Ronaldo was back home safely, Rooney was in devastating form, Scholes was back to his old self. What more could you ask for on the first day of the new season?

Enjoy it while it lasts!

I don’t need to go in goal to appreciate how hard it is to be a goalie. I already know it’s hard. Playing on the wing is hard too but nobody tells goalies that they should try playing on the wing so they can appreciate how hard it is.

You are never to old to rock and roll but I am definitely too old to play in goal. I hurt. I’ll never play in goal again.

We got there at 8:30 and it was already over 95°. There were just a few trees on a neighboring property and everyone was crammed under that tiny scrap of shade as we waited for the first game to start. By the second game there was no shade at all.

During that second game, our goalie was sent off with a red card performance that would have made Zidane’s mother proud and we struggled on with 10 men. After the game, I bought two of those large bottles of Gatorade and quaffed them straight down leaving me looking like a pot-bellied Biafran refugee.

The temperature had passed 110° as the third game got underway but luckily a hot wind that stank of horseshit had blown up. Someone announced that, because of the eccentric scoring system they were using (points for clean sheets, points for goals, points deducted for cards), if we won with a clean sheet and some other team lost, we would qualify for the knockout round on Sunday. The last game was a bad tempered affair with players falling down with cramp and we won with a clean sheet.

We trudged sadly up to the results desk to confirm the bad news and the lady there told us with a smile that the other team had in fact lost and that we were tied on points. Fortunately, that red card meant that we would not we playing tomorrow. A tiny cheer went up among our team and we resolved to buy a crate of beer for our fiery Italian goalie. We had dodged the bullet.

I am sorry to say that I have no great pee stories from Saturday. I have no pee stories at all for I did not pee on Saturday.

Epilogue

I went for a swim later that evening. Remember when your mum used to tell you not to go swimming after eating cos you’d get cramp. I have some advice to add. Never go swimming after playing football for 3 hours under the hot desert sun in record temperatures. You’ll get cramp. I did anyway. Cramp in both calfs and both thighs simultaneously. I sank.

I am playing in a football tournament tomorrow in Morgan Hill. We have three 60 minute games. In the middle of the day. In the middle of the desert.

Hope it’s not hot! Forecast says “partly cloudy” so it should be fine.

If we do well tomorrow we get to play two more games on Saturday.

A couple of years of ago, Beckham left ManU for Real Madrid and, a few days later someone new showed up wearing the No7 shirt. “Who is that?”, I wondered.

Within about 3 minutes, I said “I think we got the better end of the deal here. This guy is much better than Beckham”. This guy was Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo is one of those rare geniuses that appears every now and again and, like most of his predecessors (Best, Bowles, Hoddle, Marsh, Cantona, Maradonna), he is flawed.

I love watching players like Ronaldo. If there is a single category of player that is my very favourite kind it is Flawed Flamboyant Genius. You can go a whole lifetime without having a Flawed Flamboyant Genius on your team. It seems that most fans - and many managers - don’t like Flamboyant Geniuses so I am rather fortunate that my team - ManU - rather likes having them around. Right now I am in the incredibly lucky position of watching two of them every week - for Rooney is a Flawed Flamboyant Genius too - and I love them both. Rooney is slightly ahead in the Genius department but Ronaldo has Flamboyance streaming from every pore and is therefore my favourite player of the two.

Julio blogged yesterday about how all the England fans boo’d him during the Germany and France games - he was extremely unpopular in England even before the world cup. What Ronaldo did during the England/Portugal game was no different to what Rooney would have done had the roles been reversed. It is terrible and sad that Ronaldo will be forever blamed for knocking England out of the world cup and ridiculous too. Ronaldo bears no responsibility for the red card. Rooney got sent off all on his own.

I hope beyond hope that Ferguson is able to work his magic and keep Ronaldo at ManU but, even if he does, this year will be extremely difficult for him.

Eric Cantona - my second favourite flawed flamboyant genius (and bearer of a red No7) of all time - had a series of commercials during this world cup entitled “Joga Bonito” and he ended each one saying

Play Beautiful!

If Ronaldo is forced out of England because of petty spite, the beautiful game will have lost a little of its beauty and that will be a great shame.

I am gonna make this part of my world cup tradition. For 10 or 15 minutes after England get knocked out of every world cup from now on, I just wanna be numb.

Special thanks to Mark (1990), Kevin (1994), Mike Syslo (1998) and Jeff (1998,2002) for helping me keep my tradition before I even knew it was a tradition. Jeff tried his best this year but the space he gave me was taken away. I am not asking for a lot. Just 15 minutes of numbness would be plenty. It’s not like anyone died after all.

I found it extremely shocking to hear various American commentators speaking, during the world cup, in support of diving (Balboa), professional fouls (Lalas and Wynalda), time-wasting (Balboa again), deliberate handball and various other offenses that I had always considered to be “outside the rules”.

The prevaling opinion of the commentators seemed to be that the yellow card was an opportunity for one-free-foul-to-be-used-wisely rather than a punishment for breaking the rules. The very presence of a punishment for an unethical act makes the act itself no longer unethical. The commit/don’t commit decision becomes a cost/benefit analysis rather than an ethical dilemma.

Puts me in mind of the early debate about whether the Bill of Rights might prove harmful because it could not possibly enumerate all of the rights which citizens should enjoy. As the rules for what we may or may not do become ever more well-defined, we lose the opportunities for making ethical decision-making. Eventually we will lose the capacity altogether. I fear that some of us already have.

In the old days, if the commentators of one game wanted to share the score of another they would say..

The score of the XvY game is about to appear on the screen. if you don’t want to know the result, please look away now.

Now you have to take counter-measures to avoid finding out who gets whacked in The Sopranos before the season even starts. The media has whole teams of people whose job it is to spoil your enjoyment of reality shows, sitcoms, movies and even American Idol by telling you the ending before the show is aired.

It’s all a ploy to confuse the enemy. In fact, the whole Rooney/injury thing… all a ploy…

We do it every four years. Our strategy is to look really terrible for the first round and then just squeak out of the group by way of arithmetical gymnastics in the last game against Poland. In the following rounds, we put on a stunning performance against at least two world cup powerhouses - leading to predictions which include the phrases /this time/ and /all the way/ - before getting knocked out by Germany on penalties.

This year we are being a bit more adventurous by actually winning a game in the first round. This time I think we can go all the way.

… I have the game TiVo’d.

This is a standing rule that sports fans understand very well. It’s the not-quite-fans who have trouble understanding. They think they are doing us a favour

So, not-quite-fans, follow this simple rule to save yourself - and, more importantly, the victims of your good intentions - a lot of heartache. Before you say anything about the game, ask this simple question :

Do you know the result of the Team X vs Team Y game ?

Thank you for your cooperation.