Man Of The Match? That's Unkewelled For!

Yes, just in case your living in a cave 50 parsecs beyond the orbit of Pluto, Australia qualified for the round of sixteen at the World Cup with a rollercoaster draw against Croatia. It had everything; goals, red cards, hideous blunders, and most importantly, the favourable result should you be a supporter of the green and gold. Before I go on, I would like to draw attention to the teamwork and commitment of the Japanese who, as you can see from the picture above, clubbed together to find the coach's keys after he dropped them during the warmup......... Is this thing on? Anyway I'm a big fan of Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi, the Japanese 'keeper, and I'm sad to see him and his teammates heading home after only three games. They had a tough group and in the end had trouble up front, which many people were predicting before the tournament.

Back to Australia and some more of my ill-tempered whinging and moaning about the commercial media in this country. I don't even know who voted Harry Kewell man of the match, if in fact anyone did, but that's all I've been hearing this week and surprise, surprise I disagree vehemently with the suggestion that he was the best player on the field. I guess it is just the fact that he scored the winning goal that illuminates him in everybodys mind. For mine, he played quite selfishly sometimes and should have scored 10 minutes before he actually did when he hit his open shot from 12 yards out straight at the keeper at a perfect height for him to save. I am too harsh on Harry I know, it's not his fault that there is so much hype surrounding him, but you'd think there were only one player in the Australian team. I thought Moore played well on Friday and Lucas Neill was again solid at the back. Chipperfield, who a few years ago was a bus driver in Wollongong, gave another reliable performance, showing his defensive qualities.

Ehhhhhhhh, why am I angry, this is a time of celebration for soccer fans in Australia, but I'm sure my ire will be raised again when we finally get knocked out of the tournament and everybody forgets that any of this ever happened. Soccer paraphenalia will disappear from T.V. and magazine adds and soccer results will once again be confined to the 'sporting digest' section of the Advertiser in text so small that even the Hubble Space Telescope has trouble making it appear legible. This second event I will welcome as I'm losing count of the number of misspelled names that I read in some of the print media. I know the names are difficult, but a quick visit to any of the myriad websites that list the World Cup squads will solve this problem. Yes, it's pedantic, but I'd like to have people who actually know something about the game reporting on it.

Anyway, no-one likes a complainer.

Aldo This World

Well I hope you've been enjoying the World Cup telecast so far, I know I have. So much in fact that I had an incredibly lonely five days last week just trying to fit in as much viewing as possible. No seriously, it got to Friday and I was desperate for some kind of human companionship. Let that serve as a warning for all you loners out there, it's unhealthy to cut yourself off from human contact! and while I'm at it, I hate hate hate all this bandwagon jumping and non-Harry Kewell-critiscising media. Everyone wants a piece of the World Cup pie, commercial television going it's hardest while clearly having no idea what they are talking about. And, for anyone who didn't watch last night's game, Harry Kewell missed a complete sitter, but you literally wouldn't read about it. Nothing on the news, nothing on the web. I mean, it's gotta be the miss of the tournament, but instead of accepting we lost because of our poor finishing it's all '....oh the referree was against us" and "....the courageous Socceroos fought valiantly and left the field with their heads held high". BUGGER OFF YOU PAROCHIAL TOSSERS! We lost because we didn't have the class of the other team. Oh yeah, Schwarzer buggered up as well on that second goal. I still wholeheartedly support the Socceroos, I guess I'm just angry at the media.

Anyway lets focus on the good and by good I mean outstanding. If you only remember one player from this World Cup, remember Paraguay's number two 'keeper Aldo 'El Gato' Bobadilla. He was perhaps not expected to play a game, but all this changed when the first choice keeper Justo Villar, tore his calf muscle in the opening minutes of the game versus England. He didn't concede a goal in that game and in the following game against Sweden he made a string of acrobatic saves to keep out the Scandanavians until the dying stages. Sure, he probably makes a lot of the saves look flashy, but everybody loves a showman.

Anyhoo, I hope some big European club signs this guy on and he becomes some kind of legend who plays some really great games, but at the same time make some shocking and hilarious mistakes and is remembered as a great personality and becomes chief of the U.N. and wins TIME Magazines person of the year award and discovers the cure for cancer and writes a musical about some girl who he thought would always be available, but then married someone else, but would have said yes if he had asked her and finds Jimmy Hoffa's body and goes on Deal or No Deal and wins and kicks Andrew O'Keefe in the groin and rejects the money out of principle and while he's at it kicks random commercial television sports presenters in the groin for pretending to like soccer and convinces all the countries of the world to spend less on space travel and armaments and more on looking after the needy and becomes Paraguay's greatest export and becomes a Christian and tells all his teammates about God and uses his profile to help other people and pops by for a coffee so he can give me some goalkeeping tips and stays for a serve of my mums Shepherd's Pie and releases an ill concieved and extremely poorly made pop song that playfully complains that women are so hard to understand but 'God love 'em anyway' and reads this blog so he can tell me what he thinks and learns English prior to reading my blog so he can fully grasp my admiration of his talents and doesn't become disoriented by my lack of punctuation and poor sentence structure and dies satisfied.................

Yeah, that's about it really.

Footballing My Eyes Out

Far be it from me to suggest that people are actually regulary reading this blog, but apologies to those out there who are getting frustrated at my lack of updating. I never thought getting a full time job could be so time consuming, after all it's only 40 odd hours out of a 168 hour week (about 24% worth for those of you with a mathematics bent). That and the fact that I can't always find things to write about. Fear not though for the second problem has been remedied with the commencement last night of the oh so eagerly anticipated 2006 Soccer World Cup. If you don't know what I am talking about then stop reading now and don't come back for the next four weeks coz this aint gonna be the place for you.

Right, so the opening game saw the hosts Germany take on the Central American 'powerhouses' Costa Rica. Seriously though, these guys have qualified for the last two World Cups, but that could be due to their ordinary qualifying group in which the biggest threats are Mexico and the U.S.A. I mean they got belted 5-2 by Honduras in qualifying and just got past Cuba on away goals. Back to the Germany game, the final score was 4-2 but my inkling is that Costa Rica scored twice simply for the fact that the German defence is more porous than a single-ply Black and Gold facial tissue. Despite this weakness at the back, the Germans look good in attack and both their first goal, scored by Phillip Lahm, and their last, driven in by Torsten Frings from all of thirty yards, were absolute crackers. Miroslav Klose, who has been banging them in for fun this year with Werder Bremen, scored Germany's other two, with his feet surprisingly enough. Paolo Wanchope grabbed Costa Rica's two goals with well time runs and cool finishes, though he looked marginally offside for the second.

The other game of the night was the less exciting Poland vs Ecuador, which I only watched because at this point of the tournament quality international soccer is still a novelty. Don't be expecting any in depth analysis of the upcoming Tunisia - Saudi Arabia, Trinidad & Tobago - Paraguay or Iran - Angola, I mena, I am a soccer tragic, but I'm not some kind of sadomasochistic sport addict. Anyway to wrap things up, Poland were downright disappointing up front and were undone with two well-worked goals by the well disclipined and disturbingly muscular South Americans. It just wasn't going to happen for the Poles who ironically hit the post twice (get it, poles and posts..... yep) and now look to be heading home from Germany after just one week. It's a bit unreasonable to think they could get a result from their game with the hosts, although there will be a lot of hate flying around for that one so anything could happen. Ecuador could be the surprise packets from group A. They qualified simply because they play all their home games in their capital city Quito, which is about 3,000,000,000,000,000,000 metres above sea level meaning teams that come to play there have enough trouble staying conscious let alone running around for 90 minutes chasing 11 Ecuadorians who are quite used to the thin air.

Anyhoo, my house is the venue tonight for England vs. Paraguay, although the only taker seems to be Dave 'I like sport as much as you do, but don't give me that volleyball crap' Yeend. I'll be back tomorrow with more results and hopefully more wit as well, but don't hold your breath (especially if you are in Quito).

PS: I have never asked Dave about his views on volleyball, he could actually love the game, I just could think of a sport that he didn't like to make his nickname amusing.