It’s the last day of real football today, before we go into this weird, unwanted Qatar World Cup break for the next month or so. Look, I will be watching – because it’s football – but I don’t think that I’ve ever been more disengaged and uninterested in any World Cup in my whole life. And I was only 8 months old for one of them.
Actually, the break could not have come at a better time for Sheffield United, as we might be able to get a few players back from injury while they aren’t playing thirteen matches a week to fit the tournament in. And the injury list is long: Daniel Jebbison, Jack O’Connell, Jayden Bogle, Max Lowe, Oli McBurnie, Rhian Brewster, Rhys Norrington-Davies (who should be on a plane to Qatar with the Welsh squad), Sander Berge, Tommy Doyle, Jack Robinson, Anel Ahmedhodzic and John Fleck. That’s more than an entire first team unavailable because they are broken. We started yesterday’s game with an academy player in midfield, and two more on the bench, and even then we had to add an extra goalkeeper to make up the numbers. Carnage.
(Still won, though.)
So that’s the only positive for me, but that doesn’t stop the constant stream of businesses and organisations trying to make me be interested. The latest one of those is Facebook. And they are very clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel with this nonsense:
Which team will have more corners? wut?
This assumes that a) I am interested in the World Cup, b) I am interested in England v Iran, c) I am interested in how many corners each team will get, and d) my extensive footballing acumen would allow me to predict such a meaningless statistic anyway.
But hey, Joãozin Albuquerque and 5.8M others are playing…
I have no idea who Joãozin Albuquerque is, by the way.
If you’re watching a World Cup (or any other) game just to see who gets the most corners, you’re either part of a match-fixing cartel or you’re doing football all wrong. Both of which do kind of fit with the whole Qatar 2022 vibe, but that’s really beside the point.
Just stop trying to make this happen. It’s not going to happen. Leave me alone.