WORLD CUP 2010: ON THE COUCH:Like his native country, then, Didi Hamann has surprised and impressed with his early World Cup form
DAY FIVE, and having loaded our team with Slovakians we assumed our Fantasy World Cup ship would come in. With 93 minutes gone Stephen Alkin thought so too. “Slovakia are just seconds away from the biggest win in their history,” he said as we got our calculator out to tot up the points. “Unless . . . New Zealand . . . score . . . which they haaaaaaaaaave!”
In fairness to Ronnie Whelan, he almost apologised for leading us up the Fantasy garden path by suggesting pre-match that New Zealand were no great shakes, but his intimate knowledge of their inner workings made us trust him implicitly.
“We have them playing 4-3-3 today, but in the two play-off games against Bahrain they went 3-4-3 and 5-2-3,” he said, leaving us half thinking Ronnie needed to get out more.
Didi Hamann had clearly been doing his homework too, which struck us as a bit of a contrast to, say, Patrick Vieira on ITV later in the day: the French lad was hoping Brazil would be “exciting” because they “have a new manager now”. That’d be news to Dunga, appointed to the post in 2006.
Any way, from here on in pundits who make an effort and who actually know what they’re talking about should be referred to as Didi Men, in honour of, well, Didi. We particularly enjoyed his explanation the other night of how the German youth system differs from Britain’s and our own. “Is there a lesson here for the FAI,” asked Bill O’Herlihy.
“Yeah,” said Eamon Dunphy, “move to Germany.”
It’s an option Wolfgang Delaney might ponder, but that’s for another day. For now we’re focused on Didi, not least on his ability to effortlessly pronounce surnames that contain no vowels, ones that leave mere linguistic mortals, like John Giles, having to retrieve their teeth from the studio floor.
Like his native country, then, Didi has surprised and impressed with his early World Cup form, although he still marginally trails Jan Molby in the Wacky Scouse-ish Accent stakes. He’s just ahead of third-placed Ronnie, though.
Portugal v Ivory Coast. Didier Drogba blessed himself when Ronaldo’s shot hit the post. That was about the height of it. As Kevin Keegan might have said when Goliath was knocked out by David, “he’ll be disappointed with that”.
We noted, incidentally, that when the shot rebounded from the woodwork the decibels in the stadium rocketed, prompting an acquaintance to tell us to shut up, that there’s only one thing more annoying than vuvuzelas and that’s people who never shut up whinging about vuvuzelas. It was a fair point, although our hearts go out to the pensioners who, reportedly, rang (a) their cable provider and (b) pest control because they thought (a) the loud buzzing from their telly was an indication it was about to blow up and (b) they were being attacked by a swarm of bees.
By the way, to give our ears a rest we dropped in on BBC 2’s Newsnight, only to see Jeremy Paxman introduce an item on vuvuzelas, which, he told us, “are designed to make a Neapolitan traffic jam sound like Mozart”. And with that he introduced British trumpeter Byron Wallen who attempted to play a tune on one of the damn things. There are, honestly, no words.
Brazil v North Korea. “The biggest mismatch since David picked up his sling,” said Adrian Chiles, maintaining our Goliath theme. Poor old Adrian, by the way, is getting the Robert Green treatment from the English press these days. “Dynamic, thought-provoking, funny . . . Chiles is none of these,” said one merciless reviewer, “his principal achievement has been to make even Grinning Gary Lineker look acceptable.”
What Chilesie needs is Gilesie, a pundit willing to admit that because he knows absolutely nothing about North Korea he’s not in a position to forecast whether they’ll be pummelled. If ITV’s experts know absolutely nothing about a team they’ll just assume they’re The Dog and Duck.
Teams out. “They’re not the tallest but they do love a tackle,” said Ray Houghton of the Koreans, adding that “if Hong and Jong are on their game they might just pose a threat to this Brazilian defence”.
“And there’ll be silence on the streets of Pyongyang as they watch their team in action,” said George Hamilton. Seriously, how can you not love the World Cup?
Anthems time. It was like Jerry Flannery at Croke Park all over again, Jong Tae-se dissolving, enough to leave you in floods yerself.
Game on, Goliath finding David to be a pesky little warrior. A mere 2-1 triumph, we’re loading our Fantasy World Cup team with North Korean midfielders as we speak.
