The only way Lampard 'goal' could not count

Here is the pokerknave.com official analysis on why England could not win:

1. John Terry destabilized the the team with his attempted coup.

2. Rooney should have been dropped to the bench.

3. The press were determined to upset the players with all the WAG nonsense.

4. Capello didn’t complete his homework on Germany.

5. Too many crucial injuries at the back.

6. For too many years England play one half good the other half bad. Consistency is needed.

7. The players are not hungry enough.

8. The goalkeeper question keeps on coming up.

9. Lack of firepower up front.

10. Midfield incompetence and had light weight skills compared to other nations.

11. Players are definately over-rated and unwilling to play for each other.

12. If Lampards goal stood it would have been different, however, I am not sure if the result would not have remained the same.

The first real opposition in the World Cup and we were undone like a tin of sardines. Comprehensive and completely. This is worrying on many fronts. We were supposed to have world class players in our side and unless Rooney was carrying a big injury then all of them did not come up to scratch. In fact our best player in the tournament might well have been David James who used to have the nickname Calamity James!

All four matches were awful and for English reporters crying out for goal line technology may be doing the sport great dis-service since the line for using technology may have no bounds. Would it be used for off side decisions? What about controversial fouls? All these incidences can change a game and once goal line technology is introduced it can ruin the game as well as improve it.

In my view we need to keep the game as it is because not every team and association can afford goal line technology and this will make the game different and longer and we do not want to end up as NFL Superbowl et al, with hours and hours of stop start game, with loads of adverts in between and some ropey dopey half time entertainment. Nothing wrong with NFL but it is not the game we want football to be like.

Ours is a very simple game that can be played by anyone around the world without too much overly expensive equipment. The NFL is not transferable because it is all about minute details and other nerdy stuff as well as the actual game.

Now that I have put the world to right with my post match analysis, I will continue watching the World Cup 2010 although I am now in the red with my betting which is due to some overly optimistic bets because I got bored. Not a great advert for consistency I know but I could not help myself and at the time it sounded like a good idea,

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World Cup South Africa 2010

‘The beautiful game’ as Pele called football (soccer if you are a US person brought up to believe handling a ball constantly is ‘football’, and not ‘handball’…), about to go ballistic in a major festival of the game which for a long time will mean wall-2-wall football. This will be like a drunk being let loose into a liquor store.

Partners who do not like the game will fume and get bitter, politicians will jump on any bandwagon going especially if their country is doing well and UK publicans will pray that the English team will single handling resuscitate the brewing industry by getting to the final and possibly winning it!

Can I make one prediction at this point – if England win the World Cup then England will be the place to be. It could revive the economics of this nation. It has been proved by numerous study that a nation doing well in some form of sporting endeavour has a knock on effect on the economics of the country involved. That is why the former Eastern Bloc countries spent so much time and energy on sporting achievements.

I think it was George Orwell that said ‘sport was war by another name…’, and Nelson Mandela certainly used sport (1995 Rugby World Cup) to help consolidate the relatively peaceful transfer of South Africa from apartheid to democracy. It is very unlikely that South Africa can do this again as the skill level between South Africa and say Brazil or Spain is far to great for something like this.

Which brings me onto poker. The World Series of Poker 2010 will be taking a major back seat as nothing can beat the religion that is football. As Liverpool legendary manager Bill Shankly once said football was more important than life and death. Like poker football manages to be more than a simple game. It represents a philosophy – just like poker.

Football is about community and kindred spirit in a common goal. Poker is naked capitalism and capitalism as practice by an individual who has nothing more than the knowledge of the cards he or she has. Football is about teamwork and although an individual can alter a game it is on the whole about a team mastering another team. Poker deals with wealth accumulation – yes there can be collusion but this is seen as cheating.

I have always been fascinated by the fact that a large number of US Presidents have been pretty good poker players – apparently. This maybe folklore to encapsulate the nature of US culture, but, it does make sense as the US of A was always seen to be the bulwark of Western 20th Century capitalism. In fact President Nixon was supposed to have financed his first political campaign for office via the winnings he made playing poker. It was not only because of Watergate was he called ‘Tricky Dicky’.

In both of these pursuits there are other similarities in the sense that both have very simple rules. Therefore everyone can learn to play. The difficulty comes in learning to win and win consistently. Undoubtedly there will be an element of luck, but, luck overtime does even its self out. The skill in poker is not to make mistakes and give away your chips. Just as in poker you do seem to see the same names at the top on the various trophy and league tables.

The big difference is that poker encourages mis-information. Poker demands that you tell lies and make your opponent believe you have a bad hand when you have a good hand, or, that you have a good hand when you have a bad hand. In football you cannot say that Didier Drogba is injured then bring him out next day fresh as a daisy, there would be enquiry etc. However, you can use mind games to get an advantage as practice by Alex Ferguson or Jose Morinho. These guys will say things which can un-nerve opposing teams or motivate their own teams to win games, a very subtle art.

So that makes the difference between the two games which are very similar and the way online poker firms have been pushing any form of linkage between the World Cup and poker it has captured the mind and soul of the world and I for one will be loving the month of June.

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Do you sometimes have one of those weeks when you wonder if you are living in some parallel universe where everything is not exactly in the right place? Well my friends I have had one of those and my head feels like a punch bag in Mike Tyson’s gym.

It didn’t start well, I got a call from my Manchester squeeze telling me that my good friend Eddie has only a few weeks to live and if I want to have somewhere to stay when I go to the funeral then I better be nice to her or my squeeze will make my life living hell.

I bit below the belt but it is what I expect from her since she left her husband and expected me to move in with her. It ain’t going to happen because I got things to do and moving into a flat with neurotic women is not on the agenda by a long shot. So I will have to be absent until the death or make other arrangements – it is always good to have a plan B.

Next came the ongoing saga over my broadband which is becoming as bore and will eventually lead me to smashing the damn thing and stuff the bill or more sensibly telling Three and Hewlett Packard to take their crappy machinery and sort it out or I will commit justified homicide on their technicians in India and South Africa and trust me I will fly out to those places and shove my date of birth, postal code and product serial number down their procedural throats. It is maddening while you are short stack with a chance of making it to the payday when your computer just freezes up!

Then came the news that a kid I knew committed suicide! He wasn’t an angel but he was only sixteen and somehow you do think that he deserved better than what he got in his short and tragic life. Some say he was bad news but I can only speak as I find, and, he was never disrespectful to me.

In fact I was having one of my sensible moments when he asked me some advice on why people hated him? I sat down and told him that you cannot expect to upset people one minute and then expect them to like you the next. If you do upset people, expect some comeback in whatever form it comes. This is what happens and when you go down that road, you basically leave a bad feeling. He did listen to me and I truly believe he took it onboard what I said to him, but, I fell out with his grandmother over a promise she made on a business matter and that was the last time I spoke to him.

When you hear bad news like that I find it easier to divert attention to objects rather than feelings, and, I decided to play poker as a ‘horse‘. A horse is a player who plays poker for a backer and gets a percentage of the winnings. My reason for this is that I wanted to get into the mind of a stacked player. The result of this exercise is that my ratings is that of a person on ’Super Tilt’. Never really heard the term before but it basically means you have played 8 tournaments and not won a bean and therefore I am rubbish and should try some other method of investing my money.

I then decided to punt heavily on Birmingham City not to lose to Portsmouth in the English Football Association Cup – which is the oldest soccer competition in the world and I have had a decent bet on Birmingham City winning the competition at 33/1! Now Portsmouth is a club in turmoil and Birmingham are not.

Portsmouth is in administration which means they are nearly bankrupt. They have the remarkable distinction of having a Russian oligarch, and, an Arabian sheik as owners’ who didn’t have any money! Birmingham City on the other hand are financially viable, absolutely sae from relegation and are hard to beat. Therefore I pumped heavily that they would not get beaten – Birmingham City lost 2 – 0!

I again decide to play some more online poker. This time I decided to right the wrong of my stats and definitely make the money. Playing Omaha which means I will play super tight and all was going well when I suddenly found myself in position 25 out of 2000+ people, I am about to make the money position when I get silly for some god forsaken and decided to play up my AA 66 which were both suited I lost to a flush and was booted out. I played Texas Hold Em, being a bit erratic but I am OK. Then my Queens was in a race against AK suited, and, AK suited gets his Ace.

So here I am on a Saturday night with a large glass of whiskey in mental anguish when I suddenly read an article that some Mickey Mouse university in Canada states that online poker relieves stress! McGill University must have some dubious research department to come out with this gem of a concept. Now I have searched everywhere for this paper and I am sure it’s out there but it is well hidden and I am now of the opinion that it was sponsored by internetonlinepoker4you.com!

Not wishing to disparage the scientist but when you hear continuous blurb about its conclusion yet no easy access to the actual research paper, alarm bells ring in my head. If I am wrong and the papers are there for all to see – fair play to them. Put if you spend an hour looking for the paper and it still not available but the headline story is everywhere it makes you think, hmmmmm!

Now that I have had my therapeutic whinge I am about to plunge into the relaxing world of suck outs, lose of money and drunkenness – happy days!

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Ali G in Staines

There is a football team called Millwall and they have a reputation for soccer hooliganism. I have witnessed the hooliganism when I was going to a friends wedding and got caught up in a middle of a full scale riot involving Millwall fans, apparently they lost 1 – 0 to Sheffield Wednesday.

Now Millwall are in a fA Cup game with Staines a place made famous by Ali G. Staines is socially a million miles away from Millwall and the residents are up in arms about the potential for trouble involving Millwall fans. So the wags and jokers of Millwall have been ‘winding up’ the residents on the Staines News website, promising murder and mayhem. Some of the comments have been hilarious and will take ages to read which means that it keeps you of the table for ages with constant need for tissues for the tears of laughter. Here are some of the comments, spot the one comment which maybe true?

Superintendent Duncan Greenhalgh said:

I’d just like to remind residents in Wheatsheaf Lane that parking any kind of vehicle in your rear garden is a breach of the road traffic act 1966 and would result in a fixed penalty notice. I personally will be attending a grenade diversity training course that weekend but our community officers will be available to give commendations for the best use of weapons of mass destruction, and geraniums.

November 18, 2009 1:46 PM

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Yep my view is that ‘Concerned Resident’ is the genuine one. Here is the brilliant Ali G doing General Levi’s Incredible and a video of a West Ham United v Millwall riot.