Skip to main content

Overload and heroics

By

 The additional fixtures thrown-up by the 48 team competition is making the group game part of the competition absolutely relentless. If memory serves, we'd normally have 3 games per day at this stage of the competition, rather than the 4 we are getting. And they'd normally be in fixed time slots. This expanded schedule basically means that anything beyond work/footie/sleep needs to give, with the day 100% accounted for by those three things. It is definitely a World Cup where I wish I was still a student.

Since I last wrote, the tournament has been rolling along nicely. My early comments about "zero jeopardy in the group stages" looks to be fundamentally wrong, as some of the token teams are proving to be far more relevant than that. Curacao grabbed a [genuinely] thrilling point vs Ecuador, the Iranian goalkeeper went into beast mode to deny the Belgium onslaught and grab a point in what was a fascinating game; attack versus defence in large parts, but Iran not without threat themselves. In amongst that, Japan carried on playing their nice football to dispatch the hapless Tunisia, Spain woke up and smashed Saudi Arabia. But the main shock has to be Cape Verde's incredible game vs Uruguay, a belting encounter, full of needle, flowing attacks and drama right to the end. What a point in their 2-2 draw. 

The net result of these various results is that actually most of the groups will be very much alive as we enter the final round of games during this week. And that means only one thing...MULTISCREEN. 


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