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.