Albion City Rovers move joint topside!
16/06/10 03:28
The football might not be that entertaining but at least we've got Footcall...
Day 5 of the World Cup and I think it's fair to say it's still yet to kick off. We've had a bit of quality from the bossy Germans but the Italians last night along with the Portuguese and the Brazilians didn't really set the world alight as we thought they might. Anyway it's still early days and the first games of the Group Stages are often a cagey affair whilst the players bed in their brand new Nikes, you know the silver ones with the orange backs (are they giving those boots out on the gate or what?) It seems that teams are more concerned about losing rather than gunning for the three points, hence all these tame draws. We've had 14 games with only 23 goals and that's about 10 less than the last World Cup. Maybe it's the ball, maybe it's the altitude, maybe it's the "let's get 10 men behind the ball" approach some teams are adopting who can tell but it's not adding up to many goals and as such a few Footcallers have a little off in their predictions. Mr Paul Wakefield predicted Brazil would romp home 7-0 against the WC minnows, North Korea, or Korea DPR, as we should call them. Well the team in red certainly gave the samba boys a good game and maybe just the experience saw them through.
This afternoon Portugal played Ivory Coast in a bore draw 0-0 which actually wasn't that bad other than the lack of goals. Ronaldo, probably the best player in the world, hit the crossbar and the one armed Drogba, probably the best player in the world, came close at the final moments of the game. What's more amazing is that not a single person predicted this would be 0-0... quite remarkable!
Game one of the day was Slovakia v New Zealand and the Slovaks took the lead with a neat header and looked to be cruising for the three points. No doubt many of you were also thinking this is it, 3 points are in the bag for me too, but you weren't counting on the team from the Southern Hemisphere (where I myself have played my best football) heading home an equalizer in the ninety bloody third minute! I did have a few emails this afternoon full of much stronger expletives over that result! On behalf of the fourth official and Footcall I can only apologise that the whistle didn't get blown a few seconds earlier. The dopey defender, Reid, took his shirt off in celebration and promptly got booked for it, let's hope that doesn't come back to haunt him later.
And so to the Footcall league...Movers and shakers today include Paul "Up The Irons" Firmston who moves top alongside Jon Hill, nice little 7 pointer for Paul today, surely this is the highest West Ham have come to the top of a table in a long time? Martin Arscott is showing some Ballacks as he moves up to 5th and Ryan Smith does well too. Scott Ellis the Gooner has had a good day, in fact he and Zhaomin Meng were the only players today to have Brazil to win 2-1 because everyone had them to win by a much bigger margin but the goal fest never came. I'm happy for those that got their first three pointer today like Adam Jones, Sam Wozny, Aaron "Gary Neville's biggest fan" Harden, Robert Hatch and David Bourne rising from the flames. However for those of you losing faith in your predictions think about this, 24 hours ago Darren Arscott was languishing in 113th place (rank last) on 1 solitary point. A day later he's now up into 73rd on 6 points up there with the likes of RotorSwift, Killing Time, Clarky's Dreamers, EP Monchenglandbach and the dynamic duo of Swinging GIblets & Chris Hollins is Beautiful. Hey Darren... maybe if the Group Stages ran until Christmas you might make it on to the first page of the leaderboard ;-)
Cheers for now - BRB!
Dj