Total Fouling, and Two Traveling Circuses

Inevitably, someone's won the World Cup. And more inevitably, because I'm a mug, I watched them do it. So far as I can work out, the most entertaining aspect of debacle we were subjected to yesterday was that I was convinced to watch it in the same room as my grandma.

For the many of you who have had the privilege of not meeting my grandma, she's from that wonderfully old, flagrantly racist, and brilliantly mental breed of OAPs who you have to shout lies at to make them stop asking questions ("Yes Nan, there are normally this many bookings in a match!"). Mid way through the second half I was treated to a verbal treatise on how the Spanish manager might (or might not) look a bit like some film star from the 50's (or possibly the 60's) which she saw in that cinema in Barnsley before it burned down and was replaced by something that was inferior because the seats weren't quite so comfy. All of which was welcome, because even though Spain did win eventually, it was a dirty disappointment of a match.

Bernie Ecclestone's Flying Circus finally landed in Silverstone over the weekend, which was always set to be a bit of an event after the period when we all thought that the track had been consigned to the dustbin. As it was, Red Bull pulled out all the stops to provide us with a spectacular showdown both on and off the track. My current theory is that the team principle for the team is either spectacularly clever, or (as is more likely) is just a little dense. Whichever way round, the team managed to grab most of the attention all weekend after introducing a new, much faster front wing - which Seb Vettel promptly trashed in practice, and his team mate Mark Webber was ordered to surrender his wing to Vettel, and use the older, slower one. Having his team apparently discriminating against him did the emotional equivalent of setting the Australian on fire, and he went on to pull an astonishing drive out of his hat to win the race. Like I say - either very, very clever team manipulation, or blind luck and stupidity.

Finally, I spent the last week in Wales, and so far as any Welsh person ever talks about cycling, everyone was talking about Geraint Thomas. He's a cyclist for Team Sky, who's actually been around for a while - he was even in the gold medal winning team pursuitists on the track in Sydney 2008, it's just no one's ever really heard of him, and for a couple of heady days last week he was inside the top five of the Tour. For now, he's faded back into the main pack (as has Lance, after two crashes yesterday), but he's a name to watch - if not in this tour, then the next one. In terms of real results, Cadel Evans is currently in yellow, and Mark Cavendish has become the first British man to ever win two stages in a row.

In a few days I'm off to Hawaii to languish on a beach and ogle sea life, so unless I can wangle net access, there'll be no posts for a couple of weeks. I'm sure you'll manage.

One Day On

For those of us inclined to be English, these are now what might be termed Troubling Times. We had to wake up this morning, and remember again that we're now in an era when the biggest World Cup defeat we've ever suffered was at the hands of Germany. Every generation of England football watchers has their defining game against the Germans that will forever remain in their memories as that game. The match you can mark your life by, with a time before it happened, and all subsequent times since.

For me (and the rest of us that became sentient in the early nineties) it was the semi-final of Euro 96, and our reoccurring ineptitude with spot kicks. For kids of the noughties, yesterday was your rite of passage. Well done, you're now truly inducted into the cult of the three lions.

We learnt a lot of new words yesterday too (and not just the ones David James was yelling): "goal line technology" being the most irritatingly haunting three. I'm not going to wander into the debate as to whether if that goal had counted England would have done better, or even if that now makes it 1-1 on dodgy crossbar based ball antics, but I will say that if I ever meet Sepp Blatter, I will follow the stern advice of Alan Rickman, and take out his heart with a spoon ("because it hurts more").

If you breathe more, and munch the calm pills, you might notice that other things happened last week too. Andy Murray's waded his way through a wall of grump into the quarter finals of Wimbledon (beating the winner of Queen's, and without a fish joke in sight). And as far as I know, Isner and Mahut are still playing.

The Valencian Grand Prix added its own degree of confusion to the weekend, firstly because what's usually billed as a poor man's Monaco (all of the dis-excitement, but none of the dancing girls) turned out to be actually quite exciting, and secondly because Mark Webber decided to fulfill his boyhood dream of becoming a Fighter Pilot (unwisely though, because he was in a car at the time), resulting in some spectacular (but shortlived) aerobatics courtesy of Heikki Kovaleinen's car-cum-launch ramp.

Finally, rightly back on two wheels (where we belong on this blog), the Tour De France starts next weekend, which means this week most cycling teams will be getting outside their own weight in pasta, and thinking tactics rather than actually riding too much. Sadly, Tom Boonen (perhaps the closest thing we've got to a Cycling Rock God) will miss the Tour, because he sustained a pretty nasty knee injury while running over Mark Cavendish's head.

Public Service, Errant Communists, and Two Spanners

Because this is the first time my weekly sports report has been unleashed in a public sphere, I reckon an introduction is in order. I produce a weekly Sports and Society e-message for Mansfield College, and by (slightly inexplicable) popular demand, I'm going to continue publishing my weekly take on the sporting world here over the vacation (instead of sending everyone drivel they don't necessarily need or want) - updated Mondays.

I have a new theory as to what the England team are doing - they've decided that the World Cup is the perfect time to offer everyone in the British Isles a public service. The Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish are having a fantastic time watching the English flail like a jellyfish drowning in Marmite (more than they could get from having their own team in the tournament), and what more could the English want than the perfect excuse to moan, and spit disappointed scorn into our pints, before whiling away the evening telling our friends what we'd be doing were we Fabio? (You could argue that's not so much a theory as a coping mechanism).

Sadly, as I write, my adopted second team of North Korea (and that's nothing to do with the post below this - I'd forgotten I'd written that) are getting the kicking of a lifetime (outside of the jail they'll be thrown in when they get back) from Portugal; and to answer a question lots of people have asked me, I believe that (disappointingly) the North Korean authorities are showing all North Korean games, whether they win or lose, but re-scheduling them so people can watch the game in the evening, and not three in the morning.

My favourite moment of the week in the tournament was the outbreak of lust and desire for human contact that paralysed the Slovenian team just before a USA free kick, causing a number of Slovenians to vigorously embrace the Americans, such that in the sheer confusion of this sudden penalty-box love in, the spectacular goal the USA scored was disallowed.

If you like your balls a bit smaller, then Wimbledon starts up today. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on tennis (though any sport that incorporates strawberries as part of its identity has to be brilliant), but I have finally decided that I don't like Andy Murray. Anyone who can tweet that interestedly about tuna sushi, and has his bio as just "I play tennis," is clearly (in my books at least) a spanner of the finest, iron-clad, ocean going variety.

In other spanner related news, Jenson Button has thrown his toys out of the pram, and taken Mercedes to court because they wouldn't give him his £1 million championship winning car as a gift. I do quite like Jenson, but sometimes he can seem such a wazzock (and I don't know what he's planning to do with the car, F1 cars these days are so complicated you need four beardy blokes and a laptop to even think about starting them).

Finally, the impossibly named Thomas Lofkvist (some say he's The Stig), lead Team Sky Cycling to 12th in the Tour De Suisse, though with quite a few of the key riders now resting for the Tour De France, this result is respectable.