Beach Volleyball At Horse Guards Parade
Yesterday, I spent a pleasant afternoon at the beach volleyball on Horse Guards Parade.
Note :-
- The advert for New Zealand on top of New Zealand House.
- In four hours, we saw four matches. The Netherlands won two and Venezuela and Italy one each. Sadly the British women lost to the Italians. But the Dutch beating the Germans was probably very satisfying for them.
- The food was no better than at the Lee Valley.
- The weather wasn’t good, but everybody carried on regardless. Even the Italian and Australian girls, who obviously train in the sun!
- I’ve put most of the comments in the pictures.
In some ways the stadium itself is a star. It just shows how with careful design, you can build a temporary 16,000-seater stadium. How many other sports could put on a championship in such a stadium? It would be ideal for tennis, some equestrian sports like dressage, boxing and martial arts, to name just a few. The only problem in the UK would be the rain.
Professional Theft – Dutch Footballers at Euro 2012
They have definitely underperformed in this tournament, as they are ranked fourth in the World at the moment.
I wonder what the man on the Amsterdam Omnibus is saying?
It’s All Double Dutch to Me
Some things in International football are always the same. For a start England always lose penalty shoot-outs and various Latin teams are good at faking injuries and being badly tackled.
Another was that The Netherlands always played in orange.
But not tonight!
As Portugal are playing in red and Holland in black with orange trim, from the other side of my room, I thought Portugal had scored first. But it was The Netherlands!
Rinaldo also seems to be trying to get the award for the most over-rated player at the Championship.
Unfortunately for the Dutch, he got very much better!
The Racism Has Started
Why did the old farts in charge of UEFA take the tournament to Poland and the Ukraine, when they knew it might happen?
This incident involving the Dutch is actually in Poland.
I don’t think that the Dutch govenment will take this lying down.
The Netherlands are playing their first match against Denmark tomorrow.
I wonder what the odds are that we don’t through the first round without racist trouble.
A Place for the Little Ships
In the Diamond Jubilee flotilla today, there are about forty or so of the Little Ships of Dunkirk. If you look at the Wikipedia entry, you’ll see that some unusual boats took part in 1940. What surprised me was that 39 Dutch coasters that had escaped the Germans also took part and rescued about seven percent of the total of the troops brought home.
Getting Emotional
I can sometimes get very emotional and start crying quietly. I did this morning in Carluccio’s in Islington. I’ve talked of this before. All I was doing as reading the colour magazine in The Times and especially the piece about some of the people who had won medals at the 1948 Games after suffering badly in the war.
The star of those Games was the Dutch female athlete, Fanny Blankers-Koen, who won four gold medals. The Dutch presented her with a new bicycle.
One other competitor I’d heard of was the Hungarian marksman, Karoly Takacs, who after losing his right hand to a grenade accident, learned to shoot left handed and won gold. He also won gold four years later in Helsinki.
One amazing tale concerns Jim Halliday, who fought in the retreat from Dunkirk and later was captured by the Japanese in 1942. On release from the his POW camp, he weighed just 27 Kg. He then won silver or bronze, depending on the source, in the wrestling. Sadly he died in 2007, so won’t be able to present any medals. Perhaps, he has a son or daughter, who can be asked!
And people moan about, VAT on pies and pasties. They don’t know they’re alive.
To me though, the crying may also be about my eyes telling me that they have now wetted up and are not as bone dry as they have been in recent months. Two years ago, a nurse treated them and said they were the driest eyes she’d ever seen. She gave me some artificial tears, but I can’t put anything in my eyes.
It’s not as if this day is anything significant in my life, as my son died on the 23rd, not the 30th.
Perhaps, I’m just one of those people, who needs to cry!
Has Stuart Pearce Done Enough?
Certainly in my opinion, as his other team beat the Belgians 4-0 on the night.
The Orange Train for the Dutch at the London Olympics
London’s new Overground system is four lines, with a fifth to be added in October, later this year.
The Dutch will feel at home on these trains, as the colour scheme of the trains and stations is predominately orange and the line is shown in orange on the tube map.
The major line, the North London line, also travels across North London from the Olympic site at Stratford and connects to buses and trains to get to the Heineken House at Alexandra Palace. If you go further west you get to Hampstead Heath and Kew Gardens, two of the best places in London to get over a hangover.
I suspect that getting to Alexandra Palace during the Olympics may be difficult, as the two train routes from Kings Cross St. Pancras station, where the Olympic Javelin Shuttles arrive, the suburban rail to Alexandra Palace station and the Piccadilly line to Wood Green station, are crowded most of the time, even without the Games. If you can get to Alexandra Palace station, it’s a much shorter walk up the hill to the Palace.
So a better alternative might be to take the North London line from Stratford to Highbury and Islington and then take the suburban rail from there to Alexandra Palace station. It will certainly avoid the inevitable crush and wait at Kings Cross.
The Netherlands May Yet Win the 1978 World Cup
The Times has a small piece about how the military governments of Peru and Argentina stitched up the 1978 World Cup Finals in Argentina.
Search the Internet and there’s this article in the Buenos Aires Herald.
Here’s an extract.
The news is that FIFA, soccer’s world body, could annul Argentina’s 1978 World Cup victory. That may be putting it too harshly, but they are focusing on Argentina’s arranged 6-0 victory against Peru in the semifinal group to reach the final and keep out Brazil.
The report states evidence from Peru’s goalkeeper in that match, Argentine-born Ramón Quiroga — originally the main suspect — that a lot of his players played below form, not the strongest team was picked and the defence “did not stop anything”, that then military government president, General Jorge Videla was in Peru’s changing room talking to several players before the match and that a former Peruvian senator, Genaro Ledesma Izquieta, a political prisoner in Argentina at the time, said he was going to be freed if Argentina scored at least four goals more than Peru.
Whether FIFA will act thirty-four years later is a very awkward question. On the other hand, it was posted on an Argentinian website.
According to the report, FIFA is also annoyed that they have named their football championship after the General Belgrano.
But FIFA has also asked the Argentine FA (AFA) why the current closing tournament has been named after an Argentine navy ship (Crucero General Belgrano) sunk by the British during the 1982 Malvinas War. This could be sanctioned under FIFA statutes which forbid any political significance of tournament names. The name was “suggested” by the Argentine government which pays for the TV rights of soccer matches under the “Free soccer for all” programme which could also be looked on as government interference.
The AFA (and/or the government) however has decided to continue to use the ship’s name for the current tournament. What has, and will save Argentina from possible sanctions is that AFA chief Julio Grondona is FIFA’s first vice-president and is close to President Joseph Blatter.
I think the Falklands are the least of the Argentinian President’s problems. I suspect that the average Argentinian might like the Falklands oil, but take away free football on television and the riot would be extremely large.
The Anonymous Widower 