Dr Gloom

3 pm next saturday. balls, i was afraid of that. supposed to be flying to spain then. flight is blatantly getting switched

nice read from simon kuper in the ft England’s elimination ritual http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3ccc82d0-7e12-11...144feabdc0.html “It was disbelief,” England’s midfielder Alan Ball summed up the mood in the team’s dressing room after West Germany knocked them out of the World Cup in 1970. England’s quadrennial elimination is one of the country’s few surviving national rituals. It may happen in Port Elizabeth today: England need to beat Slovenia to be certain of reaching the second round. It is time to establish whether, on this occasion, each phase of the ritual has been respected. Phase one: England enter the World Cup certain they will win it. Alf Ramsey, the only English manager to win the trophy, forecast the victory of 1966. But his prescience becomes less impressive when you realise that almost every England manager forecast victory in the World Cup, including Ramsey both times he didn’t win. Fabio Capello, England’s manager at least until this afternoon, observed this ritual. “My team, the England team, we can beat all the teams,” he said last month. Like all his predecessors, Capello spoke for a confident nation. Phase two: the campaign is upended by a freakish piece of bad luck that the English conclude could only happen to them. Here the current campaign breaks with ritual. Normally, the freakish bad luck happens in a later round: the tummy bug that felled keeper Gordon Banks in 1970, Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” in 1986, or David Beckham’s red card in 1998. This time, it came only 40 minutes into England’s tournament: the soft US shot that trickled through Robert Green’s hands into the net. Phase three: England lose to a former wartime enemy. In five of their last seven World Cups, they went out against either Germany or Argentina. The matches fit seamlessly into the British tabloid view of history, except for the outcome. England’s defeats to Germany, because of their grandiose yet repetitious character, are tragicomic. By contrast, elimination against a ski-mad country of 2m people would be merely comic (if you aren’t English). To honour ritual, England need to revive national hubris by triumphing against Slovenia, before losing to Germany in the second round this weekend, ideally on penalties. Phase four: the nation decides the team is spoiled, overpaid and unpatriotic. For some players “the triple lion badge of England could be three old tabby cats”, lamented the Daily Express in 1966, and possibly again tomorrow. The fan who wandered into the English changing-room and castigated the players for drawing against Algeria on Friday night felt the same way. “Most of them didn’t even try,” Pavlos Joseph said afterwards. However, these ritual denunciations are coming too early. By tradition, English hubris swells to unfathomable levels before being punctured. Phase five: a scapegoat is found. Usually this only happens post-elimination, but the current squabble between Capello and his ousted captain John Terry is best understood as early jockeying to assign the role. Capello runs the greater risk. Ritually, England’s scapegoat is never an outfield player who has “battled” all match. Even if the player directly caused the elimination by missing a penalty, he is a “hero”. The ideal scapegoat is either a perfidious foreigner – Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo in 2006 – or an English management figure, such as chief selector Joe Mears in 1958. Capello’s bad luck is to be both foreigner and management figure. Phase six: England enter the next World Cup certain they will win it. It’s widely believed that England’s eliminations cause misery. In fact, the ritual provides comfort, by drawing the nation together, and connecting English past with present. That’s why it’s essential that the ritual sequence be respected. Here’s to England-Germany this weekend. Simon Kuper is co-author of Why England Lose: & Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained (HarperSport, £7.99)

future newcastle coach?

i'm not sure england have the collective mental strength required to beat the germans. i can see a glorious failure on the cards to them and if not them, to the argies.

if we get past the krauts, when's our quarter final fixture due to be played?

if we get past germany does anyone know the date of our quarter final?

shocking miss tbh. martins' shocker was typical of his one on ones when he was with us too

feeling those wheels craig. nice

old school nikes all the way for me. i'm a trainer junky, have got about 12 pairs on rotation at the moment. all about the dunks, air force ones, old schol air max 87s, 90s, 95s and 97s and jordans ... always in loud, bold colours. a few of the colours snd designs i'n wearing at the moment:

gerrard and lampard simply can't play together in the middle of a 4-4-2. t's been tried and tested. in fact, isn't that the front 6 that sven used in the last world cup?

spot on.

he looked fearess when he burst on the scene a few years back. he looks as petrified as the rest of them when they pull on englnd shirt now.

i thought he cut a across it a bit to fair - bit of a sliced shot but a great goal. agreed about gazza. he's a once in a generation player. shame he fucked up his career. none of the current lot could touch him when he was in his pomp.

held to a draw by the mighty algerians. this was all so predictable. those saying we were going to do well must be feeling a bit silly now england have reverted to type. there just isn't anything remotely fun about watching them. rooney, lampard, gerrard and heskey all awful. why the fuck is heskey playing? oh yeah, he does all that good work for the team that apparently outweighs the fact that he can't shoot, pass or control the ball. i predict a laboured victory over slovenia then a glorious failure in the knockout stages - either a pen shoot out defeat or an 'unjust' sending off, so the majority of deluded england fans can say we were cheated.

i'm for the england team but against the players

apparently it's a black thing. they've started doing it at the rugby too as it really fucks off the boers. sounds like a giant swarm of wasps. annoying. but then you would probably say the same if you got stuck next to one of the english trumpters belting out the great escape.

Really slick. oh no, the treads come under pun attack. Cap it off before it becomes crude. you're trying to drum this into something aren't you? could be a right barrel of laughs

Agreed. Thought Irelands' missus was gonna be the most dislikeable, but Cisse's wife is a bitch. Nicola T seems cock mad. So would you be if you looked like Rocky Balboa in the 15th round every time the teas not ready.

feelign good. about to jet off to la for a couple of day's work before 4 nights in vegas for a stag do

Serioulsy mate, I respect your point of view, but what DO Israel have to do to get your condemnation? i thought the timing of the 2008 assualt on gaza was outrageous, the large scale civilian casualties were shocking and could have been avoided if the strikes had taken place at night instead of during the day. but again, i can see two sides. gaza had launched over 50 rocket attacks into israel in the days leading up to the strikes. what was israel to do? just allow hamas to continue firing rockets? it has the legitamacy to defend its borders. if welsh separatists suddenly started firing rockets into herefordshire, i'm pretty sure the english military would act too. i think the way israel acts (or often reacts) can be excessive and it is rightly criticsed. but i also find much of the criticism against it excessive. i also think israel shot itself in the foot by killing those those 8 or so people recently on the boat. when they are provoked, they act with a heavy hand. that is regretful but there is no doubt to me that they were provoked. the people on that boat knew what they were doing. It's disingenuous to blame Hamas for the breakdown of the tahdia. Israel were the first to draw weapons. israel withdrew from gaza in 2005 but hamas still continued to fire rockets into israel. hamas wants the violence to continue. they don't want a peaceful solution, they want the end of israel. yes i have sympathy for the innocent palestinians that are caught in the middle but israel is fighting a war against an enemy that doesn't recignise its right to exist. it's worth noting also that while idf attacks on gaza often end up by killing innocent civilans, they target hamas military targets. hamas suicide bombers and rocket attacks only target innocent civilians.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs...gazaimports.pdf That's the full list of what's allowed in and that is it. That's not propaganda. Saying the ships could have docked in Israel or Egypt and the stuff would have been allowed in is however. Because a lot of stuff wouldn't have been. That's stuff which is needed to help the Palestinians get back to some semblance of normal life. Can you give me a good reason why tinned fruit should be banned by the way? It's a fucking disgrace and I'm ashamed this country is party to it. Also outlined here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7545636.stm i agree that not letting a lot of basic stuff through is disgraceful. but you can also see that they do let a lot of basic food supplies in from the link you posted. i think another big criticism of the likud policy on gaza is that by restricting so much stuff into the strip they are contributing to the terrible living conditions and only adding to the anti-israeli sentiment there and increasing sympathy for hamas.

Serioulsy mate, I respect your point of view, but what DO Israel have to do to get your condemnation? i thought the timing of the 2008 assualt on gaza was outrageous, the large scale civilian casualties were shocking and could have been avoided if the strikes had taken place at night instead of during the day. but again, i can see two sides. gaza had launched over 50 rocket attacks into israel in the days leading up to the strikes. what was israel to do? just allow hamas to continue firing rockets? it has the legitamacy to defend its borders. if welsh separatists suddenly started firing rockets into herefordshire, i'm pretty sure the english military would act too. i think the way israel acts (or often reacts) can be excessive and it is rightly criticsed. but i also find much of the criticism against it excessive. i also think israel shot itself in the foot by killing those those 8 or so people recently on the boat. when they are provoked, they act with a heavy hand. that is regretful but there is no doubt to me that they were provoked. the people on that boat knew what they were doing.

there is propaganda on both sides, that's the point. i think the idf used excessive force but unlike many, i don't always see israel as playing the role of the bad guy. there are two sides to this story.

Lefties in general love knocking Israel while giving Muslims a bit of an easy ride - I think because they see right wing anti-muslim feeling as something to be opposed. I on the other hand see religious fuckwittery on both sides which I have no respect for so tend to call cuntery on both sides (or at least I try to). yeah, that's what i'm getting at. i'm a liberal but i find it ironic that israel is always the bad guy and a lot of the arab nations - and the islamofascists within them - get an easy ride by many lefties that don't want to come across like they read the daily mail. Classic strawman stuff tbh. Avoiding the issue at hand. well, i've already said many times in this thread that i'm no israel apologist - i'm as critical as the likud's policies as anyone. but i do find the somewhat hysterical response to some of israel's actions to be overdone, especially the latest incident with the flotilla. israel is a sovereign state, a civilised western democracy and quite the opposite to many of the states that surround it that for some reason the left in the uk often sympathise with. I sympathise with the people of Palestine and what is being done to them in the name of Israeli 'security'. I don't sympathise with states such Iran, Syria, Egypt etc. You don't seem to be able to recognise the difference between the two. israel and egypt have set up the blockade around gaza precisely to stop the flow of weapons from iran and syria into gaza to help hamas militants continue to fire rockets into israel. israel allows humanitarian aid through. the reason the idf soldiers boarded the ship was top check for weapons. if iot had docked, like the rest, the aid would have been got through and we wouldn't be having this discussion. As I've already pointed out to you in this thread their definition of humanitarian aid is pretty strict. They allow medical supplies but don't allow building materials, educational supplies and so on. Keep spewing out the propaganda though. talking of propaganda, isn't it strange that reuters decided to crop a pic of a man on the flotilla standing over an idf soldier armed with a knife, given the contoversy over whether the men on the flotilla were armed? http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/06/08/re...test=latestnews