Something For The Weekend (78)

Now that Summer’s season is but a memory and Autumn seems more about decay than mellow fruitfulness, it hardly needs the sort of TV footage we have been seeing lately, to find yourself dreading some future hard rain that’s a-gonna fall. What with hurricanes and earthquakes supplying a regular parade of painful broken bodies on the news, it became easy to concur with Woody Allen, when he said life is divided between the horrible and the miserable. If you add in the constant stream of propaganda about global warning and the possibility of a ‘bird flu’ pandemic there seems rather a lot be concerned about. They say that when you have been in the mad house long enough, you no longer notice the screams and similarly the death toll from Iraq, has been drowned in the white noise of horror-fatigue.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been asked, directly or indirectly, why, with so much wrong with the world, I expend so much time worrying about the trivialities of football and it is sometimes hard to find a convincing answer but with so much happening this week, I could only conclude with a resounding: ‘Because it is so much more manageable!’. Pondering the iniquities of Robbie Savage, is so much easier than working out why thousands of Muslims got killed or mutilated in the middle of Ramadan. All people’s have one thing in common – we all ask our Gods the same questions. So I gave up pondering the uncertainties of why some victims of the tsunami ended up with eleven cooking-pots, while the fund for Kashmir started at zero and decided to concentrate on my role as an economic unit, while trying to keep myself cheerful by contemplating the delights of actually seeing an England team play quite well and with some much welcomed and unfamiliar verve. All courtesy of a result produced by another team in an entirely different group.

We’ll now have to forgive Holland for the penalty that Platt never got from that fat bloke or Gazza’s broken cheekb