It’s July 4th 2008, it was a Friday and I’ve been invited to a barbeque at the friends house, I am looking forward to relaxing and being around a group of fun people. It’s just before lunch and I’m finishing off a little work e-mail. I even remember the email I was replying too, it was about having people available to receive and inspect some…
England Postmortem – Chapter 79
Typically when England go out the papers will fill the back pages with phrases like “brave”, “a team of heroes” or something along those lines. There are exceptions, in 2002 after Beckhams sending off against Argentina the Sun ran the headline “10 Heroes and one stupid little boy”. The disappointment of an early exit is made a little easier knowing that the team performed to…
24 Hours in Sounderland
I worked late yesterday, I was not having a great day and did not go into the office until after watching Spain beat Paraguay. It’s been a rough couple of weeks, I was working deep into the evening and I wanted to do something fun for July-4. I had a couple of offers for BBQ’s in Seattle today. Nothing says July in Seattle like a…
Day-1
I was reading Jeremy Paxman’s book “The English” a few weeks ago, a very entertaining and worthwhile read BTW. In it he attempts to define what “Englishness” is, he looks at stereotypes, how we view foreigners, the importance sport plays in our lives, the ability to drink tea by the gallon and most importantly for me right now, how our history and legend shaped us…
London…
In the last 15 years it’s still the same city, but the details have clearly changed. From the old peoples house the entry into London is Waterloo on the South Bank of the river. The South Bank has maybe seen the biggest change of anywhere over the years since I lived there.
Beckenbauer in new rant against ‘stupid’ England
So the headline in todays Daily Mail reads, it’s more than a little inflammatory, but this is a big game between two teams with history, a lot of history. The actual quote was ‘Stupidly, the English have slipped up by finishing second in their group. A game like this against Germany should be a semi-final, not a last-16 tie.’ I’m not disagreeing with Der Kaiser…
It never really goes away, but it gets better
Yesterday I saw the A-Team movie (and admitting to it). It’s not exactly an intellectual challenge, but taken for what it is was a decent way to distract me for a couple of hours. The body count was not huge by Hollywood standards, but a couple of the bad guys met with some spectacularly violent ends. I know in real life people die every day,…
It’s Germany!
And England won the World Cup. The Germans (of course) didn’t agree with the linesmen, and to this day feel they were cheated out of the World Cup.
Tweet o’the day
@EmmaK67: Watching England is a cure for constipation.
Europe v’s South America
With everything going on I could not sleep, in a vague attempt to avoid counting sheep I was looking at the World Cup and the relative under performance of the European teams along with the solid games played by the South American teams over the last 10 days. A quick drag through the results so far show that European teams have met South American teams…