Among the thugs

1. I can’t remember exactly where it is but there’s a great moment 
somewhere in Beckett where someone launches their boot ‘among’ 
someone else’s testicles. Christopher Ricks used to cite this as an 
example of Beckett’s brilliant use of dead-seeming language. Wayne 
Rooney probably isn’t much of a Beckettian (or a Ricksian, come to 
that) but he certainly knows how to put his foot among an opponent’s 
goolies.

2. When was the World Cup last an all-European affair at the semi-
final stage? I'll have a nerdy look at the reference books later, but 
off the top of my head I can’t remember when. Does this make it less 
interesting? Probably it does, a bit.

3. I now want France to win for a whole set of reasons. The non-
footballing ones are that they are the most racially mixed team left 
in the competition, and also that they are the oldest. These days I 
find it important to support the oldies. The footballing reason for 
supporting them is that they come closer than anyone else to playing 
the beautiful game. And then there is Zidane, who is both a 
footballing reason and a non-footballing one.

4. Footynomics: Portugal v England was the third example of a 
smaller, poorer country beating a richer, more populous one. But it 
was on penalties, so I’m arguing that it doesn’t count.

Note that in one sense England’s penalties were better than 
Portugal’s. Two out of four of theirs missed the goal altogether; all 
four of England’s were on target. Normally that would be enough to 
win you a shoot-out. But Riccardo guessed the right way to move every 
time, even on the penalty Hargreaves scored and (if memory serves) on 
the one Carragher put in and then had to retake. So perhaps ‘guessed’ 
is the wrong verb. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a keeper move the 
right way on five consecutive penalties. This makes it official: God hates the England football team.

Comments

[Gary Naylor]

No England's penalties were much worse than Portugal's because they arrived at a pace and, critically, a height, that gave the keeper a 50% chance of saving them. Given that he he was watching their eyes and had no doubt tapes of the takers' previous penalties running through his head, that percentage is probably halved to 25%. And so, 1 from 4 is what we got.

Whilst we have all been told ad nauseam that England practised penalties, did anyone coach them? Surely one of the thirty or forty successful Germans over the years could have been prevailed upon and what about Matthew Le Tissier (49 successes out of 50 when I last looked)? Penalties are not a lottery, as England prove yet again.

[Miranda]

Didn't Lehmann go the right way for all five? I wouldn't be surprised because he spends his evenings studying every penalty ever taken by every possible opponent, making copious notes on their twitches. That was presumably what those pieces of paper were which Kahn kept producing - Sorin: Nase zuchend = geh LINKS. Can't imagine Robinson making notes. Can't imagine him writing. As ever, it's the anti-intellectualism of the English that's to blame.

[Vish Subramanian]

1982, I believe was the last time we had 4 Euro semi-finalists. Brazil and Argentina have been in every single final since.

[Miranda]

Another reason for rooting for France: Thuram's elegant essays on racism in Le Monde.

[Brían]

Rooney would make a pretty good Pozzo to Peter Crouch’s Lucky in “Waiting for Godot”, maybe a mimed version. Don’t think he’d be right for Mr. Rooney (a bemused, blind, affectionate old man, struggling to contain his wife’s growing sense of panic and dread) in “All that Fall” though. Not yet anyway.

[Nick Lezard]

It's in Mercier and Camier. The testicles, that is. Nice blog, John.