Tag Archives: Argentina

A complete shit-show

In the end, you have to say that FIFA got the World Cup final they deserved. After pooling their collective wisdom, they somehow managed to concoct an event that was a complete shit-show in both the figurative and literal sense of the word.

This isn’t bitterness talking, much, but Argentina should never have been allowed to make that final. Their awful brand of sportsmanship was enabled by officials throughout the tournament to facilitate the progress of a few ageing stars that really needed no help anyway, and what the billions of football fans around the world got served as a result of this was a big stinking pile of garbage.

And that that was just the half time entertainment! (Have I Got News For You can have that one for free.)

It was hard to fathom — a bit like the dream I had just a few nights ago, in which I was told the actor who plays Ian Beale in EastEnders speaks with a Northern Irish accent in real life. So he does. He doesn’t, of course, which came as a disappointment when I double-checked his Wikipedia page the next morning, just to make sure.

Honestly, I was so angry at Argentina’s anti-football approach that I actually found myself willing them to score a late equaliser to take the match to penalties, just so they’d be able to return some of the entertainment they’d stolen from us.

Can you imagine a world in which that happened, and Argentina won the shoot-out? It would’ve justified their whole approach even further and sent ripples around Trump’s ever expanding waste line. As a warmongering convicted felon with no morals whatsoever, I’m sure he’d have loved their dirty underhand and manipulative tactics while claiming ownership of an overseas territory in a post-match victory banner.

In the end, though, Spain won and Trump got served a load of rubbish for the one match he actually managed to attend, which felt very apt.

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Argy-bargy!

Oh, England! Thomas’s team tanked once he’d brought off James and Gordon and we simply ran out of steam. If they make a documentary about this match to stir the emotions of England fans ahead of the next major football tournament, they should get Ringo Starr to narrate it.

I was so happy with my Thomas the Tank Engine gag there that I decided to use it in my fortnightly Cod Almighty diary too. I don’t let anything go to waste.

If the first half was scrappy then the second half was messy. (You won’t believe how much time I wasted thinking about whether I should’ve written that as ‘messy’ or ‘Messi’. I think the gag was obvious enough, but it’s one those that works better said than written. You say tomato, I say tomato. See? Rubbish.)

I said from the outset that Argentina would win the World Cup. I didn’t quite know how much assistance they’d be getting from FIFA when I said it, but now that we’ve all witnessed the events of the past six weeks with our own eyes it’s hard to bet against them in the final — despite the way Spain made France look incredibly ordinary in the other semi-final.

There were tears at full time after our poor lad had got very excited about the prospect of England winning a World Cup. In his relatively short existence on this planet he’d never known England fail. We’d topped our group, we’d beaten Doctor Congo, we’d defeated Mexico, we’d stopped Haaland, and we were supposed to have knocked out Argentina and shrugged off the Spanish in the final to lift the golden trophy.

And for so long it looked like everything was going to plan. We’d got our noses in front, and with just five minutes (and injury time) to go, we had one foot in the final.

So to lose the match and not even take it into extra time was a shock to the system. Maybe it wasn’t a shock to my system, because I could see the way we were playing, but for an eight-year-old with unchecked exuberance it was cruel to basically be given something and then have it snatched away with no chance of getting it back.

The consolation to all of this is that we have season tickets at Grimsby Town. Onwards and upwards!

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