World Cup Nonsense

[Sweder]

'The Nation Unites Behind Murray', screamed The Herald. Hmmmm.

Happily donned my Greek-Cypriot flag in the office this afternoon as the 'greatest sporting Scotsman' since Ben Doon and Phil McCavity won the all-Scotland Cottaging Finals in Inverurie last summer crumpled like an ancient fiver in a sweaty socks' pocket.

I disagree on the Cloggy point, Nigel.
I think our own post-Rooney rear-guard, futile though it was, was perhaps our finest hour (including the extra time). What a shame it took a brutal act of lunacy followed by bitter (misguided) feelings of wrongedness to galvenise our troops.

You tell the Flatlanders from me; Johan Cryff, Dick Van Dyke, Little-Boy-In-The-Dyke, Ruud Gullit, Red Light Ronata, William of Orange, Windmill Girl; your boys took one helluva beating! (and you went out one clear round sooner than us, so there).

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Shall I hand out the razor blades boys?

Remember Dunkirk, bring back Churchill - do something! When Australia went through a similar phase in the 70s we brought in Packer - drastic, but it worked. Last year, when we lost the Ashes (and there is no greater calamity) grassroots cricket club membership shot up over 10% as there was a collected determination to do something about the problem.

Drowning in a sea of negativity, no matter how good the beer is there, won't change anything.

Send letter bombs to me c/o any of your international footballers.

[El Gordo]

Shall I hand out the razor blades boys?

Remember Dunkirk, bring back Churchill - do something! When Australia went through a similar phase in the 70s we brought in Packer - drastic, but it worked. Last year, when we lost the Ashes (and there is no greater calamity) grassroots cricket club membership shot up over 10% as there was a collected determination to do something about the problem.

Drowning in a sea of negativity, no matter how good the beer is there, won't change anything.

Send letter bombs to me c/o any of your international footballers.

Who's being negative? Not me. And I don't think the others are either.

This is a ritual played out, on average, every 2 years. (The World Cup and the European Championships are every 4 years.) There is disappointment, certainly, and immense frustration, but it's not a complaint about the players.

It's not like our tennis or even cricket, where a long-term decline in standards have seen various initiatives appear to bring kids into the game, and improve facilities. We don't need to encourage people to play football or even to play it better. Our players, if organised properly, could win the World Cup. Not saying we are better than anyone else because we aren't. Football is rarely that clear cut. Ultimately, it comes down to collecting good players and then devising an approach and a strategy to achieve the goal. It's that last bit that we're not good at.

As fans, we know what the problem is but feel pretty powerless to change it. What I can do about it is make my opinion known. Maybe someone will read it and decide that I am the man to lead English football back to the sunlit uplands. Let's hope so, eh?

No one enjoys losing but now, just a couple of days after the Portugal game, we're pretty much back to normal. I am, anyway.

Which is why I'm sitting at the computer at 6am. Guess what I'm doing? Yep, downloading some training schedules to get me running again. Oh god. My excuses are spent. No World Cup to hold me back; shingles not quite gone but good enough to allow me to run.

5km this evening by the looks of things.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Ah well, I'm happy to be mistaken. Really, in the overall scheme of things, England did well, and whatever you thought of the Rooney affair, there had to be a sizeable slab of bad luck in not getting through to the next round.

Damn shame about Millar at Wimbleding, although it is no disgrace losing to Baghdatis, who is much under-rated, as he proved at the Oz Open.

I now look forward to the revival of English cricket over the next few months prior to the much anticipated Ashes series.

[Seafront Plodder]

Not quite sure which match you were watching there MLC, must have been satellite delay. :p

[El Gordo]

Give the lad a break. He's being nice to us.

Anyway, I'm off for an elephantine 5km plod.

I may be gone some time.....

[Sweder]

What a game of football.
This was sport from another planet, 100 miles per hour, full-on skillful football.
The Americans would have hated it – I loved every minute of it.
Rough, tough, rugged, man’s football. A defensive masterclass from the Italian back four, commitment to attack, quality mid-field passing.

Wherefore art the route one hoof?
Even in the heat of the madness that was the second half of extra time, as the German goal frame wobbled and rattled, both teams kept the ball on the floor. Italy knew they had to score - their record in penalty shoot-outs is a poor as ours - and in the final moments they snatched their reward. Lehman didn't deserve to be on the losing side and could do nothing to stop Grosso's sublime driven, curling strike.
Del Piero's coup de grace had me on my feet.

Nice to see Ballack playing like a Chelsea midfielder – he almost made Lampard look good.
Last word to Terry Venables on Podolski’s golden chance at the end of the first half of extra time:
‘Ee met the ball too fick . . . Ee didn’t get enuff finn-ness on it.’

Classic, Terry, just like the match.

[Nigel]

Just got back from Luc Clogboy-Land in time for the last 10 minutes. And what a close to a game it was.

'Juergen Klinsmann, Gerhard Schroeder, Adolf Hitler, Michael Schumacher, your boys ...' - no, I just won't go there.

'It's almost as if there are two entirely separate games going on here,' said the commentator (I missed who it was) - one of them attacking one goal, and one attacking the other.' Wonderfully free-flowing attacking football.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Give the lad a break. He's being nice to us.

Yes I must do something about that... :mad:

[Nigel]

Do you remember those earliest of 'jumpers for goalposts' games at Infant School? I can remember both sides attacking the same goal in those days. And it was just like that tonight.

We must hope that the Germans don't run off with their ball though, now that they've lost.

Mentioned football to my Rotterdam hosts today. The first just smiled, giving a perfect Ronaldo wink. The second bemoaned the 4-3-3 adopted by van Basten. 'People don't play that way any more,' he said.

In England's case, too busy playing 4-5-1. Or even 9-0-1.

[Sweder]

In today's edition of The Fiver, the Grauniad's e-newsletter:

Whereas Portugal have been dull and halfway decent at penalties, France's ageing stars have breathed life and romance into an increasingly prosaic tournament, and not since Leslie Grantham logged on to his laptop has an old man made as big a splash as Zinedine Zidane.

[Sweder]

We've found a witch - shall we burn her?

OK, you saw this coming.
Sweder’s a die-hard MU Rowdy - who else to leap to the defence of the new nemesis of English football, Christiano Ronaldo?

Except I’m not.
At least, I shall not begin to attempt to defend his petulance, his unsportsmanlike conduct, his penchant for kissing the turf at the first whiff of a tackle, his ridiculous and ill-thought-out wink at the bench.
All these things are true, and the lad should be rightly castigated for them.

No, what makes me at best uneasy and at worse sick to my stomach is the way our ‘sporting’ nation has heaped the woes of our poor cheated team on the broad shoulders of this Portuguese trickster. Newspaper headlines scream, photo-shopped images fly around the internet, vitriolic text messages fill the air and football fans loudly discuss their preferred form of death for The Man That Stole The World Cup From England.

But he didn’t.
There was no ‘Hand of God’ here. Diego Maradonna, beloved in the football world, revered as (sickeningly) ‘the greatest player ever to have kicked a ball’ by many of the same nicotine-stained hacks now publicly carving up Scolari’s number seventeen at every turn. Maradonna was a cheat. More to the point, he actually cheated England out of a possible World Cup win. Somehow this act of a man quick to embrace drugs and sloth, rather than condeming the player to eternal damnation, has added to his global portfolio.

Ronaldo exacerbated a situation created by that nastiest of pieces of work Ricardo Cavalho and the petulance of a frustrated Wayne Rooney. Carvalho has spent the last two seasons in the Premiership pulling shirts, kicking shins, pinchin nipples and tugging leg hairs. OK, he plays for Chelski so I'm never going to love him, but he blatantly cheats in game after game. He has a face I could just never tire of hitting.

Rooney was a powder keg from minute one; a mushroom cloud-laying m*therf*cker, to steal from Samuel L. Jackson. Consigned by his inept manager to plough a lonely furrow, Tabloid Wayne seethed and boiled as he saw the game pass him by. The moment Carvalho’s ‘tomatoes’ leaped out of his shorts and attacked Wayne’s metatarsal the Saviour of English Football had is name down for an early bath. How do we know? Because the referee, complicit in allowing the two Portuguese players to kick lumps out of the lad until he finally lashed out, has told us so.

In the rarefied atmosphere of the Blame Game played out on our TV screens and our newspapers we see the pattern emerge. In ’98 it was the photogenic darling of English football who took the full force of a nation wronged; burning effigies followed Beckham's tabloid obituaries. The real villain of the piece, Diego Simeone, having recklessly clattered the Boy David with a challenge not out of place in the WWF, escaped so much as a yellow card.

Directed by Sven-gali we now choose to turn our ire onto another soft target.
‘Don’t kill him’ begged the Swede, his hang-dog expression explained by the weight of FA gold bullion lining his blazer pockets. So off we went, determined that someone would ‘die’ for this 'heinous crime'. Ronaldo did himself no favours; the pre-match wind-up, the wink at the bench; but surely his greatest sin was to out-shine our lethargic midfield? He played with passion; his blood was up. He took his penalty like a man; he kissed the ball, he stared Robinson in the eye and with a fearsome strike condemned the greatest band of underachievers ever sent from these shores to the hotel check-out. Did his manager issue a call to arms before the match? Did he tell his players to wind up the opposition, to go out there and die for their country?
I’d bet my house on it.

What hurts me most is we castigate an opposing player for doing what we accept from one of our own; playing his heart out for his country. ‘But he dives’ you wail; ‘he cheats! It’s not fair!’
Hmm. I don’t remember anyone wailing or gnashing their teeth when Peter Crouch attempted to scalp the T&T fullback as he headed in England’s first. The BBC ran slo-mos as the pundits giggled in the background.
‘Who cares?’ quipped Alan Shearer. Shearer deserves a cameo in the next Johnny Depp Piratical classic; he’s already got the one-eyed stare down.
Don't tell me Joe Cole doesn't hit the deck at the drop of a hat. Or that Micheal Owen never once took a slightly dodgy tumble in the opposition box. Think Argentina in 2002. Was that a wink I saw there, Micheal?

‘Rooney should stick one on him’ suggested the King of Tyneside after England’s exit. I do hope he was referring to the man who made absolutely sure that any talent our team possessed was strangled, who singularly failed to inspire our band of ‘world-beaters’, and who rides off into the sunset, his saddle-bags groaning, to pastures new and lucrative.

Good luck Italy.

Despite all the shenanigans at home you have played some excellent football in a tournament which, if we’re honest, has been decidedly ordinary so far.

Cannavaro has to be the player of the tournament. I only hope he heads for the Premiership in the wake of the fall-out from Serie A. His performance against Germany was sublime – Bobby Moore would have enjoyed it I’m certain. And I hope Rio Ferdinand watched carefully.
Now there’s a ball-playing defender, Rio.

[El Gordo]

You're being too rational about Ronaldo, Sweder.

Non-MU Rowdies fans have never liked him because he's got a pretty boy face and because he's a flashy footballer. That's it.

The haranguing of the ref and the wink towards the bench was a godsend. An absolute godsend. At last, he has given his detractors a peg from which to hang their dislike. No matter that it's not much of one. It now exists.

His real crime, as someone at work said the other day, is that -- "like Michael Ballack, Ronaldo has a very punchable face". I'm not a violent person, but I sort of knew what he meant.

[Sweder]

Yeah, I know what you mean about the face thing - I feel the same way about Lothar Matteus.
And, err, Ricardo Carvalho. And Craig Bellamy. Robbie Savage, anyone? Robbie Fowler? . . .

I'll get me straight-jacket . . .

[Sweder]

According to the BBC website this morning Zinedine Zidane has won the the FIFA Golden Ball award as player of the tournament.

Quite apart from his inexcusable assault on Matarazzi - on the basis that there is never an excuse for thuggery and violence on a field of sport, unless it's rugby of course - what a preposterous decision.

Owen Hargreaves was by far the best player in the competition.
Bloody strikers' union (mumble mumble . . .)

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Ha ha! Zidane, you stupid pathetic blundering thuggish idiot! You made the Cup final for me - it is soooo gratifying to see that these monstrously over-paid lunatics who are accorded mega-star status on the preposterous grounds that they can kick a ball, are in fact, pig-ignorant thugs

For me, Zidane's swan-song stupidity was the highlight of the entire tournament. Which probably says a lot more about me than it does about Zidane, but gosh, I did enjoy that bit

[Bierzo Baggie]

Hey, I’m going to stick up for the great man. Zidane has always been simmering on the brink of a few serious sessions of rage control therapy somewhere. Occasionally it boils over, as it has done before. However, his head-butt was a symbolic one. A classy one even. Roy Keane would probably have marked the moment with a true Glasgow kiss to Meterazzi’s Roman nose (and then he’d have stood over him shouting obscenities). Rooney would probably have nutted him in the bollocks. Zidane simply channelled his rage into the one place where he wouldn’t actually do any damage. And of course after a bit of theatrical rolling around the floor to mark the true spirit of Germany 2006 Meterazzi got up again, probably when he realized that Zidane was on his way. Inevitable? Yes... it looked bad, but Rossi's elbow against the U S of A was potentially 10 times worse.

Remember Boli’s cowardly head-butt on Stewart Pearce? Or this time around, Figo’s pathetic little prod of a head-butt against Holland (why did he only get yellow?) No, Zidane ended his career by providing us with one of only two memorable moments from a world cup of monumental crapness, his long, sad march past the world cup trophy without so much as a passing glance. Sadly it had to end this way.

The other memorable moment? Enter king of comedy Graham “chuckles” Poll….

[Nigel]

Our power supply has failed without warning several times over the past few days, causing some concerned correspondence with our energy supplier here in Crawley. The interesting background is that that Seeboard (sp) is actually EdF, of the famed and dreadful 'Where Do they get their energy from ?' adverts which were endlessly shown during the World Cup, as warm-up for the non-analysis so cheerfully supplied by the likes of Sam Allardyce, Terry Venables and Stuart Pearce.

This massively expensive advertising campaign was apparently aimed at increasing our awareness of the brand whilst for now (at least during the Coupe Mondiale) choosing to tactfully underplay the mildly worrying fact that large parts of southeast England's energy supply are now in the hands of a part state-owned French power company, Électricité de France.


Meanwhile, in an apparently unrelated incident, frantic reports from mainland Europe indicate that the main French powerhouse inexplicably blew its main fuse at around 10.09pm last night.

'We just don't understand it,' said EdF marketing chief Monsieur J Malàlatête. 'The evening had gone so well, and then five minutes before it was time to retire .... 'Boum', our central transformer circuitry in Berlin all fused at once, with spectacularly violent results. Supply was immediately cut to all of our front channels, and the consequent loss is still being felt right across the whole of France today.'

Customers with unsaleable second-hand Renault Clios or ill-founded penalty claims of any kind are kindly advised to write to someone else.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

So Zizou has largely been forgiven by his countrymen who fell for the "I was only defending my mother's honour" sob story

I don't understand the French. On the one hand they stand up to, and even kick the Americans out of their country, and on the other they detonate nuclear devices in other peoples' backyards and headbutt Italian star players who call them a sissy.

Then again, a certain other country detonated all its atomic and hydrogen bombs on the other side of the planet too, hmm? How well does England teach that story to its students, I wonder?

Every action is justifiable to a certain degree, but what is disappointing is when the masses blindly focus on the excuse and ignore the crime.

Sooo, I'm proposing a punishment to fit the crime. This is savage this is, but I see no alternative. The only solution that I can see is for FIFA to force the entire French national side to accept sponsorship from McDonalds for a year.

The Zidane incident would then never happen again

No, seriously!


P.S. Oh, and along the same lines, the punishment
for England's indiscretions with their bombs? You all have to
watch Aussie Rules football and drive Holden cars for a year.
But we won't force you to drink Fosters. Not even we do that.

[El Gordo]

Every action is justifiable to a certain degree, but what is disappointing is when the masses blindly focus on the excuse and ignore the crime.

Eh? Who's ignoring the crime? The meeja's been full of self-righteousness about the 'crime'.

I find it hard to share in the mass indignation. So the Italian insulted Zidane and wound him up. He eventually got to him and lashed out.

OK, so Zidane was punished with a red card. Fair enough. And the Italian guy? Remind me, what was the Italian guy's punishment?

They both behaved badly but only one got punished. That's the scandal, not Zidane's spectacular response.

Sorry, but I'm a bit like the people who watch F1 hoping to see a crash. I quite enjoyed the head-butt, and I even quite admire Zidane's action. He decided he wasn't going to stand for it, and looked for some revenge. Sounds reasonable to me.