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?

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 can choose between sticking a pin in a map of Europe or sitting back in our collective armchairs and watching the antics with the impartial eye of the neutral.  I fall into the latter group, despite holding out a little bit of hope for Spain to finally show up and perform at a Finals tournament.  Who are your team?

Plenty of highlights so far (Germany losing, Ibrahimovic’s goal, total football from the Dutch) and the typical mix good, bad and indifferent matches but one thing has become blatently clear to me… ITV is rubbish.  The BBC coverage is slick, polished and effortlessly entertaining with a good selection of pundits and when you watch on BBC HD channel, it looks like a million dollars.  Now, I know that ITV HD is now available on Freesat but I can’t see that.  However, when you watch on ITV1 the picture looks like it’s been smeared in Vaseline, the commentators talk even more gibberish than their BBC counterparts and the advertising breaks and terrible studio make it almost unwatchable. How can coverage of the same event be at two such extreme ends of the quality spectrum?

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 are Andorra (again), Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.  With those three latter teams surely proving to be a challenge in the away legs at least.  So, here’s my short term advice for the FA on how to move the international team back to the top of the pyramid.

• Appoint a manager with technical prowess in preferably both the Champion’s League and International arenas.  No rush appointments, so even if the right man is not available till the summer of 2008 then so be it, let Trevor Brooking take over for any friendlies between now and then.
• Quality not quantity.  Fewer matches for the top players are essential.  Relegate six teams from the Premiership in 2009 and promote only two into it.  Thus, a 16-team Premier League creates a more manageable 30-game season with room for a winter break.
• Arrange a summer tournament for both 2008 and 2009 to keep the players in the habit of getting together for games after the end of the domestic season.
• English player quotas.  Insist on minimum levels of national representation in the 16 selected players for each game.  Anyone who shouts about EU Work Directives and legislation from Brussels should be ignored: These European laws are not designed for people earning £10,000-a-week
• Central contracts.  As in the cricket model, key players to be identified and contracted first and foremost as England  players and sub-contracted back to the clubs.

Of course, many of these will never happen because of lost revenue but that’s my armchair based advice.

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 have been a highlight of the sporting year. Instead, I have dipped in and out of the tournament to date, switching over to SkySports to get a few updates and use the red button to see the highlights (the service is great and makes the subscription costs completely worthwhile). But what a great game it was, talking points on and off the field and both sides to face off against one another when the Windies tour England in a month’s time. Elsewhere in the TV week, we saw the 24 storyline take another major twist with the capture of the remaining nuclear warheads and the killing of Grendenko and Fayid. Just as we were all wondering what on earth would be happening for the next 8 hours, Chang, Jack’s Chinese nemesis gave him a call to say that Audrey was being held captive. It looks as though the series should be renamed “16 plus 8″. A good Desmond tale in Lost helped us find out why he calls everyone “brother” and Charlie escaped death once more. In Doctor Who, the Daleks took Manhatten in the best story of the season so far but I’m still resisting the temptation to award it the Show Of The Week because this time the Cricket World Cup gets the nod.

• Sun 22nd Apr: Prison Break “John Doe” (8/10); Battlestar Galactica “A Day In The Life” (8/10); 24 “10:00pm to 11:00pm” (7/10); Lost “Catch-22″ (8.5/10)
• Sat 21st Apr: Cricket World Cup (England’s meaningless swansong was match of the tournament!); Doctor Who “Daleks in Manhatten” (9/10); Doctor Who Confidential (8/10)
• Fri 20th Apr: Heroes “Six Months Ago” (8/10); HIGNFY (Still funny after all these years); Ruddy Hell! It’s Harry and Paul (made me laugh again 7/10); QI (Always brilliant); Friday Night With Jonathan Ross (Patsy Kensit, Gilbert & George, and Alan Carr… all wierd); Arcade Fire: The Culture Show Session (6.5/10… may buy the album)
• Thu 19th Apr: No TV
• Wed 18th Apr: House “Lines In The Sand” (7/10); Desperate Housewives “Come Play Wiz Me” (7.5/10); The Apprentice (still brilliant… 8.5/10)
• Tue 17th Apr: No TV (I was going to watch the cricket but saw the score and switched off and went and did something less boring instead)
• Mon 16th Apr: The Gadget Show (final show); Battlestar Galactica “The Woman King” (7/10)

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 been saying that they have had a plan and a strategy for how they are going to approach and be challenging by the time of the next World Cup.  Someone should tell them that the World Cup is now only a couple of months and even the most casual of armchair viewers can see that there is no discipline, planning, or ability in the team’s approach.  There is undoubted quality in there but they are very lacking in some key areas.  The bowling is too erratic and the batting is not big hitting enough for the modern game.  I suppose, in the disappointment, it’s easy to be overly critical and you shouldn’t take anything away from the Aussie team, they really are a class act.  However, someone has to take the blame for this and I don’t know whether it’s Duncan Fletcher, the selectors or the powers that be in the ECB themselves.  Once the World Cup is over and before the West Indies come to Lords in May, I imagine heads will roll.

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.