Monday night football
(Posted 14:12:41 on 7th May 2008 by Mr O)
When I say Monday I mean bank holiday Monday, when I say night, I mean afternoon, when I say football, I mean English football (soccer) just.
In UK there's a tradition of crap movies on TV, this particular bank holiday that movie was Escape to Victory (E2V), a film loosely based around football, although it does star Sly Stallone. In fact E2V is the answer to a bit of pub trivia, as in "In which team did Pele play alongside Ossie Ardeles, John Wark and Russell Osman?", but again, most of those names will mean nothing to our American readers apart from why is a guy who advertises Viagra playing football?
So the alternative to E2V was the Women's FA Cup final on the BBC, now having been to a women's soccer game, I decided that quality of the football in E2V was going to be much better, Stallone included.
I'd been to see a Women's international game at the Sixfields stadium in Northampton a few years ago. Jon and I have a habit of finding cheap alternative sports, and this was cheap, a whopping great £3 ($5 as it was). It was England versus Denmark in a friendly. Jon and I certainly felt out-numbered in the crowd by the amount of women, in fact I think the line I used was that there were more dykes there than in Holland. Ok cheap line, but an easy one to make. So the quality of the football on display wasn't that great, the skill was there, but it just wasn't fast enough, to be honest the best part of the game was watching the Danish subs warming up at the side of the pitch directly in front of us.
So back to Monday afternoon, knowing how bad women's football is as a watch it had to be E2V. That said, I did miss one of the best passages of commentary on live football on the BBC in ages. Apparently the male commentator turned to his female co-commentator/pundit and said "I understand that one of Leeds players is nicknamed Munch, why is that?" After a few moments of awkward silence and stifled giggles, he swiftly moved on and changed the subject. A definite case of foot in mouth, or should that be rug in mouth?
