Forza Italia!

I had no plans to watch the Germany v Italy semi-final last night. It was an 11pm kick-off and I had been up since six yesterday morning. But 10.15 came and I was still awake so I went down to ye local club. It was full, they said, but they'd just re-opened J-Blues, a failed nightclub-type place attached to the main building. So I went in there and had my pick of the seats - there were only two other punters in the room. That soon changed as more people arrived and by the time the game started it was full, but not uncomfortably so.

And what a match! Although goalless until the dying minutes of extra time, both sides played proper football. It looked like we were going to have the almost-inevitable penalty shootout, but miraculously Fabio Grosso found the net in the last minute of extra time, and seconds later Del Piero did the same. Unbelievable!

So Germany are out, but they can be proud of their performance.

More Footie

Axonsax has done an interesting post about watching footie in public places. I've been very fortunate up until now-ish, in that Dubaibilly has thrown open his doors and we can get a front-row seat in front of his quite large telly. But it's 20 clicks up the SZR to his place, and this evening I thought I ought to try out Jebel Ali Cloob as a viewing venue. The Cloob has a pretty good offer going for non-members (c'est moi). Dhs 50 gets you in, and Dhs 50's worth of booze or food. Very clever it is, methinks: they are guaranteed a minimum spend per head, and thereby can afford to pay the extortionate rates for public showing of the World Cup that monopoly provider ART demands.

The match I watched was Germany v Argentina, and it was a bit of a thriller that ended in one of those horrible penalty shootouts. Germany won. I can't say I enjoyed watching the match at the Cloob: I got there a bit too late to secure a table in the room of my choice (the ever-expanding Cloob has about 5 interconnected rooms, all containing a massive screen) and finished up sharing a table in the Red Room with a couple of strange guys - an Indian and a local who had apparently never watched football in his life. So there was a constant stream of explanation going on. In front of us was a large table full of Germans, all face-paint and flags. Surprisingly there were also people shouting for Argentina.

The view was periodically obscured by large opaque Germans jumping up and down, opaque everybody else heading off to the loo, and opaque, but small, waitresses doing their job.

So tomorrow is the last chance I get in this tournament to sit on DubaiBilly's sofa, hopefully watching Engerland thrash Portugal, because he and Mrs DubaiBilly are whizzing off to Greece a couple of days later.

If I watch any more games in this tournament (and I'm sure I will), it will either be at the Cloob or a secret venure that somebody told me about. Watch this blog...

Oh England, My Lionheart

Ok, so we won our first match in that World Cup thing. England 1, Paraguay 0. We hardly deserved to win. The only goal, a Beckham free kick that was helpfully deflected into the net by the Paraguayan captain Carlos Gamarra in the fourth minute, was a superb starter. But it was all downhill from there. England were all over Paraguay in the first half, but nobody could be arsed to score another goal. Paraguay were somewhat more on the case in the second half, and it was nailbiting stuff.

I hate this. England seems to believe that a 1-0 victory is good enough. I disagree. We want goalfests, we want excitement. We don't want to see these outrageously highly-paid chaps not doing their job (I define their job as scoring as many goals as possible, not the boring Eriksson definition of just score one more than the other team).

And I seriously hated the Brazilian referee: he looked like some kind of vampire, he had more oil on his hair than Saudi Arabia pumps in a month and he was totally biased against some of the England players (especially the midget Crouch). This guy made free with the yellow cards for perfectly acceptable tackles while ignoring the blatant prima-donna-ish acting of the SAmericans.

I've just read a piece in the online Grauniad - Eriksson and Beckham said they were crap because it was too hot.

To quote Gaspode The Wonder Dog: Pull one of the others, it's got bells on.

Sheesh.

It's A Draw!!!

I'm not a huge football fan, but I do like to watch the big games. So the other night I trooped down to Jelly Baby Cloob to watch the English F.A. Cup Final. Being a chappie of the Northern persuasion, I wanted Liverpool to win. But I freely admit that West Ham were the better team for most of the match. Steven Gerrard scored a wonderful goal in the 90th minute to bring the teams equal at 3-all. So they go into extra time, and nobody can manage another goal. Players are dropping like flies with cramp, exhaustion, whatever.

I think both teams would have been very happy to call it a draw, and split the cup down the middle. But no, these Cup tournaments always have to have a Winner, and so it goes to the dreaded penalty shoot-out. As it happened, Liverpool had the luck, because they wear red (previous post: Red Always Wins).

I hate this. Two teams play their hearts out for 120 minutes, and it turns out that at that place and time, they were 'equal' to each other. So that's a draw, isn't it? The penalties thing, golden goals, play till you die, etc, are all just idiotic devices to produce a 'winner', but in those circumstances, for me, the 'victory' is meaningless. There is zero skill involved in these deciders, only luck.

Brilliant game though.

Come On You Reds!

The first real job of my career was working as an interior designer for a company in Liverpool UK. That company was owned by a great man, Sir John Moores. Mr John (as he was known by us plebs), pretty much owned Liverpool FC. He also had a holding in Everton. None of this was Malcolm Glazer-ish, it was just supporting the community that had helped you become a gazillionaire (Sir John was the richest bloke in Britain at that time, but not affected by it).

One day, I got into the lift to hit the twelfth floor where I worked. I was wearing a grey business suit and (because I am a designer carrying a full artistic licence) a pair of red patent leather shoes.

Mr John entered the lift. Looked at my shoes. Shit, I thought, gonna get fired!

Mr John just said 'Liverpool fan, eh?' To which I had to reply 'no sir, Donny Rovers sir!'.
As I left the lift, he said 'I love the shoes'.

Littlewoods was a very interesting company. Deliberately not smart and not stylish, it appealed to the 'lower classes', and didn't make them feel uncomfortable. Their main cash earner was football pools, then mail order catalogues, and then the chain stores. There was always a feeling that the High Street stores were there to lose a bit of money for the group to reduce its tax bill. Well maybe, but it was real work for us folks involved in it.

Littlewoods was nominally a PLC (Public Liability Company, shares supposedly traded on the open market), but you could only buy or sell shares if you were a member of the Moores family. Mr John was getting on, and was trying to figure out his succession. Various sons were tried out as Managing Director, and all failed. The company then went through a succession of MDs brought in fom outside, none of whom lasted a year.

In the background, I had first come to Liverpool through various community schemes. One of the great supporters of community activity in Liverpool was John Junior (son of Mr John). He had been tried as MD and failed. But he used to host a monthly lunch for community groups on the executive floor of the HQ building. I got invited to one of these. I don't think JJ knew that I was actually working for the enemy company.

And the guys in my department (Gordon, Clive, where are you now?) were most interested in knowing where I'd been that day when I disappeared for two or three hours. I was only upstairs.

I've kind of lost track of where Littlewoods is at now - I suspect that it's all been (or is being) sold off. But it was good fun while it lasted, you could wear red patent leather shoes and get away with it!

Cured!

Didn't know I was ill didya? Well, I wasn't ill exactly, but I was suffering from a bit of a problem.

Three nights ago as I was getting ready for bed, I discovered the sudden appearance of what could well have been a third testicle (or a tumour of course - I'm not one to look on the bright side generally). I went to the doctor's the next morning and he said he reckoned it was an abscess. He said it would grow rapidly for a few days, probably hurt like hell and then explode. If I was lucky I would be able to get to the doctor when it had ripened, and he would lance it.

I was told to visit the clinic daily to have a magnesium dressing applied. This morning, the nurse said that the doc wanted to inspect the progress of my new toy, but he was working the evening shift so could I come back later. Okey dokey. I trotted down there at about five pee emm, and the doc was disappointed that the thing wasn't bigger and more painful. He said he still thought it was definitely an abscess, but wanted to get a second opinion. He tried to phone a specialist at Rashid Hospital's Emergency Department to see what could be done. Nobody was answering the phone though, so my doc asked me to come back or phone in an hour or two. I gave the doc my number just in case he felt inclined to use it, and retired to Jebel Ali Club (which is conveniently located next door to the clinic), for a pint and some food.

I was just starting on my second pint when the doc called. He'd spoken to the specialist, who was willing to have a look at the thing this evening, and possibly drain it tomorrow morning. I started to protest a little bit about the timing of it (I didn't tell him that I wanted to watch Liverpool v Chelski later that night), and the doc said fine, I could wait 28 days for an outpatient appointment, but I might be seriously unwell by then.

So I abandon the second pint (absolutely unheard of!), whizz round to the clinic to get the reference letter from the doc, grab a cab, pick up BetterArf en route, and head off to Rashid Hospital. Rashid H is in the centre of Dubai, sometimes a 25 minute drive from Jebel Ali, but on this occasion an agonising 40 minutes.

We wander into Accident and Emergency, which was fairly crowded but quiet. Not much like ER or Boston Whatnot - no drunks or junkies, no fighting or abuse. Just calm. And there were 3 or 4 cops around the place (there is actually a mini police station at Rashid Hospital).

I get to see the specialist fairly quickly (within 40 minutes), he has a grope of my lump, declares it to be an abscess and says he will drain it straightaway. I had to wait a wee while until a bed was available in the treatment room, and then it was all systems go. First of all they sprayed vast amounts of a freezing spray onto the scrotum, and then I think they injected a little local anaeasthetic. Then he made a little cut and squeezed all the goo out.

'Khalas' he says 'all done!', pats me on the chest and disappears, leaving another guy to clean up the mess. It was all over in about five minutes. But then I had to hold a gauze pad onto the wound until it stopped bleeding. The other guy kept coming back every five minutes to check if the bleeding had stopped. It hadn't. After about twenty minutes of this, the specialist came back and did something that seemed to stem the flow, and then they tried a few dozen alternative methods of trying to bandage the thing. It's a bit of a tricky location to get anything to grip firmly, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Eventually I'm fixed up, given a prescription for about a hundred painkillers a day (codeine I think), and shuffle off to find BetterArf, who is mightily relieved that I'm not dead.

So I've got rid a lump that didn't hurt, and now I've got a groin that hurts like @#!&.

An aside - I was supposed to be meeting a friend of mine. He's an exiled South African who has lived in Hollywood, is now based in Australia, and spends eleven months of the year travelling the world painting Impressionist paintings. In short, a natural Chelski fan. I called him when I was on the way to the doctor's to say something had cropped up and I had to go somewhere but I would try to get back in time for the match. He was a bit concerned, but it's kinda hard to explain in a brief phone call. As soon as I got out of A & E (the hospital one, not the booze shop), I called him again, explained I'd just had a little operation, and was returning to Jebel Ali ASAP. He said 'oh man, they're not showing it live down there - I'm at Scarlett's in the Emirates Towers - kick off's in ten minutes'.

I could have made it, but both BetterArf and Heroic Self were a bit tired, so we decided to be sensible and head off home. And then stay up till gone midnight writing this silly article.