Fazzinchi

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 (more…)

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 (more…)

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 (more…)

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 (more…)

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.

Quarter Finals day 2

We all worried about his foot and, when all was said and done, it was his head that should have been the subject of our concerns. Rooney saw red as another World Cup drifted away from England’s grasp in the cruelest of penalty shoot-outs (yet again). The accusations will be undoubtedly, and to a large part correctly, levelled at Sven and his choices of selection, substitutions and tactics but he has long since announced his departure. It came of more of a surprise to hear that his captain had handed back the armband for good. And so, as the Eriksson/Beckham era comes to an end we will begin to look at their legacy of 3 consecutive quarter-finals, we will look back at the 5-1 game in Munich and the Beckham free-kick against Greece and wonder how a team of this undoubted talent have failed to secure any silverware. Ah well, there’s always next time… it’s always next time. Elsewhere, France beat Brazil by a solitary Henry goal. It was apparently a great game but I was too despondant to watch.