Not complaining about that, but I wonder if the club and the management of County Mall can come to some arrangement for the football club to set up a stall in one of the many empty units in the town centre for a couple of weeks.  Perhaps the ever-resourceful Bob O’Brien can broker some sort of deal?

Any rent would be better than none, and it would generate extra sales for the club.  The only problem I can see is that of getting stock in faster than it flies off the shelves.

I discovered something myself too.  After listening to the commentary of the whole game on Radio 5 live, I rushed downstairs to see if I could catch the goals on the news.  At that point I discovered that our TV can pick up ESPN and I could have watched the game instead of listening to it.  Bah.

I would have preferred that to sitting through the 5 live commentators disparaging Crawley and taking the piss out of the terraces, the telephone mast, the stadium clock, and anything else they could think of.  Mind you, they did mention that they saw a gritter going past on the A23.  I don’t think the 5 live crew realised what an event that was.

Anyway, well done to the team and fingers crossed that they don’t meet ther Hammers until the final.

As if that wasn’t enough, the next day we had Germany absolutely walk over Argentina, beating them even more comprehensively than they beat England.  Absolutely awesome to watch, even if there was nothing as cheeky as their first goal against England – surely the football equivalent of fool’s mate?

The first half of the last quarter-final was a bit of a let down after all that, but the second hald was pure drama, with a touch of farce about it.  Paraguay got a penalty that looked like it would break the deadlock but it was saved, and then Spain got a penalty themselves almost immediately which was scored, but had to be retaken for dubious reasons, and then the re-take was saved and there should have been yet another penalty given in the follow-up to it.  I think it is safe to say that referee will not be on the pitch at the final!

So now we have to look forward to Holland v Uruguay and Spain v Germany.  I imagine most neutrals will want to see Uruguay lose after that hand of god incident leaving the way clear to another all-European final.  Can’t wait.

I haven’t really been enjoying this World Cup as much as I hoped.  Most of the opening matches were dull, and so were a lot of the second games.   Best game so far has to be Germany v Ghana and I can’t believe how many England supporters are saying they wish we had got the ‘easy’ tie against Ghana in the knockout stages.  Ghana didn’t look a pushover to me.

It is all very well being patriotic and wanting your team to win, but honestly, do we think supporters of any other team would be afraid of playing us after seeing our three games?  I hope that we can get a result against Germany, but so far it is not looking good.  All these stories about the England team finding their mojo, but they didn’t really look that impressive against Slovenia.

All those positive press stories about England’s performance are just a case of Emperor Fabio’s new clothes at the moment.  To actually stand a chance we need Rooney to actually turn up to the next game.

A few random thoughts:

Why does the USA strip look like International Rescue?

Didn’t Rob Green look a lot like Damon Albarn in the first game?

Isn’t it a little insensitive for supporters to turn up at a game against an Arab team wearing crusaders’ costumes?

I watched the pre-tournament concert on TV on Thursday night, which was a bit disappointing.  Instead of showing it live, the BBC showed edited highlights, but their idea of a highlight is not necessarily mine.  For example, Amadou & Mariam were on the bill but didn’t feature at all on the BBC, and Hugh Masakela was cut off in mid-song at the start.  On the plus side, they did show Angelique Kidjo doing a couple of songs.They did show a longer version in the early hours of Friday morning so I set the V+ up to record that and will FF through it to see if there is any Amadou & Mariam on it, or any other good stuff missed from the edited version.  I was very impressed by a Colombian singer they had on there called Juanes and of course the other Colombian, Shakira.   Which seems like a good excuse to embed yet another Shakira video…

[youtube@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qmB4ZZF_uA]

I think we can all agree that is a lot better than watching Terry Venables’s effort!  I usually dislike the use of autotune, but if ever a record was crying out for it then it is Venables’ excruciating effort.

Very surprised to see Johnny Clegg didn’t feature in the concert at all.  I would have thought he was guaranteed to be in it.

I saw a bit of the opening ceremony on Portugese TV, because it was one while I was having my traditional Friday late breakfast in the Cafe Santa Maria .   I only caught the end plus some highlights but it looked pretty good, all those people dancing away to one of Femi Kuti’s hits.

Got home to see the kick off of the first game, which was a bit of an anti-climax after all the build up.  Before the game started it was hard to not be overwhelmed by the idea of the World Cup not only being in Africa but being in South Africa.  It doesn’t seem like that long ago apartheid was in full force and yet there was the black football ex-captain and the white rugby captain on TV talking about one nation.  It is hard not to be affected, but as a West Ham supporter I am used to feeling like crying while watching football.

I have to admit that I fell asleep at around half time and only woke up to see the second half of the France/Uruguay game, which didn’t look great either.  France did not look great which is a shame because I drew them in the work sweepstake.  I’ll have to hope that the other team I drew do better, but since that is New Zealand I am not counting my winnings just yet.

Shouldn’t complain too much about the BBC’s coverage of the concert though.   It might be annoying that they choose to spend time with Trevor Nelson talking that they could have used to show another song, but at least they don’t do what this (Bulgarian?) channel does and talk over anything they are not interested in…

It’s a tradition or an old charter or something.  Just as the England team raise our hopes only to get knocked out in a penalty shoot-out, so Spizz comes up with a tournament anthem miles better than either the official one or the more-popular unofficial one which never gets the attention it deserves.  Maybe this time will be different – for Spizzenergi and for England.

For the record, my favourite was We’re the England, but this one is rapidly growing on me.

Joe Cole, John Terry, Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand all there in West Ham colours, Di Canio and Zola on the pitch together… it must have been a great night for the fans.  A little depressing for the Hammers fans though: seeing all those players from the West Ham Youth Academy now stuffing the England squad.  All it needed was Bullseye’s Jim Bowen to come on the tannoy saying “here’s what you could have had.”

With Lawro’s appaling record in predicting results we should be OK.   Last week he thought Liverpool would draw with Fulham (they won), West Brom would beat Stoke (they lost), Chelsea would draw against Newcastle (they won), Spurs would draw (they lost), Hull would beat Portsmouth (they drew) and Bolton would draw against Boro (they thumped them 4-1).

It rather re-inforces Naseem Nicholas Taleb‘s views on so-called experts.

A wet pussy is not necessarily always a good thing... Rojo decides my trousers look too clean.

Today ticks all the boxes for being a good day:

• West Ham didn’t lose
• Man Utd did lose – thus keeping the Premier League interesting for a while longer
• Crawley Town won – keeping them within touching distance of the play-offs
• Went shopping and came back with what I went out for (new trousers)
• Went shopping and came back with bargains I wasn’t looking for (a couple of Depeche Mode albums)
• Had lunch while shopping (Ask, because we like their bruschetta)
• Got home to find a parcel with a new toy in it.

The new toy was a Canon Powershot A590.  I was perfectly happy with the old Fuji E550, but it got lost/stolen while on holiday.  Very annoying because there were at least 100 photos on it.  On the plus side, the replacement is slightly smaller than the Fuji, has more megapixels, more optical zoom, and is half the price I paid for the Fuji a couple of years ago.

I know I have the nice big Canon DSLR now, but I like to have a compact too for doing video clips and for just slipping into my pocket.  Took ages to find a compact that met my criteria though: it had to have an optical viewfinder, take SD cards and use standard AA batteries and not some sort of proprietary built-in lithium ion cell.  Very few cameras have optical viewfinders now.

The Depeche Mode albums were the special 2-disc (CD & DVD) sets for Violator and Exciter.  These sets are great and fantastic value, with 5.1 surround mixes, extra tracks, decent booklet and documentary film – and only £9 each now.