Despite the title of this blog I do occasionally, with varying degrees of reluctance, get off the sofa. Yesterday I went to Lord’s to watch England lose to Sri Lanka in a one-day cricket international. After the upsetting victory over Trinidad and Tobago there was something deeply soothing about it: the polite crowds converging on St John’s Wood, carrying their cool boxes of lunch and clinking bags of booze; the bored wives and girlfriends with their precautionary paperbacks to read during the match; the men listening to the radio commentary while watching the match, in order not to miss a nuance; the way England slowly and inevitably slid to defeat.
A good day out. I’d forgotten, though, how physically demanding it can be to spend a day at the cricket. I met my mates at quarter past ten and left the ground at quarter to seven. Eight and a half hours in baking sun; it wasn’t the Pamplona bull run but it was still pretty taxing.
A consequence of this is that I don’t anything particularly contentful to say about the football, since to watch a game in the highlights package is not to have any idea about what the match was actually like. I’ve sat through games that put the crowd into a narcoletpic trance, which look like all-action thrillers when boiled down to three minutes of clips. You also can’t tell anything about the balance of a game; a team can have had 80 per cent of the dominance, but look even-stevens or worse when it’s boiled down to a few unrepresentative moments.
So, all in all, I can’t comment on either Ghana’s magnificent victory or the Battle of Kaiserslauten, other than to point out that on the Xbox360 simulation mentioned in an earlier post, the USA were supposed to beat Italy 3-2. Kaiserslauten’s population is one-third American, according to the Beeb, so this was virtually a home game for the USA. The Italians do tend to feel that other teams get ‘helped’ in the World Cup—in fact, they never shut up about it, with particular reference to the game they lost to South Korea in the last World Cup—so I wonder how they’ll react to the fact that the USA had two men sent off and a goal disallowed.
On the way to the cricket I was reading Emmanuel Carrère’s biography of Philip K. Dick. Favourite fact so far: Dick once got 17 rejection letters in a single day.
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