World Cup Draw

[badams]

Group A - Germany - Ecuador - Poland - Costa Rica

Group B - England - Paraguay - Sweden - Trinidad & Tobago

Group C - Argentina - Ivory Coast - Netherlands - Serbia Montenegro

Group D - Mexico - Angola - Portugal - Iran

Group E - Italy - Ghana - Czech Republic - USA

Group F - Brazil - Australia - Croatia - Japan

Group G - France - Togo - Switzerland - Korea

Group H - Spain - Tunisia - Ukraine - Saudi Arabia

Edited December 9, 2005 by Guest

[Davey Boy 2.0]

yeah it's being broadcast @ 2:30 i think

a twisted part of me was going to try to skive off here early and go home to catch it, but then i realised that that would be a little too much

[badams]

You going to tape the games so you can watch them well into 2006 and possibly 2007?

[Davey Boy 2.0]

the WC games?!?

naw, i'd love to take a month off in June to watch each and every game but that may not be realistic

we'll see what happens

('course I still haven't finished watching the games I taped from the last world cup, hopefully this weekend though )

Edited December 9, 2005 by Guest
blllttthhhhhhhh

[badams]

Your World Cup IQ... USA Edition

[Davey Boy 2.0]

7/11

[SevenSeasJim]

Netherlands with Argentina

[Diggzz]

Netherlands with Argentina

Ivory Coast will be tough, even the Serbs will be tough, this would be the proverbial "Group of Death" I would say...

[Booche]

Yup, that's a tough group but dont let this one fool you:

Group E - Italy - Ghana - Czech Republic - USA

[Davey Boy 2.0]

John Nic end of year rant:

Here's something you don't hear much. Football fans are great. Football is great. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

I get reflective at this time of year about everything, including the football, especially when there are so many reviews of the sporting year telling us how great it is to do such things as sail a boat fast, jump over a fence on a horse or win a five-game series at cricket - if you can't win three out of five in anything, you're not that good are you?

Why do people go on about it so much? How exciting can something be which takes five days? I saw the first ever cricket World Cup final at Headingley in 1975. It was okay but it lasted for eight bloody hours sir!

But as we enter a new year, a World Cup year, I still hear so many voices, especially of the older generation it seems, moaning louder than ever that footballers and their fans are rude, are cheats, are ungentlemanly, violent and basically just too bloody-working class, unlike those nice rugby and cricket boys - this despite the fact that week after week we see rugby union players beating the cack out of each other and nakedly cheating. This despite the fact that Flintoff and his mob are scruffy p***ed-up lads from the north just like their football brothers. But somehow, because they play cricket, they escape the slagging that we fans and footballers get. It's part of the negative cultural knee-jerk response to football in this country amongst a lot of people.

But let's look at old people, since they have a pop at us so much. Now, I know you this is likely not to be you. You lot are mostly the 16-24 age group to which so much attention is paid and which is often thought to be so desirable despite the fact that most of you are short of cash, are obsessed with embarrassingly-rubbish passing fads and haircuts and can't hold your wad for more than 30 seconds on the rare occasions you get any action at all. Or maybe that was just me.

But if you can stop peering at your phone to see if someone has texted you an assemblage of apparantly random letters and numbers for a minute, then you might notice that most old people - by which I mean those 60 and over - look like they've always looked for the last 80 years, don't they?

The media vacillate between depicting oldies as useless scared fools who won't leave the house for fear of being mugged by crack addicts for their teeth, and patronising sprightly old birds who whack robbers over the head with incontinence bags to stop them nicking their £13.45 pension money to buy turkey twizzlers with.

But what strikes me is that old people these days look pretty much like they did when I was a kid, except the blokes don't wear flat caps as much. But by and large they're identikit copies, especially the women. Put ten over 60's old dears together in the same room and eight look like sisters - they dress and look the same.

But how can this be? If you're 65 now you were an impressionable 25 years old when the Beatles released Revolver - an album that revolutionised what popular music could be.

You were 15 when Elvis swivelled his hips and sent post-war Britain into a collective, if muffled, orgasm. You were 26 when we won the World Cup. You were in your teens when Catcher in the Rye came out.

You saw Andy Warhol's soup cans, you heard Dylan, Miles Davis, Jimi, The Stones, The Doors, The Dead, Sly and the f*****g Family Stone, man, all before you were 30. You've seen all the best telly programmes and were the first to have access to the world's greatest literature and art for free from state-funded libraries and galleries. So how exactly, after all this revolutionary cultural stimuli at such an impressionable age, can so many have turned out exactly like their parents?

Conservative in their tastes, dress, outlook and politics. Scared of anything new, scared of change. Inventing foes and delusions. Worrying about immigrants robbing you of your rubbish underwear and waffling on about Gracie Fields even though you were only one when the war started. Why? How did that happen? Why are you not ushering in a new vanguard of rebellion and change?

You're healthier than ever, living longer, are richer than ever and are far less likely to be a victim of crime than the very age group you have convinced yourself are going to be coming through your windows.

And yet all you want to do is watch Heartbeat on the telly, eat mild cheese and moan about not being able to work computers at your age. You're letting the side down. Old people should be like Roger McGough, like Peter Blake or Michael Caine, Bonnie Raitt, Germaine Greer, Georgia O'Keefe and Helen bloody Mirren. Oh yeah baby.

It has puzzled me for years. In California you regularly see oldies on Harleys in jeans and leathers burning rubber up Pacific Coast highway. Blowing their money on a second childhood. Good on yer granddad. You see them grizzled like Sitting Bull, long-haired and bearded. They look like survivors of the electric kool-aid acid tests. They look like I thought loads of old people would look by now. But here all we get is old men with Marks and Spencers slacks that go up to their armpits and their wives with that stupid blue hair moulded into a snot bubble shape, all of whom complain about no-one being able to cook these days while they stand in line in Tescos with shopping baskets full of ready-made meals and cakes.

What happened to you?

It's like a surrealist drama played out with a straight face.

Well here's what I realised. The stuff which freaks you out (if anything does), the things which shape your universe, the stuff which is acclaimed, lauded and vaunted as great, moving or profound art, doesn't mean jack to most people in their lives. Ever. Nothing. In any era. Nothing. Doesn't matter whether it's The White Stripes, Dylan, The Smiths or David Bowie (pre or post-Ziggy) Stevie Ray Vaughan or the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band ("looking very relaxed, Adolf Hitler on vibes"), the films of Scorsese, the books of Wolfe, Eliot or Ginsburg, The Guggenheim, Paul Klee, Picasso, Damien Hirst or Will Self's column, Jamie Oliver's flavour shaker or Ewan McGregor's cock in Trainspotting. Nothing penetrates the veneer for long. It goes over their heads it goes under their feet, it passes them by like it never happened. It's irrelevant to them. You think it's profound, but they treat it as another five minutes' distraction before the next paranoid delusion based on rumours, half-truths and s*it they've made up in their heads. Searing profundity is ignored in favour of bland mediocrity and a chat about what's happening in Emmerdale.

That's the way it is. It used to annoy the hell out of me but now I just accept it. It is what it is.

Except when it comes to football.

There's a lot of misinformation about football spread by these people who know nothing about it and care less, which is why we get such inconsistent attitudes to it compared to other sports.

Many seem to think it's a game - and oh I wish it still were - for the rough-arsed working clarss darlin'. A game for the uncouth, the common and the downright disreputable. Listen to these people and you'd think it's a game for the mentally sub-normal working-class to indulge in. It's played by thugs for thugs who behave badly at any opportunity. Its followers fight, wear scruffy clothing and drink vast amounts of alcohol. They say all these things like it's really, really bad, unlike living in the suburbs and wearing grey shoes which is apparantly really f***ing great.

Okay, I'm off on one here, I admit it, but I say all this because all this year and last we as football fans have been bomf***ingbarded with sh*t about rugby and cricket, racing, athletics and even sailing a sodding boat, which have all been lauded uncritically as somehow superior sporting achievements to anything in football - even Liverpool's astonishing CL win.

It will be the same in 2006. Don't believe them. Football remains at the pinnacle of all sports precisely because we believe in and appreciate its power of drama, excitement and passion. Something which the non-believers hate. But wait till the World Cup comes around. There will be much disparaging comment about jingoism and sneery derision for our passion for the game. Because the papers come out with utter garbage we're tarred with their brush - but that's not us.

We are the worshippers at the temple of the holy sport. But if England do well or God forbid win the World Cup all these whiners will suddenly become fans just like they did in 1990. They'll climb aboard the bandwagon for a few stops before quietly dismounting because we've started singing songs about engorged genitals.

So as we gird our loins for another year of football, a big year - let all of us who love the game and commune with it every week be proud and stand tall. We are f***ing good you know. Football fans. We're top notch. Aye, we swear, drink, belch and scream. We get mad, we're irrational, we annoy the hell out of each other and we go on about the details of the game like we're a bit autistic but we really bloody love our game and we reserve the right to give all aspects of it a critical savaging at times, precisely because we love it so much.

In 2006, just as in 2005 and every year before it, football f**king rocks! Let's make it an epic year. Bring it all on. Now.