We’re only four games in and I’ve somehow lost our FIFA World Cup 2026 wall chart. I hold myself to a higher standard than that. We didn’t even get past the group stage.
Anyway, more games have passed since the mysterious disappearance of the wall chart, and I must say it’s been an enjoyable tournament so far with plenty of goals. A lot of them came for Germany against Curaçao, but Spain managed none against Cape Verde.
As a nocturnal person who has never voluntarily gone to bed in his life, this tournament has the hallmarks of a classic. I can’t quite do the 2am kick-offs on a work night (I’m not an insomniac, yet) but I’ve been able to see through the 11pm kick-offs successfully.
My son was convinced, if only for a little while, that the Dutch goalkeeper’s name was Fart Verruca. I didn’t actually know his real name to put him straight, so I had to Google it and now I’m being served up ads for Bazuka gel wherever I go online.
To be fair to the lad, it did sound very much like Fart Verruca to me. The name Bart Verbruggen isn’t as much fun. He’ll be known as Fart Verruca by us from hereon in, just as the Welsh lower league striker Rob Duffy was known as Cob Dirty owing to the way his name was distorted on Soccer Saturday by our pathetic TV display (which, admittedly, we’d dropped on the floor when moving into the house a few weeks earlier).
One of the reasons I got the bug for attending football matches was the singing and chanting, perhaps more so than the football itself. I love the ingenuity and inventiveness of the fans, and it seems the England fans are being particularly inventive in the US — not that Trump will enjoy their creativity much.
My wife made me aware of a question that was posed online, asking: if you could eradicate two people from this world without any repercussions, who would your second choice be?
I’ll answer that by asking: what’s the difference between a billion dollars and a trillion dollars?
(The answer is about a trillion dollars.)