That was liquid football...brown liquid.

Without wishing to labour the point, England are out of The World Cup at the group stage for the first time since the Crimean War or something.  I don't really care to be honest; I find it difficult to get excited by international football.  What does stick in the craw, however, is the bare-faced bullshit spouted by the players and manager in the post match trawl through the entrails.

The game was a dead rubber.  Costa Rica were through and so fielded a team of ladies, children and the lame.  And the thinking was that as England had phuque-all to lose, they would play with abandon and invention.  As it turned out, they reverted to type and played a ponderous lumpen version of the game; thereby proving, je suppose, that you cannot make a silk purse out of a pig's perineum.

Current manager, Roy "Woy" Hodgson, opted to play some youngsters in order to blood them at this rarefied level.  Sadly, they were all found wanting.  Probably the worst aspect was the absence of a recognisable football formation; they just seemed to meander about the pitch in a loose confederacy of ineptitude.  What had Woy said to them beforehand to prompt that? 

So the game petered out, bringing down the curtain on a shambolic tournament for this sceptred isle's finest - not that you've have known this from the words of the protagonists afterwards.  Good Lord, no!  England played some "good stuff" apparently.  There was plenty of scope for optimism.  Unfortunately this was absolutely at odds with the empirical evidence available to those with eyes.  England weren't awful, just very ordinary and anodyne.

There was a vee awkward stand-off between Woy and a BBC reporter straight after the game.  The reporter opened with a carefully-weighted and accurate precis, along the lines that the game didn't really get going, did it?  Woy took odds with this.  And they wonder why England supporters get hacked-off.  You don't have to have played the game at the highest level to recognise a shit game when you see one.  It's a variation of the old "I've never been to the North Pole, but I know it's cold" argument.  If he'd fetched-up and confirmed what we already knew, people would have said "fair enough".  Expectations were pretty low to begin with.

Tossers.

Bob Hopeless

I'm in the office watching England's last group (and therefore by extension last [fullstop]) game.  It's against Costa Rica.  Marketing have laid on drinks and nibbles for us all, but no-one's heart is really in it.

A few weeks ago this must have seemed like a prime fixture: 5pm on a fine late-June Tuesday afternoon, everyone in the office, the sun cracking the stones outside and free ale for all.  The thinking was, also, that England would need to win this match, so the excitement would be palpable.  It isn't; it's a dead rubber.  I can't even bring myself to down a complimentary continental lager beer; that's how bad it is.

Maybe next time...

I predict a riot

There was a perfect storm this weekend.  It was England's first World Cup game, kick-off was at 11pm Saturday night (for which the pubs had been give a blanket extension) and the weather was good, hot and mostly sunny.  England fans like a drink, and most of them have trained themselves to be catatonic by closing time on a Saturday night.  Old habits die hard of course, so the majority would have been like rag-dolls come half time on Saturday.  Crosses for eyes, bubbles emerging from the nose - the works.  The only thing that might have protected the nations beer gardens was an England victory, but that wasn't going to happen. 

The wife and I spent the evening at my sister's house.  We watched the first half there and decided to scoot home for the second before the nation's finest spilled out of the pubs and started soiling themselves.  The cab office was like a morgue (this was midnight on Saturday, mind you).  The cabbie said that business was slow, but there had been a mass brawl in Woodford to alleviate the tedium.  He then pointed out the police helicopter that was hovering close overhead.  England were drawing at this stage, and already the fans were scrapping.  I don't know how they were going to top that when the Italians took the lead: ritual suicide perhaps.

The ball is round. So are pickled onions. What's your point?

England played another of its pre-World Cup friendlies last night with predictably troubling results.  One of the country's finer young players, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, sustained an injury in this meaningless fixture and now looks doubtful for the tournament.  This is probably for the best.  It will pour cold water on the unrealistic hopes of the nation.

Let's not put too fine a point on this: England are shite at tournament football.  Vee poor.  And yet, with uncharacteristic optimism, the English always believe that this time the team will do well.  They often point out that Spain suffered similar disappointments in years gone by as evidence that sometimes the footballing gods simply conspire again decent teams.  Sadly this reasoning(!) overlooks the fact that the Spanish players are brilliant and the English ones mediocre.  Yes, they are.  How many English players would make it on the starting eleven of the world's best team?  That right: none.  The bench...it's none again, isn't it?  What about the squad?  Nope, another dud.  The only Englishman who might make it onto the coach would be doing so as the designated driver.

So, as I say, AOC's injury has taken the heat out of English expectations.  Just as well too because some of the voodoo logic one is hearing in the workplace at the moment is terrifying.  Real Madrid were European champions and Arsenal won The Cup the last (only) time England won an international tournament.  Yeah, and John Lennon was still alive.  What do you propose to do about that?

If we took a holiday...ooh yeah, ooh yeah

I'm just back from a long weekend in Ireland, visiting my parents. I always sleep like a new born when I'm there. It's difficult to pin the very welcome blame for this on one cause; it's probably a combination of events: the clean air, the peace, the restful ambiance, the good food and the heavy consumption of Guinness. Each plays its part I suppose.

The odd thing is though as soon I step back onto English soil I'm unable to slumber, which makes no sense. Take last night for example. I spent the majority of the day in Ireland, so I had a plenty of exposure to clean air. I ate well, and because of the travelling, I arrived home in a fatigued state. The wife and I then popped out for a couple of sharpeners before dinner to bring the curtain down on the festivities. But could I sleep last night? Could I feck. The only conclusion I can come to, therefore, is that I'm allergic to England. It could be London I suppose. But I'd need a control group to be certain. Perhaps I should relocate to Leicester for six months? That's a high price to pay for catastrophic fatigue though; I think I'll just make do and mend.