Astonishing though it must be to the great minds behind the selling of
the tournament, the FIFA Fussball—Weltmeisterschaft Deutschland 2006 ™
has not achieved 100 per cent market penetration in the Lanchester
household. I am at times outnumbered 3 to 1 by people as keen not to
watch the football as I am to watch it. So I did what a man has to do
and bought a new tv for the bedroom.
It’s a widescreen tv. By this I don’t mean a pimptastic 60 inch Sony or
anything, just a normal-sized telly in a 16:9 aspect ration. And here’s
the thing: the 16:9 screen is a zillion times better for watching
football on than the old-school 4:3 tv. The main differences that you
can see who the player is passing to, and what his options were; you
can see what the players who haven’t got the ball are doing, instead of
being focussed solely on the man in possession. You can watch the whole
trajectory of passes, instead of scanning around as the ball flies. I
couldn’t believe how much better it is.
I thought this was a blinding revelation, but it turns out that if you
say this to someone who has a widescreen tv, they stick their tongue
under their lower lip, assume a vacant expression, and say, ‘Durr’. In
other words they regard it as a famous self-evident truth that
widescreen tvs are much better for watching football. But the thing is,
I don’t think people do know that. Certainly I’d have bought one years
ago if the adverts for them, instead of wanking on about lifestyles of
the rich and famous, and pretending that the pictures are better, which
they aren’t, had just said, ‘buy one if you like football, because you
can see where the ball goes’. A bit like Kingley Amis’s character
Garnet Bowen, who dreams of marketing his own brand of beer with the slogan: ‘Bowen’s
beer. It makes you drunk.’
Other business. As I said in yesterday’s post, despite being very fond of France I
wanted them to lose to Togo on the grounds that this would somehow be
good for them. I asked a Scottish friend if this was similar to the way
people north of the border react to the England team. He said: ‘No,
it’s more that we hate you.’
Spain v France, Netherlands v Portugal, Brazil v Ghana; the round of 16 should be fantastic. I’m going to Disneyland now (?!?!) with my elder son and may not post til Monday. On the
other hand if I find a computer I’ll post tomorrow. The excitement is
hard to take.
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