Skip to main content

3 bites and you're out

By
Not much difference in the reports and reaction over here Birchy. Just sheer disbelief at the fact he's done it again. I also am still rolling back the years playing (high level) suburban over 30's "soccer" and we have two blokes from Uruguay on the team. Apart from being a great opportunity to make the obvious jokes as we got started in our game, I was able to gauge the mood of the natives which was no different to the masses, and it was clearly something for them that completely took the shine away from qualifying through the "difficult"group....

However, being on a bit of a delay, I now know we should have waited for the official Uruguay response before jumping to conclusions.....

Turns out, we had it wrong - today we had claims of photoshopped teeth marks (not sure how you do that with live video feed, but hey, I'm no expert ); "an inconsequential event" according to the skipper and a simple global media witch hunt for everyone's favourite pantomime villain.... 

So as we wait to see the size of cajones at FIFA as they assess the ban (6 games?? ), I leave you with one (entirely unsubstantiated heard on ESPN radio) fact from the game..... The ref in the game was a Mexican named Marco Rodríguez, whose nickname is Dracula because of his resemblance to a version of that character on Mexican TV ......brilliant!

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Azteca

By
 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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Geography lessons

By
 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...
Post a Comment
Read more

One bar of 4G

By
 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...
Post a Comment
Read more