, plus a certain amount of lung capacity. While there might be a child trombone prodigy somewhere who could manage to deafen her caregivers with a vuvuzela, the average person is at little risk from a vuvuzela-wielding nursery schooler.

This World Cup, it's a Catch-22, really: either put up with the incessant rattling and concussive pounding of a caxirola for an entire game; or endure the intermittent, ear-blasting a-hoogas of the vuvuzela.

So, I guess... all hail the vuvuzela? Unless you get hit in the head with its successor?

But whether you learn from my experience and go old-school, or buy into the caxirola hype, let me give you one piece of unassailable wisdom: always hide the cowbell.

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