Category: sheffield

Back to football

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Twice. And neither of them with the result that I would have liked, but… that’s life, I guess.

United finally got their season underway at Watford last night, and were unlucky to lose. The performance was OK, but there were a few last minute injuries and admin things that meant that we couldn’t get our strongest – and more importantly, most balanced – side onto the field. One goal settled an ugly game, and now we move onto our second of six games in less than 19 days… Ridiculous.

And then tonight… I finally played football again. GET IN THERE!

Just over a year after Covid flattened me, it was great to get back onto the field again. And I was so touched that the guys gave me a guard of honour just before the game started…

Did they, bollocks. Lol!

But despite the result, I really enjoyed playing again, Honestly, it was something that I really didn’t know I would ever be able to get back to. But my biggest issue tonight (aside from the scoreline) was that my smartwatch kept telling me that my heart rate was getting a bit high, and trying to SMS my wife.

I’ll be switching that option off ASAP.

And I’m feeling good. Might be a bit stiff tomorrow, but good stiff.
And I’ll be ready to go again next week: hopefully with a better outcome.

Feel it, it is here

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I’ve been waiting for this email. And now it has arrived:

I love a good package (who doesn’t?), and with just 4 days until the first Championship match of the new season (although 7 days until our first Championship match of the season), I was wondering if a good package was going to come my way. Well, finally, it has.

And there’s an early bird offer. Kaboom!

On the other end of the spectrum, there are the pay as you go deals: £25 per month or [gasp] £10 per game. Ten pounds!
That’s right up there with R500 per baboon. You could actually almost get an actual match ticket for that. Although the air fare might bump things up a bit.

Anyway, now that my email has arrived, I am going to sort my subscription so as not to miss out on anything exciting. And by that – incredibly – I mean Millwall at home next weekend.

UPDATE:
Aww yiss!

Back to it (and it’s hot back home)

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After a couple of really awful days, today has been… less awful. I still have no voice, and am subject to painful coughing fits, but things are slowly improving. I have more hope for tomorrow.

Back in the UK, all the news (apart from all the other news) has been about the record-breaking temperatures. It looked like Sheffield – SHEFFIELD! – might even get up towards 40C today. That’s quite literally unheard of. Clearly, something is up. And yet, the climate change deniers (you may recognise them from being anti-vax/pro-Trump/pro-Russian invasion of Ukraine on any given day of any week) have stuck their oar in again with the old:

Lol. So this is “climate change”, is it?
We used to call it “summer”.

Oh yes. I remember the summers of my youth in Sheffield, where it regularly got up to 40C and the trams had to stop running because the overhead lines were being damaged by the heat. That happened every summer. And you couldn’t escape it, because – just like Brize Norton and Luton yesterday – the runways at the airports had all melted. That’s a typical UK summer, alright! Just what we’re known for. When someone says “English summer”, it’s always melty runways and over-stretched power lines that spring immediately to mind, amirite?

Even Ireland joined the party, recording it’s hottest day in over 100 years yesterday, and then it’s hottest day in 24 hours, today.

Temperature records have been kept in Sheffield since 1882, and while a couple of hot days as a standalone can’t be used as evidence that things are heating up generally, it’s interesting to note that the record temperature has been broken today (39.4C still TBC), yesterday (36.1C) and then in 2019 (35.1C). Before that day (25th July) in 2019, the previous highest temperature was 34.3C (1990).

Now, I recognise that these records can obviously only go up, but it’s more the speed at which they are going up which is the interesting/scary part.

Here’s a graph from 2019 which shows the gradual increase in mean temperatures in Sheffield:

…together with the maximum and minimums for each year. And those are all trending upwards.
We’ve now just seen that maximum increase by more than 5 degrees in less than 3 years. I’ve added today’s new record in as a red dot, so you can see just how much of an increase it really is. Incredible.

The climate deniers – being experts, like they are in Eurasian geopolitics (last month), vaccine development (last year) and supporting the fat orange man (since 2016) – will tell you that these things aren’t significant, but there’s actually only so many times you can dismiss these increasingly occurring events as “not significant”, before you have to come to see that in sheer numbers alone, they actually are very significant.

But this is just another wake-up call to ignore.

A note: I still don’t think that the media helps the understanding and gravitas of the situation by publishing “scare stories” and hyperbole about climate change. It belittles the situation and provides plenty of ammunition to those who want us to ignore what’s going on. So please stop doing that. [laughs]

Double up

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I didn’t pay the £25 to watch United’s 6 pre-season friendlies. I wasn’t sure I could watch them all anyway, and £25 seems like a lot when the opponents are Casa Pia (won 2-1), Lincoln (see below), Scunthorpe, Mansfield, Burton and Barnsley. No offence to those clubs, but I would have thought a bit more about it if there had been a Spurs or a Bordeaux or something in there.

I might still go for the season long package again though, if it hasn’t gone up too much. And that even though there won’t be a Spurs or a Bordeaux or something in there.

Anyway, if I had bought into the friendlies, I would have got more for my money today, with United playing two (two!) back to back 60 minute training games against Lincoln City.

Fotmob handled this unusual scenario quite nicely (see above), but Google got all confused and claimed that the first game had been abandoned and the second one cancelled.
That clearly wasn’t the case, and personally, I would have liked a third game to see if we could have got to 23.

Again, no disrespect to Lincoln, but these are games that we would expect to be winning, so it’s all about the intricacies and the performances, rather than the results. And the boss seemed pretty happy with those aspects, so I think it’s safe to say that we’re definitely winning the league this season*.

Bring it on*.

* T&Cs apply

I… I have no words.

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Thanks to the work of the Ramsey Bay Over Saturation Society and their insistence on pumping up the Lightroom sliders to unbelievable levels, we’re now all painfully aware of the #RBOSS phenomenon.

Using software to make shots look better than they actually were is fine. Of course it is. It’s when you go WAAAYYY over the top that it gets silly and ugly and then when you have the audacity to suggest on social media that “it came out of the camera like that”, well, then we’re really heading way down the road of RBOSS wankerdom.
It’s just deceitful karma-harvesting and it pisses me (and a lot of other people) off.
Quite reasonably.

I’m talking about stuff like this, this and this. It even spread to Bergen, which really doesn’t need assistance in looking good in photos.

But all of that (literally) pales into insignificance with what I saw on a Sheffield Facebook group this morning. Because… I mean… even when a sunset is spectacular, you can’t claim that it looked… that it looked… like this:

What in the ever living fishcake has happened here?

This isn’t “Tonight’s sunset over the village” as the protagonist claims. This (I think) used to be Aston on the border of Sheffield. But this isn’t a sunset. This is the actual star crashing into our planet. This is thermonuclear detonation. Billions of megatons of raw explosive power blasting out streams of plasmatic energy across the rolling hills of South Yorkshire. Every atom right across the Western sky exploding in perfect synchronicity, creating an ultra-electromagnetic shockwave that instantly kills everything in its path.

And it’s not helped by comments such as “Absolutely gorgeous!!! [several heart emojis]” or “breathtaking!”. The only breath that’s being taken here is your final one as the blast of hyper-energy – having melted your eyeballs in a nanosecond – sucks the very last molecules of oxygen from your lungs, leaving merely a smouldering pile of desiccated remnants where you once stood.

What makes it impossibly worse is that this guy sells images from his drone. It’s his business. He wants you to pay for this kind of thing. Money. Real money.

To be honest, this is beyond RBOSS. No-one could have known that the technology to over-saturate to these sort of levels even existed. We simply didn’t think it would ever be possible, but this guy has unashamedly gone multi-Sharples.

End times are upon us.