Skip to main content

Goooooooooooooooooooaaallll!

Aha, so Brazil are slowly awakening. Their defence still looks atrocious, but that Neymar chap is quite a player. I'd not seen a lot of him before the tournament and so was wondering what all the fuss was about. That sumptuous first goal showed exactly what he is about. Brazil ramped things up to the point when even Fred (aka 'the statue') scored.

The prize for football is that now Brazil play Chile - which if ever a game had 5-5 written all over it, is the one! Both team have questionable/non-existent defences and a potent strike force, so I am looking forward to the clash on Saturday.

Mexico also progressed, beating my tip Croatia into second place, and deservedly so. Their manager is a legend. He went ballistic when they scored and was hugging people so hard that he was falling over in his suit and all sorts. Great scenes. They always seem to make it to the round of 16 and then bomb out and I think it will be no different this time around.

I'm at home now, rue-ing the fact that my tivo has recorded the England game and not the Italy v Uruguay one, as I rather be watching that, more competitive contest. As for the England game - there's little to gain, and I fully expect we'll win, looking generally more promising, which will invite the obvious conclusion that we played the wrong players from the start. It will doubtless all feel a bit flat.

Surely better to self-destruct, Cameroon style, rake a few players, finish up with 9 men and loads of infighting. If we're going to go out, why not do it under a massive cloud with headlines like "The Battle of Brazil" or "Hot tempers".

Then later I hope to watch Ivory Coast progress. On paper the games tonight look pretty wretched, but the fact that Ivory Coast, Greece and Japan are all fighting for 2nd spot, it does throw up potential for some excitement.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Azteca

 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 ...

Geography lessons

 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...

One bar of 4G

 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...