An occasional diary on the World Cup.
Joe Cole is on ITV, describing Saudi Arabia’s win against Argentina as “the romance of the World Cup”. I’m not sure about that, but it was an incredible game. Despite my strong opinion that the World Cup should not even be in Qatar, The Beautiful Game drew me in again. It was brilliant.
I certainly underestimated The Head-Choppers, as the Saudis aren’t really known, expecting them to be crushed under Lionel Messi’s spell. More fool me. Now, people – well, men – will be dancing on the streets of Riyadh until the early hours. I can only imagine what the pubs would be like if they were allowed to have them. Still, perhaps you can have a lot of fun after an historic win in the World Cup without being bladdered. Not sure how, though.
Ignoring the so-called debate on ITV among the pundits in general and Graeme Souness in particular, who seemed somehow to think that the Saudi victory was purely down to tough-tackling and all round aggression – it wasn’t: the Saudis scored two great goals and defended brilliantly – it confirmed, at least to me, that football is not just The Beautiful Game, it’s the best game, too. This was a bit like Georgia beating Wales at rugby union. it just couldn’t happen. Oh, wait a minute…
One thing that’s excited the pundits is the amount of added time in all the games. There were 24 minutes added to the England v Iran game. What can you say about that, other than GOOD? How many games have we seen when there has been massive time-wasting, injury time not being added and all the rest of it and up comes the sign, “Three minutes”. Time-wasting is, and has always been, almost an art-form but there is one way of dealing with it: actually adding time to the game rather than apparently just thinking of a number from thin air and displaying it.
Anyway, well done the Saudis. A well-deserved win in my opinion. Argentina were relatively poor and if I were a betting man I’d now put a few quid on them winning the thing. Any takers?
1 comment
5
Comments are closed.