World Cup Fever

It all starts here. Novelty records, metatarsils, unbounded optimism, wall-charts and booking your holidays. Yes, it’s the World Cup Draw. England, third out of the proverbial hat as the seeds for Group C have been drawn against Algeria, USA and Slovenia. First up is a match against our friends across the pond, the US of A on Saturday 12th June and I’m already planning the party. The draw itself was its usual fun with a remarkably watchable Charlize Theron and some French chap hosting the ceremony and a handful of sporting icons pulling plastic balls from glass jars. Amazing to think 150m people were watching, worldwide. Of course, there’s always room for comedians as the above Wikipedia screenshot proves. Now the only question left is which episode of Doctor Who series 5 will act as the warm-up entertainment before the match?

Tags: Charlize Theron, Doctor Who, Draw, England, World-Cup

Gary and Alan Preside.

The early evening TV schedules are packed to bursting with football at the moment.  Not surprising given that the biennial soccer festival that is either the World Cup or, in this case, the Euro Championships are here.  Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that none of the home nations have qualified and, unlike the last time such a thing occurred, we can’t even pretend to Irish to give us a team to follow.  So, we

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Tags: Austria, BBC, England, Euro-2008, Football, HD, ITV, Soccer, Spain, Switzerland, World-Cup

The Future

As a follow-on from my previous football-related post, during which I promised to espouse on the ways that the England footy team can recover from its current pit of despair, another significant event in the England calendar occurred today as the first half of the mountain that needs to be climbed has been identified.  This afternoon’s draw for the qualifying campaign for World Cup 2010 has thrown us, once more, together with scourge of Euro qualifiers, Croatia.  The other teams

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Tags: 2010, Andorra, Belarus, Croatia, England, FA, Kazakhstan, Steve-McLaren, Ukraine, World-Cup

Reach For The Stars

The Cricket World Cup came alive this week as the Super 8 stages of the tournament came to a close. Up until now it has meandered along with some uninspring and one-sided encounters usually involving Australia dismissing all before them with an unstoppable flourish. However, in a thoroughly irrelevant match because both sides had already been eliminated, between West Indies and England, we got to see 600 runs, 19 wickets and a near-as you can get to a last ball finish. If the whole competition had been just half this good it would

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Tags: 24, Cricket, Dalek, David Tennant, Desmond, Doctor Who, England, General, Lost, Sky-Sports, West-Indies, World-Cup

The Full Monty – A Rare Celebration

We lost the five test matches, then we lost the Twenty20 and this morning we’ve lost the first match in the Commonwealth Bank, one-day series, I say “lost”, I mean “been thrashed”.  If that wasn’t bad enough, we’ve also lost our best player after Kevin Pietersen broke a rib during his top-scoring 83*.  As Michael Vaughan said in his post-match interview “it never rains but it pours”.  For years now, since the comprehensive defeat in the last World Cup, the ECB have

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Tags: Andrew-Flintoff, Ashes, Aussies, Australia, Barmy-Army, Commonwealth-Bank, Cricket, Kevin-Pietersen, Michael-Vaughan, ODI, Sport, Twenty20, World-Cup

Don’t Lose Your Head

There we have it…. 32 teams, 64 games, 147 goals and 28 red cards. A moment of outrageous indiscipline from the star player followed by ignaminious defeat in that cruelest fashion, the penalty shoot-out. Oddly, not England this time but our close neighbours France. What a game Marco Materazzi had though: he gave away the penalty to gift France the lead, leapt salmon-like in the box to head home the equalizer, stroked in one of the quintet of perfect Italian spot-kicks and (most memorably now) was on the receiving end of the Zidane head-butt. The feeling here is that this World Cup, though always the greatest of sporting spectacles, seemed to fizzle out a touch after the great start we had in the group stages. The only exception being the brilliance of the Italy v Germany semi-final, after which I guess it was only right for the Italians to win it in the end (it is the Chinese Year of the Dog after all, and only Brazil or Italy are allowed to win, if you put faith in such quirks). It was a good tournament though and as always, I left with a feeling that they should do that every year.

Tags: BBC1, Football, France, Italy, Penalty-Shoot-Out, Sport, Sven, World-Cup, World-Cup-Final, Zidane