All of it was made for you and me

I know I took the piss out of Scotland a bit the other day, but they didn't deserve the death of a thousand cuts that the new tournament structure inflicted on them. The BBC had been calculating the odds on them getting through as a wild card all week, and by Saturday afternoon they reckoned it was down to 0.07%. You might think that was an improvement on the odds they started with two weeks ago, but immediately after they lost to Brazil their chances were estimated at 43%. This figure steadily fell as the days went by and one result after another went the wrong way from their point of view. South Africa, having looked like they couldn't find the goal if they were tethered to it, managed a completely unexpected victory over South Korea which left both teams better placed than Scotland. Ecuador did the same to Germany, a frankly astonishing result that took away another Scottish chance. All week this went on, until finally last night Croatia beat Ghana by less than the required ...

 If you're following the tournament through match reports, a lot of what you see looks like this. Chadagascar  came from behind to beat  Balkanonia  3-1 today, in a tense encounter in Kentucky City. Balkanonia Manager Eric Krestovnikov became the oldest manager at a World Cup game at 134 and 3 months, until Jordistan kicked off against  Vanuvalu  3 hours later and the record passed to Neil Warnock. Balkanonia's teenage sensation Eric Krestovnikovnikov scored with an overhead kick after just 7 minutes, but was sent off  10 minutes later under the new FIFA regulation limiting players' farts to 5 seconds or less. His manager's protests were disregarded by the VAR team, who said they had no grounds to overrule the referee's nostrils. Etc etc. You may have noticed that you don't get much of that kind of thing here. I don't disdain it, it just isn't in my skill set. The World Cup isn't a zero sum game, the match reports don't stop existing just becaus...

Before today's post, here is some non-football advice. If you set your shower to lukewarm, stand in it naked for a minute or two then go back to your laptop without completely drying off, it is possible to feel briefly normal. I cannot adequately describe the thrill of this, and I speak as someone who can usually describe things. You may have to put up with the water on your head dripping down your glasses, but it's a small price to pay. Onto the matter at hand. Let me take you back to the 1982 World Cup . Twenty four countries took part, divided into six groups of four, and the top two in each group went through to the next stage. It was business as usual in many ways. England topped their group but then crashed and burned, while Scotland huffed and puffed but got sent home early, to think again. Something new and exciting happened in Group 2 , though. For the first time in a World Cup an African nation did well. Algeria beat West Germany, lost to Austria but then beat Chile 3...

 You'll have noticed, if you're following the tournament at all, that most of the US stadiums have another life in the NFL. This is hardly surprising, as none of their dedicated soccer stadiums are big enough for FIFA's requirements so other solutions needed to be found. It had to be the NFL stadiums. Baseball grounds are too square (technically, too diamond-y) and ice hockey rinks are too small and cold, even for the Scots. There's no point looking at basketball, tennis or lacrosse, all their facilities are the wrong size or shape for our purposes, but the NFL ones are just right. Fortunately it's their off season until the beginning of September, so there is no time pressure on returning them to their normal use. Many of them regularly host Major League Soccer teams anyway, so they're quite used to it. It's stadiums not stadia, by the way, or at least it normally is. Stadia is the correct plural of stadium in Latin,  but it's also the correct plural of...

 You may recall me telling you about silly games  the other day. It falls to me today to inform you that that was a silly post. A silly post, you won't be surprised to learn, is a post that contains an incongruous juxtaposition. In this case, the incongruously juxtaposed elements were the silky elegance of my prose and the clunking failure of my forecasting. For in this post, I implied that the result of the Spain Cabo Verde game was a foregone conclusion. In the event, mighty Spain (population 49.6 million, first in the world football rankings) and mightless Cabo Verde (population 533,000, ranked 62nd) played out a remarkable goalless draw. 'Silky elegance? Fuck off', is probably your first response to this thinly veiled humblebrag. The point, though, is that I was wrong wrong wrong. I followed that up by also being wrong about Ecuador v Curacao, another goalless draw where the team from the island paradise stood in their own area kicking the ball away for ninety minutes w...

It's a commonplace that association football was invented in Britain, but unlike many commonplaces it's actually true. We also invented cricket and rugby, back when there was a British Empire, but we didn't share all our games around the colonies in quite the same way. Rugby went to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, while cricket went to all those places plus the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent. Football didn't take off in the colonies. The Europeans and the South Americans went mad for it instead, and as a result it became a mainly Catholic game. 17 of the 22 World Cups so far have been won by majority Catholic countries, and no-one from outside South America or western Europe, or from outside the Christian world, has ever won. The North Americans largely disdained our sports, preferring their own, and for a century that was how it stayed. Baseball and American football in the Americas, cricket and rugby in the Commonwealth and football elsewhere. The Amer...

[Sorry, you would have had this well before now but there's a lot of football to watch. I was up at 6:30 this morning and now it's 13:11 and I'm just finishing off Austria versus Jordan. Before that it was Iraq v Norway,  before that it was Argentina v Algeria. Which gave us the subject of this post, but I couldn't look things up until I'd finished all the games in case of spoilers.] A few years ago the BBC did a documentary about Argentina, England and the Hand of God. They got Gary Lineker to present it, and he interviewed Gazza and Maradona in their home environments. To provide a wider context he interviewed Messi as well. It was clear from the interviews that the four of them could be split into two types. If Messi or Lineker hadn't been footballers, they would have lived out respectable if unremarkable lives as middle managers for provincial manufacturing firms. They would have occasionally visited the theatre, but not as often as they took the family to a...

Have a look at the pool stage from the 2011 Rugby World Cup . In particular, have a look at Namibia in Pool D. Namibia had games against South Africa, Wales, Samoa and Fiji. They lost all four of them, scoring 44 points and conceding 266. They lost 87-0 to South Africa. I remember this game because I watched it. On telly, I didn't go to Auckland to watch Namibia play rugby. It was a silly game. A silly game is a game where one element is incongruous when juxtaposed with the others. In this case it was Namibia who were incongruously shit in comparison with South Africa. I've only ever been to one truly silly game. It was the 2004 League One playoff final. Bristol City played Brighton and Hove Albion, for the right to play the following season in the Championship. For those who aren't familiar with FA branding practices, neither League One nor the Championship are the highest division. If you get relegated from the Premiership, the division with the teams you've heard of ...

[I can't be bothered with Scotland yet, so here is something I wrote twelve, sixteen or maybe twenty years ago, I forget. Christmas hasn't grown on me, but I've learned to endure it with more grace than previously.] Oh, let me count the ways. No-one suddenly thinks they can demand things of you because the World Cup is on. No one expects you to buy them things, or attend their tedious performances, or in fact leave your house at any time. There are no World Cup cards demanding to be sent, even though there is actually far more to celebrate. The World Cup is a celebration of summer, whereas Christmas is a commiseration for winter. No one says we have lost the true meaning of the World Cup. No one pretends we only have the World Cup for the sake of the children. Children are not annoying for months before the World Cup. The actual World Cup itself goes on for longer than the buildup. You are never sick of the whole subject of the World Cup weeks before it actually happens. Th...

All three hosts have started well. They've had two wins and a draw between them, and even their heads of state have behaved themselves. Trump stayed away, and actually managed to say normal President-to-sports-team things to the US manager Mauricio Pochettino before the game. Of course this meant the story wasn't mainly about him, so I'm sure we can expect something much less presidential soon. Following a Mexican opening ceremony where I hadn't heard of any of the pop stars, Canada and the US both gave us basically the same thing. I had to go to iPlayer to watch them because the BBC thought it was more important for us to hear what Wayne Rooney used to do in the tunnel before a game. What did Rooney do in the tunnel before the game? Nothing worth remembering as I type this five minutes later. I once called Rooney the boring onions, and I meant it as a compliment. It was back when he was a regular England player, and profoundly stupid people were saying he should be dro...

It isn't the World Cup yet, it isn't the World Cup yet, and then suddenly and joyously it is, and there's corners and free kicks and everything. I opened a fresh bottle of scotch for it, I wonder if you'll be able to tell? They gave Mexico the opening game. The US get the final, and Canada get to shut up and be grateful. They do get the second host game tomorrow, and the US get theirs in the bit of tomorrow that we call Saturday morning. This is the downside of having multiple hosts. We normally only have to get through one opening ceremony, but this time we have three and one of them will have Donald Trump in it. It's alright for you, you'll be asleep. I have to write about it. If you get the first game you also get the first opening ceremony. This gave Mexico their chance to shine, and they gave us most of the required elements. Big words about diversity: check. Aztec imagery: check. Remembering not to refer to the human sacrifice: check. Band that sound like ...

I have more to say about t his song . It's meaningful to me because I ride the bus all the time, and I can confirm that you see things from under glass when you look through your window at the bright and hollow sky. Bristol may not have a winding ocean drive as such but it's a city with ripped backsides a-plenty, as anyone who's ever taken the 45 to Cherry Gardens can confirm. And yet what's this?  In the third verse. Get into the car, we'll be the -  sorry, what? Get into the what? Oh no no no. No no no no no. This is all wrong. In desperation I googled American meaning for car  in the hope that it might turn out to mean the passenger bit on a bus. It can mean a train carriage, but that doesn't help at all. It can even be the passenger compartment in a lift, but lifts move through entirely the wrong dimension, both spatially and metaphorically. This is hideously wrong. And yes I'm a big fan of public transport, but that isn't the issue here. The issue i...

This World Cup will be the first with 48 countries. The number has slowly grown, from an inauspicious 13 in 1930 to 16, 24 then finally 32 in France in 1998. I say finally, and most of us probably thought 32 was peak bloat, but like Mister Creosote they've found room for another 16 wafer thin mints. Whether we can expect a similar outcome remains to be seen. The 48 will be made up of 16 countries from Europe, 10 from Africa, 6 from South America, 6 from the rest of America (that's North America, Central America and the Caribbean), 9 from Asia and 1 from Oceania. Oceania used to have a play off against a South American team, but FIFA have now given them an automatic place. This means in future New Zealand will always qualify, unless they manage to lose to Vanuatu or one of the other volcanoes. The continental balance might strike you as not in fact that well balanced. Europe may be the centre of our world, but the centre of the actual physical world is a superheated mass of iron...

I expect I'll do something about the actual football quite soon now, but first it seems only polite to let you know what you' can expect. First off, I wouldn't expect promptness. The way I write is I knock some paragraphs together like I'm making a marinade, then they have to sit in the fridge for a bit before they can take shape. Taking shape starts with a vigorous purge. That last metaphor about the marinade, for instance. Landed with an awful clunk, didn't it? Away it goes. As I was saying. First off, I wouldn't expect promptness. The way I write is I knock some paragraphs together, then they have to sit for a while before they can take shape. That's still some way off, but it's going in the right direction. As Samuel Beckett said, Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. That's what makes writing fun, and I'm not being paid so you'd better hope I'm enjoying myself. As I was saying. First off, I wouldn...

I haven't done one of these for years, but apparently they're considered quite old-fashioned now so it feels like it's my time again. Here then is my fourth World Cup blog. I often used to take my blog titles from songs, and so it was for all the World Cup ones. In 2006 the World Cup was in Germany so I chose  First We Take Manhattan because the next line in the song is T hen we take Berlin . In the event England did not in fact take Berlin, which taught me a valuable lesson about hostages to fortune. In 2010 it was in South Africa so I went for Hope Joanna , the Joanna in the Eddie Grant song being Johannesburg. It was recorded when apartheid was still in place, and was about the hope that it could be defeated. Obviously by 2010 it had been, and the Iron Curtain was a thing of the past as well, but equally obviously a whole new crock of shit had sprung up to replace the old crock of shit that we'd grown up with and thought would last for ever. Looking back, I seem to r...