Fiendish Games

After a Friday night spent gaming I was feeling a bit rough the following morning for reasons unknown. I initially put it down to the 400cwt of crisps I consumed, but it might have been the beer, though I had just the one bottle. It was an Indian Pale Ale from a very small independent brewery called BrewDog and I was basically attracted to it because it was called "Punk IPA" and the label basically said "if you are a lager drinker, FOAD, matey, because this brew is too good for you."

Well, it made me laugh, anyway, and more to the point it made me buy it, along with a bottle of their "Paradox" stout.

As it happens, I liked the stout a lot more than the IPA. The IPA was very smooth and crisp going down, but left a very sour after-taste which I suppose will take some getting used to.

I went back to Odd-bins last Friday to get some more of the stout and was surprised to find it was twice the price of every other bottled beer on display. When I examined the bottle in more detail it turns out that the stout was 10% alcohol by volume, which makes it the strongest beer I have ever tasted, but oddly enough it did not taste thick and syrupy like, say, Old Peculier or barley wine. It's also matured in malt whisky barrels, which probably helps.

It's a limited edition stout, worth breaking out for special occasions.

Anyway, on the Saturday after the gaming session I was feeling a bit rough. Maybe I didn't have just one bottle the night before, maybe I had the stout as well, which would explain a lot.

Be that as it may, I slept most of the day and missed the FA Cup Final. The days when this was the second most exciting football day of the year (England v Scotland being the most exciting) have long since gone, thanks to the glut of live matches we have now on TV, but I would have liked to have watched it if only to see two teams who really care about the trophy competing to win it.

My ennui at the prospect of seeing one of the so called "Big Three plus Liverpool" doing battle with each other is such that I was seriously considering giving the European Champions-Plus-Numerous-Runners-Up Final a miss, even though - as Rory Bremner aptly put it, it contained one foreign-owned club full of overseas players taking on another foreign-owned club stuffed full of overseas players in what was being billed as a uniquely all-English final.

Part of the problem was that I wanted them both to lose. This is going to sound heretical coming from a Spurs supporter but I actually don't mind Arsenal too much; they play great football and Arsene Wenger is so cash-strapped in relation to his competitors that he can't even afford to replace those spectacles of his that only allow him to see transgressions committed against his players rather than by them.

I also have a soft spot for Liverpool, partly as a result of an infection picked up from Oakes, a keen Liverpool supporter who is probably going to have to top himself when ManUre finally rack up more title wins than Liverpool (in about 4 seasons time).

ManUre I hate because, although they generally play good football, they have had what seems like the whole of the English press on their side for the last 50 years, deifying them. Plus they have all those glory hunters following them.

I suppose I ought to hate Chelsea because they have bought success, but I am not bothered about that. I have always disliked them for their glamorous association with the King's Road and the fact that any visiting celebrity who gets dragged along to watch "soccah" is always taken to Stamford Bridge rather than Upton Park, but most of all I hate them more than Arsenal because Spurs so rarely beat them. Spurs rarely beat Arsenal either, but that's because they have always been a strong side but Spurs could not even beat Chelsea when the likes of Dave Beasant were playing for them.

So, I started watching the Euro Final just to see whether I could get interested in it, and to see whether I would end up reluctantly rooting for someone.

The first-half was embarrassingly one-sided and it was the prospect of Avram Grant getting it in the neck from the British press for "not being able to win the big one" that swung my sympathies Chelsea's way, and I was quite chuffed when they came out in the second half and actually started passing the ball instead of hoofing it up to Mad-dog Drogba all the time. I don't suppose anything is going to dent the Sir Alex Ferguson legend in the eyes of the British press, but it would have been nice for them to have been obliged to explain how the Old Master got outwitted.

Sadly, it was not to be but it was a fairly enthralling match that came to a most satisfying conclusion.

First we had John Terry, a man who probably even his own mother regards as an arrogant dick who should have been suffocated at birth, kicking off the whole string of events that got Mad-dog Drogba sent off for a girlie slap.

As the self-appointed guardian of all that is finest about the English game, John Terry felt compelled to offer his strident views to Tevez on just how possession should be returned to the opposition after the ball has been kicked out of play so an injured player can be seen to.

Seeing as Tevez had done nothing wrong and the match was, in any case, draining away to a mutually agreed draw, this naturally got up the noses of the ManUre players.

I always get the impression that Mad-dog Drogba would travel to the ends of the earth to express a didactic opinion even if it were, for instance, on the sexual needs of white European lesbian midgets, and so I was not surprised when he lived up to Rooney's pre-match claim that he (Drogba) is not right in the head. And Rooney should know ...

At this point chickens prepared to come home to roost.
+

It went to penalties and for a while it looked like it was going to be an ideal result. Ronaldo, a lad with a face one could never tire of punching, was in the frame to be the man who lost ManUre the European Cup. Serves him right for being absurdly talented, self-consciously good-looking, a bit too cocky for his own good and, most of all, foreign.

What could possibly be better?

Wait! It's John Terry trooping up to take the "winning" spot kick because Drogba was no longer on the field.

Why was he no longer on the field? Because Terry had started a needless argument because of his demented need to dictate how everyone else should behave. Sophocles would have appreciated the drama.

I presume most of us know what happened next. As Frank Lumphard put it, "It took bottle to stand up and take that penalty kick."

Er ... except he didn't stand up and take it, he fell over and took it, and missed.

Nice one, JT. At least he did not point at the turf like that over-rated dead-ball specialist David Beckham did when he skied one over the bar in a crucial penalty shoot-out.

So it came to pass that Ryan Giggs, who must be some kind of saint because I can't find anything to dislike about him after his long career at ManUre, scored what effectively was the winning goal for ManUre on the occasion when he set a record for most appearances at the club, while the "goals for hire" forward Nicolas Anelka failed to score for Chelsea.

Sport as drama. Somehow it still has the ability to hook you back in after you've sworn off it.