Skip to main content

More reliable than Die Mannschaft

By
Round One of the group games is done, and so far I've been running my watching efforts more successfully than Germany has managed its efforts to progress through Group F. I've yet to be later to bed than midnight, thanks to a ruthless regime of radio-silence in the day and TiVo catchup in the evening. The pattern I've fallen into is to take in the first half of the lunchtime game, live, in a pub near work, and then to get the second half done shortly after getting home, whilst my son watches Sarah & Duck. This leaves just two games to knock off during the evening; which is a cinch.

On Monday I went through the same agony and ultimate joy that England fans everywhere will have experienced about 2 hours prior to me.  I thought it was actually a decent and calm performance against a rugged and determined defence. The way the BBC commentary team lost their minds during the second half was  as if they just wanted us to fail. I spent the last ten minutes, cliche though it is, thinking the game is 90+ minutes long and it is only after that time that we should be upset with a draw. Luckily we're not now in a weeklong mire of crisis, and can instead look forward to progressing with a good result on Sunday.

We've still yet to have a nil-nil match, which is amazing really (I do hope they are not all being stored up for the knockout stages); Russia have scored as many goals as Spain did in their whole winning campaign of 2010 and its all going very nicely.

Special mentions over the past couple of days got to:

  • Senegal, for bringing the African game that us oldies know and love form year back. Pace, rawness and excitement.  
  • Japan, for wearing a kit that when combined with bright Russian sunlight and dark pub projectors made their players entirely invisible. (It was odd seeing Columbia lose to themselves because of this) 
  • South Korea for being so bad that they lost to an abject Sweden. That said, it is a Sweden side that every Englishman will be supporting this Saturday night, as they could potentially put the Germans out. I'll be hoping for this, as my excited calculations about potentially avoiding Germany until the final if they finish second is garbage. We are inexorably going to meet them in the quarters, unless we each finish first or second or don't qualify. I'm not sure I can cope.

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