I'm back! Yeah yeah I know... Not even going to apologise or make any excuses, life's busy!
So much is happening at the moment on and off the pitch. Where do I start? I'll save the best til last i.e. La Coupé de Monde! Die Weltmeisterschaft! You know that thing. The month's escape from normal life! The vain attempt to relive summers gone (basically 90 and 94 for me)! THAT! Like I said that comes later.
First, life! Well not life, day to day sport. Mundanity. Is that a word? It should be! I've just invented a word! Take that Ms Kanarak! Told you my English would get me somewhere! A blog about football read by a couple of hundred/maybe thousand people on the internet! Who's the English failure now eh?*
Anyway as I was saying, first every day football and my club West Ham in particular. I actually started writing this the other day on my commute to and from work, and I had reams and reams on the broken promises and outright lies of our board coupled with their expectation that we keep putting our hands in our pockets paying for a Champions League team yet getting a Championship response from the owners.
On top of this I had an anecdote of how I'd given mine and my son's tickets away for yesterday's game, and upgraded my son's to an adult to find, to my horror/disgust that we were charging £38 to upgrade a child's ticket (so how much is the full ticket?) to a relegation 6 pointer!
I decided to omit the bulk of this rant because I don't want to be too negative after yesterday's result; but at the same time the win against Southampton changes nothing in my opinion. The unrest at Burnley wasn't about the result and had been a long time coming, the Porn Barrons (or Smut Peddlers as my mates in one WhatsApp group refer to them) need to do a lot to win me and a lot of other fans back!
Moving on from West Ham I want to briefly discuss cricket. Yeah I do that on here every now and then. Cricket is my second favourite sport, seen as I no longer have an interest in F1 (it's gotten silly/predictable/boring). So last week it came to light that Cameron Bancroft was cheating in the 3rd Test against South Africa. To those of you not that familiar with our national summer sport, Bancroft was essentially scuffing up one side of the ball in order to aid its, sometimes unpredictable, deviation while in mid air. This makes it harder for the opposition batsmen to hit it, increasing their chances of getting out. That's all you're getting in terms of an explanation from me, there's not much more to it to be fair, despite all the diagrams floating around from the part time Physicists on social media.
There seems to be fair few cricket fans out there with short/selective memories and an inflated sense of moral fibre. While Smith was found guilty of cheating; he wasn't actually was he, he was found guilty of allowing it to happen or being complicit in Bancroft's actions; regardless while he was found guilty of cheating, the reaction has been nothing short of ridiculous.
The press chasing him through airports, the tearful interviews resembling that of someone who has been caught taking performance enhancing drugs (or facing the death penalty after being caught smuggling drugs into South East Asia), the social media reactions from a number of former cricketers. It's all a bit much. I mean come on I've seen people suggesting that's why the Aussies won the Ashes, let's not be silly now! Australia won the Ashes because Smith himself is an excellent batsmen, England have the most fragile of batting lineups (look at the New Zealand test the other day, were they ball tampering too?), and England are terrible away from home, hence the inability to beat Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and even my beloved (yet terrible) West Indies side in recent years.
Ball tampering is bad, and it's cheating, and it shouldn't happen (and Smith and Co should be punished) but it's happened before, in some cases quite recently and some of "Typical cheating Aussies" comments I'm seeing are coming from people who seem to forget that the contemporary commentating guru that is Mike Atherton, was caught doing the very same thing, while captain of England, as has the current South African captain Faf du Plessis (TWICE)!
I've even seen Stuart Broad, the man who famously blatantly knicked a ball into an Australian fielder's hands in the Ashes, pretended that he hadn't and went on to score match-winning runs, chipping in. The guy has got some front!
Now I don't think that Broad should have been dragged over hot coals for that and I think the same of Smith. A significant fine and a ban for the rest of the series would have been more befitting of the crime. This whole situation is that classic reaction that we currently get to any controversy in sport. Just like when people say, "The standard of refereeing is getting worse..." the minute someone makes a mistake in a football match. No it's not, the reaction to errors is. We have cameras that pick up everything from every angle and footage that can reach us from a regional league the other side of the World in minutes. Then the social media outcry, the experts, the moral preachers. Give it a rest!
Finally, and most importantly! IT'S A WORLD CUP YEAR! I'm actually starting to get excited now. I've trawling the internet searching for new stuff to read, going back through old Barry Davies videos (a lot of them are getting removed from YouTube on copyright grounds, get involved ASAP). It's coming!
I need to start working out how my days are going to pan out; the 13.00 kick offs on working days are going to be a killer, and we're expecting twins (yep that's right!) a few weeks before the tournament starts. This is going to be the biggest challenge ever! Bigger than the midnight kick offs in USA 94 (couldn't blag those with my parents, aged 13); the 7am starts in 02 when I had only just finished University and as a result hadn't woken up before 8am for 3 years; bigger than that time in 1998 when I bunked A-Level History to watch Paraguay v South Africa (I was convinced Chilavert was gonna score a free kick)**; or that night in 2014 when I failed miserably to stay up and watch Japan v Senegal, which began at 2am.
This is a true test of my initiative. Whatever happens, expect more ramblings on here in the coming weeks (the reality is I'll probably end up being too busy/lazy to act upon my thoughts) as my excitement grows!
*I actually did OK at English and at school in general. That little Monologe was completely made up for the purpose of a cheap gag. Although Ms Kanarak (or "Kanarek"? I can't remember) genuinely was my GCSE English teacher. And she was a bit of a dick! Sorry if you care about the World Cup and are reading Ms Kanarak/Kanarek!
**this actually happened! And the same Ms Kanarak/Kanarek (I actually think it's spelt Konarek now), who was the Head of the Sixth Form, rang my house! No lie!
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