The Three Dads World Cup Wonderland

Who knew that by the time I made my seasonal reappearance, two out of three hosts would have enjoyed absolute spankings of comically inept opposition, and even more surprisingly - Birchy would have developed genuine English enthusiasm! I am typing having just witnessed a cagey and uneventful 45 mins of goal-less “action” between Mexico & South Korea, ending in the Mexico fans roundly booing their team at the HT whistle. Cue a goalie clanger 5 mins in to the 2nd half to gift Mexico the lead and those same fans are going BANANAS & lauding their 11 heroes on the field. Love it. So here we are, one week into what is a 5 week extended format marathon, and as I finally shake off my disappointment of Gianni pricing me out of my dream of touring the country for a month (never mind the ticket prices, FIFA wouldn’t even have let the RV in the car park due to their “hospitality” stations), it’s time for a recap of the action so far from the host country: Americana While it could take the ...

 I'm just off the back of watching two of the worst sides in the tournament (South Africa and Czechia) playing out a 1-1 draw. The result keeps their final round of group games potentially interesting, but in truth, neither team deserves to progress.  Today's post is really all about England. The handbrake is officially off. What a game and what a performance. After a slightly cagey first half, where we edged ahead and then sat back and then did so again; we came out like lions in the second half. Three of them. Proper full on, high tempo, attacking. Shot raining in, arms swinging aloft to gee up the crowd. It was lovely stuff. Bellingham completely justified the nod he got over Rogers (even from my clearly biased perspective), Kane was good - he seems to have really upped his game, and does that dropping back thing that was such a mess when Rooney did it, but to great effect now that we have pace alongside him. Not just pace, but pace with permission. I have spent much of the...

 Forty-eight hours since I posted and it feels like a lot has happened. This is when the tournament hits its stride. Games and goals a-plenty, and the relentless surge of the group games just rolls on and on. One thing that has struck me a lot about this tournament is the inconsistency of kick-off times. Where usually there are 3 set time slots for games, this one legitimately seems random. We've had 5pm, 6pm, 8pm, 9pm, 11pm, midnight, 2am, 3am and 5am games, at least. Those are the ones I remember. And it is playing havoc with my routine. Basically, the viewer needs to stay awake and alert at all times.  Cape Verde brought the tournament's first huge upset, holding Spain to a thrilling 0-0 draw, and that sparked a series of draws - Uruguay had a particularly bad tempered 1-1 draw vs Saudi, Belgium stunk the place out until a simply massive Lukaku came on and helped them to a draw vs Egypt and then Iran and New Zealand played out a really entertaining 2-2 draw. That flurry of ...

 I'm writing this as Cape Verdi's masterplan is 9 minutes in, versus the mighty (but missing some players) Spain. They are the second nation (after Curaçao) that I didn't even know was a nation - and I have a degree in geography. So, let me share my learning. Curaçao, a Caribbean island has been a country in its own right since 2010. Prior to that, its the usual depressing story of European colonisation, abandonment (when the Europeans realised it wasn't stacked full of precious metals), reinvigorated interest (slave trade) and finally a degree of independence.  Cape Verdi on the other hand is a country (Island nation off the west coast of Senegal) that is older than I am, so I feel I should know better in their case. Again it has history of being a European colony and is another epicentre of the slave trade.  With this in mind, the needle matches to look out for later in the tourney are Curaçao vs Netherlands and Cape Verdi vs Portugal. After Curaçao's outing last...

 I'm back, within close proximity of World Cup telly. For a while (after discovering a remote cidery), there was a chance that I'd miss more of this tournament - but after an unexpected sleep in a field, my camp trip has finished without further incident. The footy gods seemingly smiled upon me, as the one bar of 4G reception, whilst often unable to load a web page, did somehow manage to give me solid BBC sounds audio. And with that, I have largely kept in touch with proceedings.  The biggest challenge has been sleep to be honest. Last night, in a cider-induced fever dream, I managed to take in the first half of Morocco v Brazil, which then spliced itself together with the second half of Scotland v Haiti - which was weird. What was more weird was that in between , I had a dream about Tyrone Mings, on horseback, making a rash challenge that managed to destroy both his own knees and the horses existence. But this is something I should speak to a therapist about, rather than leav...

 Well, this one has crept up on me hard! I've barely had time to recover from Villa's Europa League win a fortnight ago; distracted all the while with SkySports trying to sell off our squad to The Big Six and reading stories of the thunderstorms and the visa complexities facing fans, players and referees of countries that Trump doesn't like today - and yet now here we are, listening to Gary Neville self reflecting on his own career as a scene setter for the World Cup. This one is a weird one. The expanded format and cruel time-zone scheduling mean that I go into it with no ambitions to 'watch it all'. The group stages are, on paper, almost devoid of any real jeopardy. The bloating of the tournament means there are now more groups than realistic winners, and with that, of course, no groups of death. And to cater for the stupid total number of teams which has to be 8,16,32 or even 64 dammit - just no other actual number; we have the awful spectacle of most  3rd place ...