Silly games

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 in it, you go down to the Championship. If you get relegated from that you go down to League One, the third level down. Bristol City and Brighton were both third level teams at the time, and were hoping to go into the second level.

The Millennium Stadium is an A-list stadium. It's the national stadium of Wales, and has been since it was built in 1999. The incongruous juxtaposition here, then, was between two pretty average teams and a very impressive ground. It should have been even sillier, as Wembley was being rebuilt at the time, so the Millennium was hosting all Wembley's big games, and ours.

We lost the silly game, and Brighton went up to the Championship. Given the level of competition we'd have faced if we'd won, I couldn't help but feel they were welcome to it. We went up three years later, came back down again then finally went up as champions in 2015, having worked ourselves into better shape, and we've stayed up ever since. Brighton, of course, have gone on to bigger and better things. The Millennium Stadium has remained roughly the same, so I think we could probably play each other there now without either of us looking out of place.

Germany played Curacao yesterday, and it was a silly game in two different ways. One of the sillinesses lay in the incongruous juxtaposition of Curacao with Houston Stadium. The stadium has a capacity of 72,220 and Curacao has a population of 155,826 according to the 2023 census, so the entire nation could have watched the game in person if half of them had been willing to sit on the other half's laps while 11,386 people sat in the aisles.

The other silliness came from making them play Germany, of course. The game ended up 7-1, but an even more telling stat is that the Germans had 26 shots, 12 on target. Watching the game, it felt like more.

Like Namibia crashing and burning at rugby, none of this came as a surprise. Curacao are 94th in the world rankings while Germany are 9th, so frankly all of this was predestined. They're managed by Dick Advocaat, a man who has managed top clubs and national sides including Holland and Russia, and is now the oldest manager in the tournament at 78. He must be furious about qualifying for the World Cup, he probably had no idea his Caribbean retirement project could ever ruin his summer like this. Curacao is just off the coast of Venezuela, so there are plenty of things he could have been doing. He might not fancy the trek to Angel Falls but he could have taken a flight over it and been back on the island for dinner, instead of which he's stuck in Houston losing 7-1 to a footballing behemoth managed by a 38 year old, with two more humiliations still to come.

It wasn't the players' fault. They actually give me quite a scare, equalising after 21 minutes when I'd typed half of this already. In the end we are all reality's bitches though, and soon afterwards reality came back to bite them in the bum and save this piece from being stuck in drafts until Spain play Cabo Verde tonight.

I'm a big fan of the tournament expansion. It means we get 40 games and an entire week added to the World Cup, and I really don't see how anyone can object to that. It does make the tournament a bit like the rugby though, with lots of countries who wouldn't normally be here having to play silly, silly games against the likes of Spain or Germany [STOP PRESS: me and Spain both looked a bit silly in the end, on account of the incongruous juxtaposition of hubris and comedy].

Not that it's all been silly, by any stretch. Sweden managed to make Tunisia look silly by beating them 5-1, but that was unexpected. Japan took a point off Holland, and Qatar took one off Switzerland. Anyway, even the silly games have been entertaining, and incongruous juxtapositions can be relied on to give me something to write about. It's still the World Cup, and when it's over we'll be wishing we could have any World Cup game no matter how silly.

Later tonight, Belgium play Egypt. If I was you I would watch.