Sunday, 21 May 2017

End so season...and Algeria

Day -389 WorldCup2018

I think of stuff all day and then late at night try to put it all together. Or what I remember.

Final day of the English season became even more boringly predictable when Liverpool went 1-0 up just before halftime against Middlesbrough. From then on the relegated team with absolute nothing to play for tried to put up a fight but by the end both teams were playing at pre-season friendly pace. Any talk of Liverpool putting in a great Champions League spot-clinching performance would be a little exaggerated. Middlesbrough had absolutely no motivation to play today. Memories of my argument about the English press making a big deal of England winning the 5th test of the Ashes series when they were already 4-0 down came to mind. The Australians could be said to have been playing for the pride of a whitewash, and the Middlesbrough players for their own pride in the final match in the Premier League, but pride goes out the window once you are losing and the fight just isn't there.

Real Madrid won the Spanish league, even though Barcelona tried to make it interesting by coming back from 0-2 against Eibar to win 4-2. It wasn't even really that interesting because Real were winning comfortably in Malaga. So Barca shouldn't even have bothered. Maybe pride did come into play. A loss at home to Eibar as Real were crowned champions might have been too embarrassing.
It's a holiday here tomorrow, when Canadians celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday by not going to work and buying cheap fireworks and letting them off in any open space and many back yards. I believe that if it is really a celebration of a British monarch then the Canadian government should insist with it's British counterpart that there is English football played on the Monday. What is a lazy, stay at home morning without football on TV? There is nothing on tomorrow. Next week, on the English Bank Holiday Monday, English people get to watch the richest football match in the world, the Championship play-off final. What a great day: get up late, eat a combination of breakfast and lunch, go to the pub/friends house/have friends come over and have a few afternoon drinks while watching Huddersfield and Reading battle it out for the right to battle against relegation from the Premier League next season. But they will earn a lot of money doing it. We don't even have an MLS match tomorrow, nothing.

Last night our choice of family movie was the story of a man from Algeria walking his cow to Paris to enter it in the Paris Agricultural Show. It was silly, heart warming and entertaining. And it reminded me of one of the best memories of the last World Cup: how much fun it was to watch Algeria play, how much energy and passion they played with. And how it allowed to call upon my Algerian roots and be a fan. They're in a tough spot in qualifying this time round and need a bit of a miracle to make it. So I might just have to be happy with what happened in 2014.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2npnALmX0G0&app=desktop

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