Nothing from me here today, I’m afraid.
While the rest of the world (really? -Ed.) is watching the Stormers and the Sharks egg-chasing at Newlands, I’m braai’ing at our little cottage in Agulhas, and I can safely say that there’s nowhere else that I’d rather be.
Category: sport
The Homes Of Football
This is completely beautiful:
“This intimate short film will accompany photographer Stuart Roy Clarke’s show at the National Football Museum in Manchester in July 2012. The film was made by Northern Stars and features an original score by British Sea Power.”
If, like me, you’re a football fan, you need to find yourself 12 minutes, sit down and watch this. If you’re not a football fan, you might just find some sort of explanation for what we see in it and why.
Clarke’s brilliant photos can be found at http://www.homesoffootball.co.uk/.
You can even search for your favourite club.
Oleg some distance from reality
So yes, England beat Ukraine and head happily into the quarter finals at Euro 2012 with absolutely no controversy surrounding their passage. Well, except for that perfectly legitimate goal scored by Marko Devic and not given by Hungarian referee Viktor Kassai.
Here’s the screenshot of that moment:
And here’s what Ukraine coach Oleh Volodymyrovych “Oleg” Blokhin said about it:
We scored a clean goal in the 63rd minute, as the ball crossed the goal line by over a metre.
Now, while I have heaps of sympathy with Blokhin and Ukraine (cos remember I have experience of this stuff here and here plus loads of other times I didn’t bother to document), I was unaware of the measurement of a Ukrainian Metre, which appears to be about twenty times smaller than a usual metric metre. Perhaps some hangover from the Soviet Union?
Incidentally, at the same press conference, Blokhin also had a pop at a journalist , saying:
Let’s go outside and have a man conversation.
Presumably, such man conversations involve a great deal of posturing, bravado and comparison of the length of their members; the size of which is something Ukrainian guys are famed for, although it now seems that they may have been measuring in local centimetres, thus diminishing the statue of their claims (and other things) somewhat.
Presumably there’s a Ukrainian Kilometre as well, then? Visitors to that country must think it’s HUGE, when Kiev to second city Kharkiv is listed as 9600km. That’s, like, bigger than Africa (but not if you measure Africa in Ukrainian kilometres, obviously).
But back to reality. Three things to ponder here:
1. Yes. There should be goal line technology in place and only now (that England have been advantaged by it) has Sepp Blatter seemingly woken up to that fact.
2. Were England cheating by having two goalkeepers on the field of play? Sky Sports suggests that yes, they were:
3. If the goal had stood and the match had finished 1-1, England would have gone through and Ukraine would not have gone through: pretty much exactly what happened anyway.
Quiz Time…
Here’s a Euro 2012 quiz question from the guy who used to do the pub quizzes I attended in the UK:
What links Jakub Blaszczykowski, who scored for Poland yesterday against Russia, with ex-Denmark midfielder Stig Tøfting, who played in Euro 2000?
Don’t bother with football. Forget your thoughts about implausibly large Scrabble scores or tenuous ties to Top Gear. The actual answer is far more bizarre.
As a child, Blaszczykowski witnessed a tragedy, which had a major influence on his life. When he was eleven years old, his father stabbed his mother to death.
During the 2002 World Cup, Danish weekly gossip magazine Se & Hør ran a story that Tøfting, when aged 13, had returned home from school to find the bodies of his parents. His mother had been shot by his father, who shortly thereafter turned the gun on himself. The story had been kept secret for years, as Tøfting had not yet told his children.
Ah. The delicate subject of matricide. A crime which, somewhat ironically, probably increases during major football tournaments.
8-Nations Final
I took the boy wonder to the Stadium last night to watch the final of the U20 8 Nations tournament. He’s still young and restless, so although there were two games on yesterday, we aimed to get down there just in time for the second one – Brazil v Argentina. However, due to the lack of traffic, combined with the 1-1 scoreline in the 3rd place game, we got there just in time to see the penalty shootout between South Africa and Japan. Amajita triumphed 7-6, which not only gave Alex the chance to cheer a bit, but also allowed us both to see a ball hitting the back of a net.
Which was nice.
Using the power of the doughnut, we made it safely through 90 minutes of the South American giants slugging it out using the “couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo” style of play. All the typical elements of Latin American soccer were present: flamboyant diving, flamboyant petulance and flamboyant shooting well wide of the target. If these players represent the future of the beautiful game, it’s all going (further) downhill fast.
At 90 minutes, with a delayed kick off and the prospect of another half hour of rubbish, we headed home, spotting the ISS as we left the stadium precinct. Brazil went on to win the game 2-0 aet, but having to carry an exhausted boy back to the car, I feel that we made the correct decision to leave after normal time.
13,000 turned out for the final, but the publicity for the tournament has been much criticised and the attendances have been poor. Nevertheless, we’re going to do it all again in 2014.