Clegg and the World Cup bid

Is it just me, or does Nick Clegg completely miss the point during his statement to the FIFA inspection team?

Apart from the fact he nearly called them the infection team, he spent well over half of his statement talking about himself and the coalition rather than how England is the best country for hosting the 2018 World Cup.

And if I was part of FIFA and heard a chap saying that England’s World Cup was “unbeatable”, I’d be thinking to myself: “Well, matey, that’s for me to decide”.

(I know sport and politics doesn’t mix very well. It’s just Clegg’s smugness in the power he holds that gets my goat and makes me post this stuff. #nickcleggsfault, and all that.)

Alan Shearer’s management record

Games: 8. Won: 1. Drawn: 2. Lost: 5.

That was Alan Shearer’s management record for Newcastle United during the 2008/09 season, in which they were relegated.

This, reader, is the person who is being mooted as a potential saviour of English football.

If you think Shearer’s the man for the job, you’re even more deluded than the average England fan.

Dennis Bergkamp! Dennis Bergkamp! Dennis Bergkamp!

In honour of the Dutch playing in their third World Cup final this evening, and revealing my preference for who I hope will win (even if I don’t think they will), here’s a nice little video (via kottke:

Intellectualising the World Cup, no.7

Argument by analogy is not a good technique at the best of times. Any attempt to draw an extended analogy between the England football team and the coalition government is horrible in principle and in practice, and receives an automatic entry to this series.

With an opening line like this:

There are remarkable similarities between Team Cleggeron and Team England

… I don’t even have to read the rest of the letter to know this is entry number 7.

Intellectualising the World Cup, no.6

I’ve not been able to write as many entries in this series as I’d have liked or as there is material for. Nevertheless, I’m soldiering on with this one from that intellectual powerhouse, Prospect magazine:

In the post mortems that are to come, whether we are talking about football or about the state of the nation, we are going to have ask ourselves how and why or free-market, high-wage, globalised industries are so phenomenally successful at enriching themselves, but cannot seem to be mobilised to deliver public goods.

That’s exactly the question we’re going to ask.

(Previous entries in this series can be found here.)

Intellectualising the World Cup, no.5

I actually liked this little paean to goalkeepers. Having been a keeper myself, I fully recognise how weird you need to be to fulfil the duties of that role.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t let the article pass my intellectualising series (the previous entry, with links to other entries therein, is here) with a line like this in it:

I assume he has never compared his role between the sticks with that of the versifier, but his apparent solitude and contemplative demeanour after his fumble on Saturday night was nothing short of poetic.

Intellectualising the World Cup, no.4

This series continues (previous entries: 1, 2 and 3) with an entry which only needs the title of the blogpost to which it links to make its point:

The thinking blog’s guide to the World Cup pointy-heads

Good work, Next Left!

Intellectualising the World Cup, no.3

Following numbers 1 and 2 in this series come the Who Should I Cheer For? website:

WhoshouldIcheerfor.com is a site from the World Development Movement that ranks all the teams playing in the World Cup to find the most supportable on the basis of their efforts to eradicate poverty and social injustice.

The basis used is stats relating to issues such as life expectancy, inequality, women in government and maternal mortality.

Even though it sort of misses the point, and there are some indicators in there which hint at a slightly different agenda (e.g. country stance on North Korea, spending on military), I’m happy to promote the site via its admission to my “Intellectualising” series.

My full list of World Cup predictions

Having done so well in the General Election prediction stakes, I’m looking to do the same for the World Cup. Thus, here are my full predictions for how I think the World Cup will go. Feel free to debate my selections in the comments…

Group A

1. Mexico
2. Uruguay
3. France
4. South Africa

Group B

1. Argentina
2. Greece
3. Nigeria
4. South Korea

Group C

1. England
2. USA
3. Slovenia
4. Algeria

Group D

1. Germany
2. Serbia
3. Ghana
4. Australia

Group E

1. Holland
2. Denmark
3. Cameroon
4. Japan

Group F

1. Italy
2. Paraguay
3. Slovakia
4. New Zealand

Group G

1. Brazil
2. Portugal
3. Ivory Coast
4. North Korea

Group H

1. Spain
2. Chile
3. Switzerland
4. Honduras

Round of 16

• Mexico v Greece = MEXICO
• England v Serbia = ENGLAND
• Germany v USA = GERMANY
• Argentina v Uruguay = ARGENTINA
• Holland v Paraguay = HOLLAND
• Brazil v Chile = BRAZIL
• Italy v Denmark = ITALY
• Spain v Portugal = SPAIN

Quarter-finals

• Mexico v England = ENGLAND
• Holland v Brazil = BRAZIL
• Germany v Argentina = ARGENTINA
• Italy v Spain = SPAIN

Semi-finals

• England v Brazil = BRAZIL
• Argentina v Spain = ARGENTINA

Third-place play-off

• England v Spain = SPAIN

Final

• Brazil v Argentina = BRAZIL

Intellectualising the World Cup, no.2

The wonderful Stumbling and Mumbling contributes the second in the series implied in my first post on this topic, intellectualising the penalty. That is, here’s another post which delves beyond the “game of two halves” to see what lies beneath the game of football.

This time, we get national stereotypes and penalties:

One of the delights of the coming World Cup will be commentators’ liberal use of cliché: the Brazilians play the beautiful game, Italians are defensive, Germans efficient and, of course, Africans are naïve at the back. However, cliches can be true, as this new paper shows. The authors studied 1564 competitive internationals involving six teams. And they found that the Germans are more likely to score in the last minute of a game. They did so in 5.5% of games. By contrast, Brazil did so in only 2.1% of their games and Italy in just 2.2% of them…

And one other thing: Germany really are better at penalties. In shoot-outs since 1960, they have scored with 94% of their penalties, whereas England have scored with just 50% and Italy with 65%.