Play up and play the game!

Well, well, what a twenty-four hours of sporting drama that was.  Verily.  Just in case you don't follow o jogo bonito, or own a television and some ears, Brazil got knocked-out of the World Cup by the Germans last night.  I say knocked-out; I mean beaten into a persistant vegetative state by the Germans.  To lose 7:1 is embarrassment enough for most nations, but for the Brazilians in their own back yard it can properly be likened to a national disaster.

Brazil has no perspective when it comes to footy.  Politics, the economy, sex, music, social cohesion - all these criteria are mere reflections of the state of the national game.  This loss, then, cannot be overstated.  The fear of the body politic is that the disaffected masses will take out their frustrations on the elected representatives.  One could hardly blame them if they did.  Brazilians pay income tax at a level comparable to the Scandinavians but in return receive public services that would shame a sub-Saharan tinpot dictator.

Back of the net!

Teeth Richards

Luis Suárez has been up to this old nonsense again.  I say "nonsense"; I mean common assault of course.  Actually, I mean uncommon assault.  It's not every day, after all, that one grown man attacks another using his choppers for a weapon.

For those of you who don't esteem the beautiful game as much as I do, LS bit an opponent on the shoulder during Uruguay's game with Italy yesterday.  It's conjures up quite an erotic vignette, that, doesn't it?  One hot-blooded Latin, overwhelmed by his emotions, biting another on the shoulder.  In reality it was rather more sordid than that.

As I feared they might, the broadsheet polemicists went to town on this episode today.  Depending on who you ask, it was either a cultural misunderstanding on behalf of the English or a Freudian cry for help.  All the analysis was unpinned with an rather unpleasant sneering tone.  Whatever position football fans took on the subject was by definition gauche, and instruction was duly given.

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...

Appraising Grace

Oh woe - appraisal season is upon us.  Mine is tomorrow (Tuesday) and I simply don't have sufficient psychic energy on a Monday to go through the heartbreaking paperwork.  I'm going to have to wing it.

I used to "wing" things a lot as a young adult: school, college, work, bands, girlfriends - you name it, I've wung them all.  Most fly-by-night wing weasels tend toward the Byronic, i.e. they don't give a shite for authority or the consequences of their actions, and refuse, therefore, to prepare or do as they're told.  I wish I could claim the same, but I'm not like that.  I'm actually quite risk-averse.  The only reason I end up improvising wildly in front of strangers, like an unimpressive white John Coltrane, is because my time-management is shambolic.  Also, I know from emetically tense experience that I'm good at it.  

All the same, I'd don't care for the practice.  The hours leading into a performance are awful.  American comedian Steven Wright once described unease as akin to that feeling you get when you overbalance while leaning backwards on a chair, and then catch yourself before falling and overcompensate again in the opposite plane.  He claimed to feel like this all the time.  Well, it's also how I feel before an outlandish wing.  Not pleasant.

Also, even if I were inclined to do the needful, there's football on constantly in the office (future me, please note The World Cup's on - Brazil), so I simply cannot concentrate.  This World Cup is just superb: wonderful, open games, hatfuls of goals and giant-killing par excellence.  

If these aren't auguries from the gods telling me to chuck my bureaucratic hand in and chance to luck, then what are they?  Eh?

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?

I'd give my right arm for a Bruce Rioch

Well, World Cup fever is building up aplenty, n'est-ce-pas?  No, perhaps you're right.  It's so very autumnal around these parts currently that staging a World Cup in a fortnight's time seems implausible and a touch distasteful.  A bit like washing your hair in the toilet.

I was reading some old guff on the BBC web site earlier about men in their 30s and 40s collecting Panini stickers during football tournaments.  It's all the rage.  I did try this once a few years ago, but it was rubbish.  When I was a boy, I thought if I had all the money in the world to spend on stickers, I'd find contentment.  I know that now to be untrue.  I did throw money at the sticker problem as a grown up, but just felt more and more frustrated.  In the end I gave up.

I shouldn't have been surprised by this; I've read enough philosophy over the years to wallpaper an oil rig.  And it all reaches the same conclusion: material things make you unhappy.  And yet I still harboured dreams of buying my way to happiness.

Those wrong-headed notions were shattered by Panini (thanks, fellas).  I no longer buy lottery tickets, thanks to them.  What's the point?  I'd just be a miserable millionaire.  "Why can't I afford a platinum submersible?"

What price Bob Latchford?