Please … I just need to sleep … let me sleep … not the jack hammer again … no, no … I can’t take it anymore.
Life as an inmate at Guantanamo Bay?
No, it’s your average fan of the beautiful game watching Euro 2012 in Taiwan.
Photo: AFP
Yes, it may not be on a single TV channel (so what’s the point of having hundreds of them, I hear you ask, with some justification), but we shall not be put off. Euro 2012 is here and even for us tired old hacks, used to long drinking sessions into the late hours of the morning, the Euro 2012 shift is a toughy, oh yes. Somebody needs to keep us up to date on all things Euro footie, though, and Johnny’s your man.
Yes, I’m back.
So whether you’re at home swearing about that Internet connection that keeps failing when you most need it, or you’re in a taxi on the way home at 5am, still attempting to make yourself understood as you try to remember where you live, this is the place for all things Euro 2012.
So what a start it’s been, we’ve seen all 16 teams after the first round of matches and, let’s be honest, frankly we’re none the wiser as to where the trophy may end up at the end of the month.
Johnny’s favorite moment of the opening round of matches was provided by Greece central defender Sokratis Papastathopoulos, surely the unluckiest man of the tournament so far, whose facial expression was worth its weight in gold when he realized he was being sent off by “chump of the tournament so far” Spanish whistle-blower-in-chief Carlos Velasco Carballo for the heinous crime of winning a header and then being in the vicinity of a Poland player who happened to slip over when he received the ball.
Look at his face, just look at his face...
So while poor old Sokratis sits out the next round of matches, Johnny reaches for the matchbox to prop open the eyes as sleep becomes a distant memory.
So what else of the opening four days of the tournament? Well, the big recurring story has been racist abuse in Poland and Ukraine. The Dutch have complained that some of their players were the subject of abuse at a training session, while a Polish-based anti-racism organization have also said that Russian fans subjected Ethiopian-Czech player Theo Gebre Selassie to racial abuse in Friday’s opening encounter.
So surely it’s time to crack down on this hard? No it’s time for UEFA and the organizers to put their fingers in their ears, close their eyes and go: “La, la, la ,la ,la, ...”
Coach of Euro 2012 co-hosts Ukraine, Oleg Blokhin, waded into the debate on Sunday by insisting that “there is no racism in Ukraine.”
Blokhin interrupted a reporter who asked him about the issue in English, removed his headphones and said: “I don’t want to talk about racism — there is no racism in Ukraine. These are political issues which have nothing to do with football.”
“If there are incidents, they won’t be in Ukraine,” the 1975 European Footballer of the Year insisted.
Really, Oleg?
Surely you’re not the same Oleg Blokhin who was quoted by the New York Times in 2006, on the subject of foreign players in the Ukrainian league, as saying: “The more Ukrainians that play in the national league, the more examples for the young generation — let them learn from Shevchenko or Blokhin, and not some Zumba-Bumba they took off a tree, gave him two bananas and now he plays in the Ukrainian league.”
Nothing to worry about there, then.
Of course, your daily diet of footie comes at a price. Yes. The championships start and the loonies come out of the woodwork.
Two years after Paul the Octopus became a household name by correctly predicting eight matches at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, several pretenders to the throne have cropped up, as reported in this very newspaper.
With a pig in Kiev, an elephant in Krakow and a ferret in Kharkiv, sports prognosticating has truly gone wild.
However, they still have a lot to prove.
“As far as we are concerned, none have the form of Paul the Octopus,” said loony-in-chief Joe Crilly, a spokesman for British bookmaker William Hill. “And with so many to follow, there are undoubtedly going to be a few who get it wrong.”
Enough, already. I may be tired, but this nonsense is getting me down. Time for some real science.
So Johnny sought the opinion of the world’s great scientists and thinkers, and I came up with this amazing fact: Apparently, humans are, believe it or not, the most intelligent creatures on Earth.
Fancy that.
So it got me thinking, surely the most intelligent creatures should be able to outdo these furballs in the prediction stakes. What we need to do is set up a proper experiment to see where the trophy is destined to end up.
Thankfully, those good people at Master Football Academy came to my rescue. Yes, this Saturday Johnny Jr and other four and five-year-olds will be participating at a “Euro 2012” five-a-side tournament in Taipei, just the experiment we’re looking for.
Young enough so that their brains still work independently from a smartphone, these fine examples of the human race have been randomly assigned teams from Euro 2012 and they will play a tournament that will give us the answer we crave — who will win Euro 2012?
Fate, as often happens, has dealt poor, tired Johnny a blow, though.
Looking forward to Johnny Jr’s team being assigned Ireland, so that we could turn up roughly on time with no expectations and enjoy the craic, imagine my horror when Johnny Jr and his teammates were assigned Germany.
Yes, Saturday morning we’ll be there two hours early to go through a series of grueling training drills, making sure the team are tactically perfect, before proceeding to win the tournament with the utmost efficiency.
I’ll let you know the outcome of Johnny’s scientific experiment, weather permitting, in Sunday’s paper.
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