How many times have I sat watching football on the BBC, hoping that an act of God would strike and shut Mark Lawrenson up?  ((its a rhetorical question…  but must be in triple figures by now))  Well tonight it actually happened.  Storms in Vienna disrupted the transmission of pictures of the semi-final.  After a while the Beeb played the Five Live commentary over an apology message, then it all came back.  Later on it all went again and when the pictures came back they kept the Five Live commentary instead of the TV commentary.

It was a real treat – seeing what was going on but not having to listen to Lawro’s poor attempts at humour.  Some killjoy managed to restore the ‘proper’ commentary all too soon though.  It reminded me a bit of the World Cup in 2002.  We managed to rig up an old VCR so that it fed pictures to our ceiling-mounted projector at work, but it didn’t have any sound, so we watched Brazil beat England on the big screen but had commentary from Virgin – which was all we could get on the office radio.

What a game though!  On the night, the Germans probably didn’t deserve to win.  They looked uninspired most of the time, but kept going and nicked it at the last minute after one of the most exciting games of the tournament. Its going to be Germany against either Spain or Russia on Sunday. Either way it ought to be a cracking game, but I’m actually starting to think that if I had a choice between Lawrenson or the crowd singing Seven Nation Army, I might choose Lawro.