Carrying on from Berlin (The Orient Nerds’ Summer Holiday Part 1: Ein Euro-Fußball-Abenteuer in Deutschland- Berlin) Part 2 of our Euro 2024 adventure saw us head down south to the Bavarian City of Munich. Sunday morning and it was up and out early for us as we wanted to make sure we got to the station […]
Ever since our honeymoon, which we of course spent at the World Cup in Brazil, the missus and I have developed a particular penchant for attending the major football tournaments when they come around. Our usual approach is to pick some location(s) in the first week of the tournament (as the better half says, when […]
Game 3: Spain v Costa Rica Al Thumama Stadium With our next match a 7pm kick-off and the fact that our first two days had been completely dominated by football-watching, we decided that we ought to have a stroll and see what Doha was really like. We walked down from our apartment to Souq Waqif, […]
Game 1: Netherlands v Senegal Al Thumama Stadium Al Thumama Stadium before The Netherlands v Senegal match After watching about half an hour of the England v Iran game, a sizeable chunk of which was taken up by treatment for the Iran goalkeeper after a clash of heads with his own defender, the continuous replays […]
So football didn’t come home in the end, instead it proved to be a fairly predictable defeat that not only punctured the feelgood vibes that most of the country has been enjoying, but brought us all crashing back down to earth with a bump. That the defeat ultimately came via a penalty shootout felt almost […]
So, have we all recovered from Wednesday night then? For only the second time in their entire footballing history England will play in the final of a major tournament. In achieving that Gareth Southgate and his players are helping long-suffering England fans to banish memories of all those glorious failures of the past, especially those […]
I ended last week’s post by suggesting that it was now or never for England at a major tournament, that: “If the Three Lions are ever to truly blossom into the top team we all hope they can be, then beating the Germans, even on penalties, feels like an essential step on the way. We […]
On the face of it playing a 24-team finals tournament using 12 different venues spread across a continent in June and July 2020 was always going to be logistically challenging. However, factor in a global pandemic which brought the world as we knew it let alone international travel and football to a halt from which […]
Love him, hate him, regard him as one of, if not the greatest players of all time, or simply a cheat and someone whose behaviour and lifestyle inevitably destroyed him, no one will ever forget Diego Armando Maradona and the mark he made on the history of football, or indeed on society as whole. Like […]
Anyone who has read these pages in previous seasons won’t have found it a particularly tough stretch to draw the conclusion that I am far from being a fan of the seemingly too frequent and often pointless International breaks during the domestic season. As much as I love the major International tournaments in the summer […]
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