25/06/2006 @18:39:51 ^19:33:04

Beckham scores; immediately throws up everywhere

Okay if you thought it couldn't get any worse than endless posts about Doom maps, now I'm going to talk about the football!

To be honest I'm a bit sick of it. I get really excited when the world cup comes around, and watch every match I can. About halfway through I realise I'm bored of sitting there for 90 minutes watching the same damn thing over and over. I really should just watch the highlights. I'm certainly not doing all those tables again, that was to practise HTML and the actual information is readily available elsewhere.

But who'd be an England fan? I mean, you spend nearly the whole match utterly frustrated at your team's incompetence "Oh god, he's given it away AGAIN!" "No idiot the goal is here, not up on the roof" "AARGH it's gone IN!" etc and I haven't even mentioned penalties. I must admit I hope England don't win the competition, mainly because nobody would ever shut up about it, I mean they still go on about 1966 like it was yesterday. One little tidbit Motson came out with was that England only played Ecuador once before today, and won 2-0. But that was in 1970! So the players are all different, the managers are all different, everything is different, you can't make any kind of prediction based off of that.

Who'd be a fan at all? It raises an important point, the fact that you can't be a football fan without having to support some team or other. Nobody can accept that you would just prefer to be a neutral and watch some decent play. Nobody can accept that you have enough of your own failures already and don't wish to allow the failure of your team in a sports match to make it worse. You don't have any control over the result, after all. Is that so unreasonable? Get this - even I can't think of a reason why England playing badly is my fault!

Of course, at least these are internationals, people are playing for their countries or whatever instead of for money. Club football is essentially two teams of hired mercenaries playing for the club that can pay them the highest wage. The club with the most money gets the best mercenaries and thus wins everything. And I'm not on about recent times, it's been like that at least since the Premier League started and certainly since Euro 96. It's just business now. I mean I thought the point of it was that instead of actually going to war with your neighbouring town, you send your champions to battle with theirs. But how can they be "your" champions when they're from Timbuctoo and Oompaloompaland...

Still, now I've annoyed myself and probably ended up looking like an idiot I'll shut up and go watch the rest of the tournament, after which I'll be so sick of football it'll take me four years to get over it.