The Three Dads World Cup Wonderland

What can a man on crutches do, but grow his very own World Cup beard. Started off with mostly a Rooney type appearance, but has now progressed to an almost Cesc Febregas..... still some way to the ultimate goal of an Olaf Mellberg, but the quest continues...

Limited activity on the blogosphere in recent days. A combination of smugness from finally a resolute English performance, an ill advised return to work and a deep coma induced by watching Portugal v Brazil, means I have a lot to catch up on while I watch Uruguay take on the South Koreans..... Firstly, the roar of the three lions! Good performance all round, with no one really standing out for me, just a very good team performance, although we look so much more of a threat with Defoe up front than poor Emile. Not that he did a huge amount, but he got one chance and took it, and that's going to be key in the later stages... No real comedy moments to recall, the game was too tense, although what seems like a recurring theme for the remainder of the tournament, the pitches are all starting to look like the Springboks have been sneaking under cover of darkness to play a couple of games of egg chasing. Mark my words, if it hasn't happened yet, there will be multiple commentary momen...

Bring. On. The. Germans.

Thanks Stevey for saving me having to do any big rundown of the last 2 days' games. I think you captured all of the highlights bar one. This was Alberto Parreira's post match interview after the glorious (but inconsequential) win against France. I watched, hoping that he was going to unleash a Roberto Carlos-esque powerful volley (of vitriol) about Domenech's spoilt child antics, but instead he praised the achievements and spirit of his South African team. At the end of the interview he did leave a little teaser though, failing to pronounce the final syllable of this sentence: "Everyone can be really proud of this country". Was he making a clever linguistic-bluff reference to Domenech? If so, clever stuff. And so onto today. My office has declared early closing to facilitate football watching, and whilst I'd have appreciated a 12:30pm finish every day for the past 10, I'll take anything I can get. And so will begin my ultimate score avoidance efforts to ...

The weekend had started so promisingly - the father in law had come up for the weekend to take care of all of the jobs my current limping state could not complete (and the wife would argue wouldn't get done even absent the crutches). However, in a clear effort to bond with his son in law, he arrived early, so enabling him to sit down and watch the England game with me. And there the wheels came off quicker than a French training session..... Too much has been lamented since Friday, so I will not dwell on a disasterous game. John Terry continues to demonstrate what a classless individual he really is, while Capello, without a hint of irony (not sure they have that in Italy), runs to the media to lambast Terry for err, running to the media. As a result of the dour Cape Town fare, it was difficult for me to explain I needed to ignore the father in law for the rest of the weekend because Ghana v Australia "may be a humdinger of a game".... and thus I caught nothing but highli...

The England match left me numbed. Unimpressive, uninspired, lacklustre – however the bottle of champagne I enjoyed with the game certainly took the edge off things. It seems that we, along with France and Italy are suffering some horrendous ‘anti-football’ affliction. If the game was less global then we could put it down to ‘a long hard season in the Premier league’ or ‘the difficulty of being motivated for national team games when the premier league pays so well’; but neither is valid. Neither is this jibulabulani ball business. The teams who pass to each other seem not to suffer. Poor selections and poor play has blighted us, and whilst lots of vitriol heads in the direction of Heskey, we’d do well to remember that the main culprits on Friday were Gerrard and Rooney for having zero patience on the ball and terrible control. Lampard wasn’t much better. At least Barry gave us some sort of stable platform to build from. I expect the introductions of Joe Cole and Jermain Defoe or Peter...