All of it was made for you and me

  Altogether shout it now There's no-one who can doubt it now So let's tell the world about it now Dreary days are here again It's early Thursday morning {Friday morning when I clicked Publish), and we're just getting started on dreary day number one. Or I am, anyway. The rest of the world seems to have decided to have another glorious global hoo-hah instead. The Argentinian players made the whole thing about the Falklands, which is clearly a bigger deal for them than any of Argentina's real problems. It seems they didn't bring the Malvinas banner they waved themselves, some fans gave it to them after the game, but they will find themselves in trouble over it in any case. Unless Trump decides to phone up Infantino and tell him otherwise, of course, which seems unlikely unless he gets the whole thing muddled up with Greenland and decides it's all Denmark's fault. I don't personally care about the islands either way, but I do remember that the Argentin...

That's the Two dreary days . The time after you get knocked out of the World Cup, when you have to face up to not being in the World Cup any more (this is on top of the 1425 dreary days when the World Cup isn't even on, a futile and empty time which is supposed to be beyond the scope of this post but keeps cropping up because I can't stop thinking about it). It's a delicate business, keeping yourself ready for the dreary days. Hope is the enemy on account of its natural pairing with renewed despair, but there is no point trying to repress it or it will just burst out when you least expect it and cause you to say something optimistic about Jude Bellingham being a natural born winner when people might hear you. Instead, a kind of Stoic detachment is necessary. The guiding principle of Stoicism is that negative emotion expended on events beyond our control is wasted energy, so we should focus instead on the things we can affect. England results fall within the category of ...

Before the World Cup started, a time I can hardly imagine now, I did a post called The continental imbalance , in which I discussed the number of countries from the different continents. Now that 96 out of 104 games are in the record books, how have the different continents done? Europe have done very well. 13 of the 16 European sides got through to the round of 32, and 6 of them are in the quarter finals. If France beat Morocco and Switzerland beat Argentina we'd have an entirely European last 4. South America did well in the group stage, with 5 out of 6 going through. There's just Argentina left now, though, although it's worth remembering that something similar happened last time and they went on to win it. The three North American teams all qualified for the round of 16, but then they all got knocked out. The USA ran into their own President, you all know what happened to Mexico and Canada lost 3-0 to Morocco. Talking of Morocco, they're the only African team left n...

I have to say something about him, you'll have been expecting it, but I'm afraid it isn't especially funny. It's possible to be funny by hitting the same note again and again and again to the point where the repetition becomes the joke, but he's no Stewart Lee. Apart from anything, the author of the joke has to understand that it's a joke.  Even people as disconnected from the World Cup as my readers will probably know what I'm talking about, but for compositional reasons if nothing else I will explain. "He" is of course Donald Trump, but the story starts with the US striker Folarin Balogun, the player with the easiest name to misspell in the World Cup. He was sent off against Bosnia when he jumped for a ball but landed with his studs on Tarik Muharemovic's heel. This was a significant loss for the American team, after all he'd scored their first goal to add to the two goals he got in the group stage, but they still went on to win and earn ...

Have you heard of Russell's Paradox ? It's a philosophical problem that dates from May 1901. Bertrand Russell found it quite by accident while he was looking for something else, and realised it destroyed his earlier work on set theory. He spent the next few days in a state of absolute despair over it, and wrote a letter to a friend in which he described how miserable he was, how clearly he understood that nothing fundamental to human existence had happened and it was really silly being that miserable, and how little that helped. The dreary days are a lot like that. I should explain, or rather I shouldn't and we've both got better things to be doing and yet here I am writing my explanation and here you are reading it. Let us begin with the first World Cup fact, which is that it ends in disappointment for nearly everyone. For nearly everyone, by which I mean the whole world except for one country, there is a moment when the full time whistle blows and we face up to the tw...

"Next, some thoughts on how the group phase went and what it tells us about where football is now." This turned out to be hubristic. I had to go back to work for a couple of days, and it knocked me out of my rhythm.  You might not think the regularity of posts was metronomic before, and you wouldn't be wrong. I did try with the group phase piece, but it came out with many statistics and no funny so I couldn't see the point. Anyway, I watched France last night and now I can't think about anything else. Yes, I said work. In the middle of the World Cup! Can you imagine? Honestly, the indignities that I have to endure. I'm off today though, and at liberty to share my thoughts on France. When I say France, I really mean Kylian Mbappe. It was his game last night, and he is football's Mozart right now. Mozart is the wrong nationality, but there aren't any French composers quite like Mozart, just like there aren't any Austrian footballers quite like Mbappe...