Day Seventeen

England 0 Italy 0

Pens 2 - 4

It was a good run, but it had to come to an end eventually. Let's be honest, we all knew it had gone on longer than anyone expected already. And at least we got to see a traditional tournament favourite.

Yes, there had to be a 0-0. Twenty seven games without one, but then England had a knockout game and that was that.

And the defeat? I find I can't be bothered to write much about that performance, so here's something I wrote about England v Portugal 2006 instead.

It’s just vicious really. Like free range calves, they get to run around the field for a few weeks, but then out come the chainsaws. Discounting the third place playoff, a poor apology for a wooden spoon game which is now beyond our wildest dreams, all the last fifteen games exist entirely for the purpose of inflicting the dreary ennui of defeat on one nation after another.

Children cry themselves to sleep, grown men hide under blankets all day, flags droop sadly on the bonnets of cars. Everywhere around the world. Including qualification, every country in the entire world except one goes through this every four years, every two years if you count the continental cups.

At least England - finally - managed to give us some halfway decent football. With their backs to the wall, they leapt like gazelles and fought like Douglas Bader, as opposed to the other way round like they normally do.

If Ronaldo had deliberately wound Rooney up he may have ended up regretting it, because it just united the team and brought all the arguments about England’s formation to an end. Crouch, stuck with the lone striker role by force of circumstance, played it brilliantly, holding the ball up on his own and tempting the Portuguese defenders into giving away free kicks. He linked up well with Lennon, who was also on by necessity, replacing the injured Beckham. How surprising that England’s finest football should have been played without Beckham, Rooney or Owen. How surprising, and how memorable.

I’m not even going to talk about the penalties, except to point out that Portugal missed two themselves, so the opportunity was there, dammit.

So the Portuguese have a semifinal with France. Good luck, you both have a 25% chance of not ending up feeling like we do.

So that was then. What's changed?

First, there's no third place playoff in the Euros for us not to get into. Second, all that stuff about finally getting some decent football hardly applies. Third, Pirlo didn't have to wind our players up like Ronaldo did, he was just effortlessly better.

But most importantly, there's no great sense of upset. People only really sulk if they have genuine hope in the first place. When the last penalty went in there was almost a sense that it was for the best, that to have beaten Italy on penalties after being comprehensively played off the park would have been so embarrassing, it was actually better to slink off now before Germany got to administer the retribution the rest of Europe was craving.

Steven Gerrard, interviewed afterwards, seemed to feel that there was some kind of unfairness in England being out again on penalties, that they'd been robbed of their just desserts by a capricious fate. It's quite rare to see someone so comprehensively misjudge the national mood. Which is not so much don't come home too soon as come home now, we can't stand it any more,  even the Greeks are laughing at us and we don't know where to look.

So that's the end of England's tournament, and also the complete rout of Groups A and D, but there's still plenty to look forward to. Three more games, and tasty affairs they look as well. Germany v Italy, Pirlo's midfield genius v Gomez and Klose up front. Spain v Portugal, with Ronaldo's solipsistic genius against the ultimate collective. And Germany v Spain in the final. There, I said it. Actually, I said it at the beginning of the tournament. Predicting a final correctly - now that would be a step up from previous blogs.

Day Twelve

England 1 Ukraine 0

France 0 Sweden 2

As Jamie Carragher said on the ITV pre-match panel, football is all lies. More accurately, he said Rafael Benitez used to tell us, football is all lies. Apparently it's something Rafa would say in team talks when he was the Liverpool manager.

He was talking about the way football people talk to the media, and he's quite right. No player would ever say I was the best player out there today in an interview, even if he was. I'm moving to another club for more money in the summer is a phrase that we hear rather less often than Arsene Wenger must do.

You know when they inadvertently tell the truth, because there's always such a fuss. I've got a five-month baby boy now, and if he can't be northern then I'd rather he grows up with a cockney accent than a Bristolian one. Nicky Maynard may have regretted saying that after he left Bristol City for West Ham, especially the day West Ham played us and he had to come back. It's no use saying you were joking in these situations. Some fans aren't as lighthearted as you might think.

No, you should never use your interviews to inform or entertain. Take a leaf out of Alan Shearer's book. I remember his interviews when he was an England player. I've never seen anyone try so hard not to say anything interesting. He answered questions like Alex Stewart batting for a draw. This isn't a situation you can win. Stalemate is your only goal, and flamboyance isn't called for. Straight bat, forward defensive, wait for the next one.

So yes, Carragher was right in the context in which he made the remark, but I think he was right in the wider sense as well. Football is full of lies. It's not just players and managers that lie, it's pundits, journalists, bloggers, everyone. Even the Carragher quote is a paraphrase. When I said more accurately, I didn't actually mean accurately. It's a comparative, not an absolute measure. The devil is in the detail. With football it's rarely the truth, never the whole truth and always something but the truth.

For instance, it seems to have been agreed that the lack of goal line technology deprived Ukraine of a goal against England. The evidence seems clear enough. The replay from above the goal clearly shows the ball over the line before John Terry clears it.

But what you don't see is the offside about five seconds before. It doesn't show up on any of the replays on the BBC website, for instance. But it happened. I saw it at the time. I nearly spilt my Hobgobin shouting offside from my sofa.

It wasn't Devic, the 'scorer', it was Malevskiy. As the ball came out to him from the defence, he was onside by the time you see him on the video clip, but at the moment the pass was made he was off. As good strikers will in that situation, he cut back inside the defender to make himself look onside, successfully fooling the linesman, the referee and the people cutting the BBC highlights reel.

It was ITV that showed the game, and you can see the disallowed goal here on the ITV Player (Euro replay). It happens in the 62nd minute of the game, and the discussion of it happens about 70 minutes in. The commentators talk about the offside as something their backroom boys have picked up on. They talk about showing the proof after the end of the game, which they did. I saw it, and it was conclusive. Just as many of us knew it was during the game.

But the program as uploaded on the Player cuts off at full time, without going to the studio chat afterwards, and just like that the smoking gun is erased from history. We get up this morning, everyone's talking about the disallowed Ukrainian goal and no-one is mentioning the offside. Collina gets interviewed about goal line technology, the Ukrainian media is doing its nut, the English media is pretending it's 2010 all over again and the ball that was over the line was actually Lampard's, and the most important fact isn't coming up.

I'll tell you what it all reminds me of. It reminds me of Trotsky's hat. There's an old story about a picture of Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders taken during the Russian Revolution. They're celebrating something, and Trotsky has just thrown his hat in the air. Years later, when Stalin declared Trotsky an enemy of the revolution, he had Trotsky airbrushed out of the picture. Unfortunately the propaganda people forgot to airbrush the hat, leaving it floating above the Heroes of Socialist Struggle for no apparent reason.

Appropriately, perhaps, I can find no reference to this online. Which makes it sound like I've searched exhaustively, but really just means that Wikipedia's article on Trotsky doesn't contain the word hat (although the word that appears a tedious number of times). It may be a garbled version of a similar story from postwar Czechoslovakia, as reported by Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It may have been garbled by me. Who knows?

The point I've been lumbering towards is that Malevskiy's offside seems to have been airbrushed out of history. It's as if every trace has been removed by some footballing dictator, except for the commentator's reference, left hanging in the air like an upthrown hat.

Except that it hasn't, because we live in the age of the Internet, so it's all over the place. Brooks Peck, for instance, blogging on Yahoo's sports pages (The Ukraine goal against England), has provided a still photo of the crucial moment. Every article on the subject in the mainsteam newspaper websites has several people commenting on the offside underneath. It's all over Facebook and Twitter (god those adverts creep into your vocabulary).

Which raises the question: would Stalin have found it harder to airbrush history if the Internet had been around back then? No, sorry, that's the question for grownups. My question is: what about that John Terry?

For it was Terry that cleared the ball off the line - except he didn't, it was clearly over the line. But in creating a conyincing enough illusion of a clearance to satisfy the goalline official, he stopped the other officials from allowing a goal they should have chalked off for offside.

So John Terry is the minister for justice. Because of him, the right thing happened. My world is shattered.

In other news, England top the group. Sweden beat France two nil, so we end with 7 points and they end with 4. We play Italy, they play Spain. Result.

Day Eight

My good friends Dave and Ann invited me over for today's football. We planned to watch the first game at his house, then stroll down to the Southank club in Southville for the England game.

France 2 Ukraine 0

Thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightening me

Not it seems thunderbolts plural, as I'd imagined for forty years. No, we're talking either one solitary though massively fearsome thunderbolt or the abstract concept of thunder in the form of a bolt. Which is the proto-Germanic word for a strike. All the football news here first.

The thunderbolts were multiple and very physical in Donetsk on Friday. Just as the French were halfway through the Marseillaise the heavens opened, as if in royalist revenge. Circa stadium tonat; around the ground the thunder roars.

It was an impressively orchestrated son et lumiere performance but not really the weather for running round a field, so after three minutes the ref called a halt. By this point about half the electricity in the stadium was coming from the sky. They finally restarted an hour later, for the fans an hour of cowering out of the rain, for the groundstaff an hour of walking round directly under it sticking pitchforks in the pitch. Why they weren't considered at risk from lightning I don't know.

ITV had to fill, and considering their limitations I have to say they rose to the occasion. Adrian Chiles went round the panel asking each of them about their rain holdup experiences, so Gordon Strachan filled us in on the incidence of snow in Aberdeen and Gareth Southgate told us about the Liverpool Villa game that was delayed due to an off-target parachutist. Neither were exactly on topic, but when you consider that ITV presenters never normally have to talk for more than thirty seven seconds before Adrian Chiles is saying see you after the adverts, sorry about the shouty Italian man but that's how they pay my wages, it was a bravura performance. Then they showed us the England France highlights again, made sure we were up to speed on how attractive young French and Ukrainian women look in macintoshes, and before we knew it the game had resumed.

By this time we were stuck into beer and pizza in the casa Hobson, and to be honest the first half rather faded into the background. We decided to watch the second half at the Southbank, and walked down at halftime. We made it before they were due to start again, but by the time we'd got the amiably relaxed man running the place to understand that the rain in Ukraine had fallen mainly on the game and turn over to ITV we'd missed both the goals.

There seems to have been a sense that Menez, scorer of the first goal, should have been sent off in the first half. Maybe so, but the action we saw was mostly dominated by France. As well as scoring the second goal, Cabaye hit the post with the keeper stranded. The highlights package had one decent Ukrainian effort, but Lloris saved well enough from Shevchenko.

It was a shame for the home fans, who must have hoped for a repeat of the Sweden game. They may not have realised Sweden were about to blow another lead somewhere else.

England 3 Sweden 2

By the time England came on we were sat down, the beer was flowing and everything was in place. Andy Carroll opened the scoring towards the bottom of the second pint. And after all our pisstaking it was a move made in Liverpool. Gerrard crossed it to exactly the height of Carroll's head plus his jump, and Carroll got ahead of his marker. As the ball came down he rose to meet it, simultaneously twisting every muscle in his body to squeeze their collective potential energy into his neck.

At precisely the right moment he instantaneously converted all the potential energy to kinetic, and his head flew forward like a piston. Every last drop of ATP in his body fired its inertial load into the ball, which flew into the bottom corner, while Carroll himself dissolved into a puddle of lactic acid with a grin and a ponytail in it.

He headed the ball really hard, is the point. The biochemical metaphor may have come out a little mangled, but however it was achieved it was one of those goals you know you'll see again and again.

The contrast with the winning goal could hardly have been greater. Walcott took the ball down the right, and crossed to Wellbeck. It came behind him, so couldn't be whacked. Not to be denied, Wellbeck dangled a delicate little heel into the path of the ball at the exact angle needed to deflect it round the pursuing defender, under the unsuspecting keeper and into the net. The two goals exemplified the contrasting virtues of the scorers. Strength where it was needed, delicacy where strength would have been unavailing, precision in the highest measure from both.

The middle goal was a conjuring trick. Sweden thought they'd cleared the English corner, and were charging out to close down Walcott just outside the box, but somehow he found the balance between a chip and a drive, getting the ball up and over the defenders with enough speed to be under the bar before the unsighted keeper had grasped what was happening. He was moving to his left, but the swerve deceived him and left him flat on his back, the fall guy to Walcott's tricky rapier thrust. Touche.

It wasn't all good news. We managed some pretty comic defending, after our solid lines in the French game. The first Swedish goal at least had the excuse that we'd cleared our lines, it was just that the ball came straight back in. Glen Johnson, having played Olsson onside, had then got himself in the way, and was unlucky to deflect the ball in twice. If he hadn't been there Olsson would have knocked it in anyway. Mind you he'd have been offside, but then that's the way things go sometimes. At least we'd had some semblance of marking.

For their second goal we abandoned zonal marking and man marking, in favour of the rarely used stand-and-watch system. Maybe they were just overawed by the majestic fullness of Mellberg's fine Scandinavian beard, but they'd let him score twice in ten minutes.

We mustn't overly carp though. They scored, they let two in and could have crumbled, would normally have done so in the past, but instead they kept calm, carried on and scored two more.

So now all our sinews are stiffened, and everyone is imitating the action of a tiger. Roll on the hosts.  We're gonna score one more than you ...

Thanks to Dave and Ann for their excellent hospitality. And thanks to the Southbank for the beer and screen.

Day Four

I'm going to let you in on a secret. I never enjoy England games.

There, I've said it. It's the tension, you see.  If you're behind, you're miserable. If you're ahead you're terrified. If it's nil nil you're frustrated. You're only actually happy if you're way ahead. The last time I really enjoyed an England game at a major tournament was the Denmark game in 2002. The last time before that was Holland in 1996.

Most games are like going on a first date with indigestion. The hope that things might go well mingles awkwardly with the memory of all the times it didn't, plus you can't finish your burger.  To be honest, I think I've gone a bit odd with it.

England 1 France 1

I can't see the point in a match report about a game you all watched, so instead here are some facts.

FACT ONE: Lloris, the French goalkeeper, is also their captain. He is not to be confused with a loris, which is a tiny, tiny monkey from the rainforests of south Asia.

One Lloris

Two lorises

A loris would never be accepted into the French national side as a goalkeeper, as they don't speak French so couldn't organise the defence at corners. Also, they are normally found in small groups of three or four, and would struggle to adapt to the squad system.

This separation of loris world and Lloris world cuts both ways.  A Lloris could never survive as an insectivore, and his inability to conceal himself with leaves and twigs would leave him vulnerable to predators.

You can tell how important the distinction between a loris and a Lloris is from the fact that I've imported two images to illustrate it. The last time my readers got even one image out of me it was an Abrams tank on its way to Baghdad.


FACT TWO: This fact came courtesy of @Pundamentalism on Twitter.

Fact: It's easier to hit Joleon Lescott's forehead than it is to get a shot on target

This may be why Peter Crouch hasn't been selected, as his forehead is both smaller and further away.

FACT THREE: 15 of the 22 starters play their club football in the Premiership. Both goal scorers play for Manchester City, as well as the goalkeeper who let in the French goal. For which he was unfairly blamed in my opinion. If your two defensive lines run into each other you've got one line not two, and one line can easily be shot through.

FACT FOUR: Scott Parker is the most English looking man in the world. More precisely, he's the most Londonish of all Londoners. If ever anyone lost their virginity on Clapham Common it was him. To Amy Winehouse, I expect, in the back of a Reliant Robin. I see from Wikipedia that he was born in Lambeth. He probably stood straight up and did the walk.

FACT FIVE: According to the rules of football, referees are supposed to make decisions by applying well-defined criteria consistently.

Amazing, but true. Of all my facts, the hardest to deduce purely from observation.

Sweden 1 Ukraine 2

By the time this one started most of us were too drained by the previous three hours to care, but it turned out to be an excellent game.

Ukraine play in yellow, so the stadium was mainly yellow as well. Sweden normally play in yellow  themselves, but it's customary to defer to your hosts in the matter of colours, so they played in bluey black instead. Their shirts still had a yellow stripe though, and their fans were in yellow.

Grass under floodlights is yellowy green. To summarise the colour balance, it was like watching a thousand canaries fly through a field of buttercups to the sound of Coldplay. After the emotional rigours of the England game it was quite soothing.

Sweden as a team depend very much on Zlatan Ibrahimovic. We were treated to a closeup of his boots, and learnt that they were sponsored. I'm not surprised by that, I'm no longer surprised by any absurdities of that kind, but I did notice they had Zlatan written on them. Now I can't claim to have lived a life entirely without bombast, none of us can, but I have to say I've never felt the remotest urge to put my name on my shoes. Either his mum did it so he wouldn't get them mixed up with someone else's, or he's a very vain young man indeed.

He's a genuinely good player though. He hit the post with a first half header he should have buried, but then scored soon after the restart. It was Yarmolenko's poor defensive header that gave him the chance. It went straight to Kallstrom, who knocked it back to Ibrahimovic on the six yard line. He'd been marked two seconds earlier, but now he had a free shot. One nil.

Ukraine were angry, because they'd had a man down at the time. The convention that play stops for injury seems to have almost entirely broken down in western Europe now. Maybe it survives in the Ukrainian league, where most of the national team play, maybe it's just annoying to give up a goal.

It didn't matter, as Ibrahimovic's act turned out to be the warmup for the Shevchenko show. He'd missed a chance in the first half as well, but three minutes after Sweden scored he equalised. The commentators had just been talking about substituting him for being a bit old, but he looked young enough when he got ahead of Mellberg to get his head on Gusev's cross. It was a relief for Gusev after some earlier errors, and it certainly got the home crowd singing. Look at the stars, look how they shine for you ...

A few minutes later, he scored again. This time it was a corner. He peeled off his unheeding marker with no apparent trouble and fired a sharp header between Lustig and the post. On reflection Sweden may have felt it was a mistake to have Ibrahimovic marking him, but it does give us a rather neat narrative arc.

The goals drove the managers into a touchline frenzy. Watching them flail about in adjacent technical areas they seemed the perfect odd couple for a sitcom. A Swedish schoolteacher forced by circumstances to share a flat with a Ukrainian truck driver. Gene Wilder and James Gandolfini would be perfect.

Sweden had several good chances before the end. Ibrahimovic was unlucky, as his shot bounced back off the keeper before he'd had time to move. Elmander and Mellberg both missed in injury time.

It finished 2-1 though. It was the result the tournament needed, to give the home fans hope. Now we have to hope England can take it all away.

Secretes and lies

Firstly, some technical issues have come up in the course of writing these first few posts, and I thought you should know.

1. Don't drop a bog roll on your laptop keyboard. If you do, it turns on caret browsing. Then you have to Google caret browsing to find out what the hell it is.
2. If you come here and the latest post is poorly capitalised, full of typos, bizarrely off key and full of mismatched and incoherent thoughts, it's because I've accidentally hit Publish rather than Save while I'm making notes during a game. Come back later, and the typos and capitals will be fixed.
3. No, the heading isn't an example of this.

Gary and Harry

They had Harry Redknapp on the BBC panel yesterday, and Gary Lineker took advantage of the halftime break to do an impromptu interview with him. He asked him all the questions we've been wanting answers to, and Redknapp told him everything we wanted to know.

Is the universe infinite? It's finite but unbounded. Is there a God? in the sense that there's a Captain America, but not in the sense that there's a Scunthorpe. Why do we only realise how to live when we're too old to do much about it? It's a combination of biological inevitability and the illusion of hindsight. Where's the bog roll gone? It's gone wherever it rolled to when it bounced off the laptop.

None of those subjects actually came up. The real conversation was more like this. Did you know Hodgson was going to get the England job? No I didn't, I heard about it through the media like everyone else. Were you approached? No I wasn't. Would you have taken it? It would have been hard to refuse, but I like being a club manager and in some ways I was relieved not to be asked.

The highlights are here (Harry Redknapp would have accepted England job).

All of this raises questions, most pressingly how much of that is true? If it's all true, if the FA never discussed the job with Redknapp and didn't even tell him he was out of the running, if it never occurred to them to send him a courtesy text to the effect that Hodgson was about to get it, then that's a funny way to treat a manager you might well be looking to in a few years.

Don't forget, Redknapp was all over the media as the people's choice. Most people wanted him to get it, and thought he would. If they really didn't acknowledge him at all that's actually bloody rude, to him and to us. Surely they aren't that incompetent? Are they?

Gabby and Roy

After the game Gabby Logan talked to Roy Hodgson (Roy Hodgson talks about Rio Ferdinand's Euro 2012 omission). Ideally, he'd have been called Rabbie, but you can't have everything. If only he was fatter, or poorly dressed.

You all know what it was about. There were no other questions of comparable urgency. The BBC only bothered spelling it out in the link for the benefit of future historians. It was about Ferdinand, and by implication about Terry. Logan avoided his name like an actor trying not to mention the Scottish play, but it loomed all the larger for its absence.

Hodgson said he chose other players over Ferdinand at first, and when he had to get a replacement for Cahill was looking for someone "at the lower end of the squad", and didn't want to bring Ferdinand in just to put him on the bench.

 He looked like someone in a hole, and he certainly kept digging. By the end, he'd managed to say that the very suggestion that the player he took was as good as the player he didn't take was an insult.

Frankly, I wonder about all of this. I wonder about Hodgson's visible discomfort and Redknapp's lack of it. I wonder if the first interview was really that impromptu. I wonder if 'footballing reasons' can have the narrow definition implied. Hodgson seems like an honest man, and he certainly sweats a lot when he's facing tough questions (see?). Redknapp didn't sweat at all that I could see, but then he wouldn't.

I like Redknapp. You know when you like someone because you're happy to see them, and I'm always pleased to see him on the TV because he's good value. Liking someone is an emotional response, not a character reference. Hodgson seems a bit prim. This is no bad thing in the world he moves in, but he's got none of Harry's roguishness at all, and we do like a rogue. Especially a dry one.

There are, shall we way, alternative explanations for events. Perhaps the FA offered Redknapp the job, but he turned it down to stay at Spurs, where he seems happy. As a courtesy, he would have agreed not to undermine Hodgson by showing him up as the second choice. It wouldn't have seemed a huge evasion compared to all the other evasions he was accused of at the time (he said, carefully).

So Hodgson comes in, and the first situation he's faced with is the John Terry one. Ferdinand, like Wayne Bridge, declines to share a squad with Terry, and Hodgson, like Capello, decides that Terry is more central to his plans. Because racism is more embarrassing than shagging, he lies about it. Because he's not naturally a bad man, he feels (and looks) damned uncomfortable while doing it.

Of course, the version both managers have given us might be factually correct in all respects. I've no evidence for anything I've just said. Look at the clips and judge for yourselves.