Yesterday, I happened upon this rather amusing feature from The Guardian's beer correspondent, Ben McFarland, in which he recreated the fixtures of the current EURO 2008 Football Championships using representative beers from each of the competing countries.
The results show that beer (or, I should say, a nation's beer-making excellence) is an even worse predictor of football performance than my esteemed comrade, The Swordsman.
Still, it was a lot of fun, and quite educational - and it left me with a torturing thirst. Check it out.
CCTV5, by the way, just got even more shit. I was, for once, winning my battle against the soporific magic of The Man-Eating Sofa..... but effing CCTV5 managed to lose the picture feed (twice, or was it thrice?), blacking out a good three-quarters of the 2nd half of last night's semi-final between Turkey and Germany.
They managed to miss all of the goals.
They managed to make the blackouts even longer by allowing their studio pundits to wrap up whatever they were saying - often rather long-windedly - before restoring the picture onscreen.
And when they did finally get the picture back for good - some time after the final whistle - they didn't show any highlights of the game, or even the goals. (They had managed to show replays of 2 of the 3 goals they'd missed during the brief periods when they were managing to provide live coverage, but Germany's second strike is still unknown to me.)
Ah yes, and I'd missed the first half anyway - because my alarm clock had failed to go off.
A pity, because it looks as if the Turks really made quite a fight of it. I will have to try to catch today's daytime re-rerun (although CCTV5 being the bunch of assclowns that they are, they've probably moved it to a completely different time, just for today).
For tonight's semi (and Sunday's final) I think I'm going to have to try and find somewhere that has a reliable satellite link to show the game with English-language commentary (and continuous display of score and time elapsed, and sensible use of replays, and coherent half-time/end-of-game highlights, and no blackouts....).
And don't forget to leave your comments on my Euro Football Championships thread (now running at over 50 contributions).
2 comments:
I don't think that was their fault to be honest. Same problems seemed to be faced by the online commentators I was watching - they ended up having to rely on a Turkish radio commentator, and a quick translator, for much of the second half.
Yes, I gather the problem was caused by thunderstorms around the stadium. The Chinese boys didn't deal with it very well, though. No replays??!!
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