I recently heard about the Unofficial Football World Championships. The idea is quite simple. Starting from the first international football match in 1872, between Scotland and England which was hosted around the corner from my flat, a boxing like title could be claimed by the victors of the each game. So England were world champions in 1966 then Scotland won in 1967 making them the unofficial world champions. The next team to beat Scotland (which was Russia who lost it to Austria) takes the title away from them an so on.

Sides are awarded one ranking point for every title match victory, these points are then used to decide who has been the most successful. The strange part of this is that it proves Scotland to be the easily the best international football side ever.

So this is what leads me to proclaim Georgia vs Uruguay as the most important football game this month as Uruguay are the current world champions having claimed the title off Romania. The even more interesting part is that Georgia are in Scotland’s qualifying group for Euro 2008, and after this friendly they meet in Georgia’s next game in March. So if Georgia win they will be the world champions. This sets everything up perfectly for me to watch Scotland vs Georgia at Hampden in March.

I could be watching the world champions.

This is him at the Beckhams party (before the Hungary game):

Here’s his goal and celebration uneditted from BBC last night:

And finally from the Crouch videos here’s a music mix with his celebration:

In other news a waaaayyy better England tune has been made by these guys for the world cup:

Extremely important advice and recommendations to be passed on to wives, girlfriends, fiancés, mothers, sisters, daughters, etc. (to all women in general).

These rules are to be communicated prior to the World Cup in June/July this year…

LIST OF RULES

1. From 9 June to 9 July 2006, you should read the sports section of the newspaper so that you are aware of what is going on regarding the World Cup, and that way you will be able to join in the conversations. If you fail to do this, then you will be looked at in a bad way, or you will be totally ignored. DO NOT complain about not receiving any attention.

2. During the World Cup, the television is mine, at all times, without any exceptions. If you even take a glimpse of the remote control, you will lose it (your eye).

3. If you have to pass by in front of the TV during a game, I don’t mind, as long as you do it crawling on the floor and without distracting me. If you decide to stand nude in front of the TV, make sure you put clothes on right after because if you catch a cold, I wont have time to take you to the doctor or look after you during the World Cup month.

4. During the games I will be blind, deaf and mute, unless I require a refill of my drink or something to eat. You are out of your mind if you expect me to listen to you, open the door, answer the telephone, or pick up the baby that just fell from the second floor….it wont happen.

5. It would be a good idea for you to keep at least 2 six packs in the fridge at all times, as well as plenty of things to nibble on, and please do not make any funny faces to my friends when they come over to watch the games. In return, you will be allowed to use the TV between 12am and 6am, unless they replay a good game that I missed during the day.

6. Please, please, please!! if you see me upset because one of my teams is losing, DO NOT say “get over it, its only a game”, or “don’t worry, they’ll win next time”. If you say these things, you will only make me angrier and I will love you less. Remember, you will never ever know more about football than me and your so called “words of encouragement” will only lead to a break up or divorce.

7. You are welcome to sit with me to watch one game and you can talk to me during halftime but only when the commercials are on, and only if the halftime score is pleasing me. In addition, please note I am saying “one” game, hence do not use the World Cup as a nice cheesy excuse to “spend time together”.

8. The replays of the goals are very important. I don’t care if I have seen them or I haven’t seen them, I want to see them again. Many times.

9. Tell your friends NOT to have any babies, or any other child related parties or gatherings that requires my attendance because:
a) I will not go,
b) I will not go, and
c) I will not go.

10. But, if a friend of mine invites us to his house on a Sunday to watch a game, we will be there in a flash.

11. The daily World Cup highlights show on TV every night is just as important as the games themselves. Do not even think about saying “but you have already seen this… why don’t you change the channel to something we can all watch??”, the reply will be: “Refer to Rule #2 of this list”.

12. And finally, please save your expressions such as “Thank God the World Cup is only every 4 years”. I am immune to these words, because after this comes the Champions League, Italian League, Spanish League, Premier League, etc etc.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Regards

THE OFFSIDE RULE EXPLAINED FOR GIRLS

You’re in a shoe shop, second in the queue for the till. Behind the shop assistant on the till is a pair of shoes which you have seen and which you must have.
The female shopper in front of you has seen them also and is eyeing them with desire.
Both of you have forgotten your purses.
It would be totally rude to push in front of the first woman if you had no money to pay for the shoes.
The shop assistant remains at the till waiting.
Your friend is trying on another pair of shoes at the back of the shop and sees your dilemma.
She prepares to throw her purse to you.
If she does so, you can catch the purse, then walk round the other shopper and buy the shoes.
At a pinch she could throw the purse ahead of the other shopper and, *whilst it is in flight* you could nip around the other shopper, catch the purse and buy the shoes.
Always remembering that until the purse has *actually been thrown* it would be plain wrong to be forward of the other shopper.

There you go poppet.

However if you were loitering by the till checking out the gift cards you are technically NOT INTEREFERING WITH PURCHASE and can be in that position when the ‘purse is thrown’. The purse must be allowed to fall to the floor before you can pick it up and buy the shoes though.

ANY QUESTIONS?

Please forward them to the guy at the back of this picture.

Yep, that takes care of that karma.

Above was shamelessly stolen from the spirt of football blog

I’ll be able to watch every game of the world cup now to keep up the tradition from my student days.

And if you were wondering I am going to France for a week (after the world cup) so I’m not using all my holidays this year for watching football alone!

We started a league at my work so I thought it would be good if we had our own league as well. Metro are running it (it’s free) so it’s all online.

Once you have logged in and entered your team, click on the ‘Leagues’ link you can find on the left of the page. Now enter the code 12861-3709 to join the private league.

Good luck!

So I’ve changed my mind again and have decided that making something in Java would be more beneficial then spending hours (3 days, 12 hours so far) playing WoW. So I’m resurrecting my previous idea of making a website that allows you to rate how unattractive English Premier League footballers are.

I’ve bought a domain for it called: www.theuglygame.com and put up a small proof of concept for the moment which is tracking ratings in the background. The scale at the moment will go from Beckham to Beardsley as they seem to be the best yardsticks to use for a scale.

With this information I will then make teams of the week etc, perhaps even send an award out to the ugliest player in the premiership for a laugh. TUG Player of the Year and TUG Youth Player of the Year etc.

Writing the application should be simple enough, keeping it maintained with all the transfers etc will be a pain though so I’ll need help at first getting the database full of all the players from each team and a lovely photo of each of them. The site will not make any money as then I could get sued for making profit out of laughing at Wayne Rooney’s face or something similar. Plus I’m not in the mood to get images for every player so I intend to take them off the clubs websites or a news source. All of this could lead to nasty letter being sent to my good self so making absolutely no cash from this is paramount.

For the Geeks: I’ll be using hibernate as an ORM solution for this project and will be testing out the new feature of Eclipse using Java. My webhost runs a resin server without EJB support so it’s just plain servlets and JSPs and whatever Component framework spams news sites enough to get my attention (Struts, Spring, Tapestry etc).

So if you fancy helping me populate and maintain the database or fancy helping with any aspect of the site then send me an email to joe at this websites domain name.

Cheers,
J.

I will only listen to The Beatles for an entire month….it’s going to be great.

Big thanks to all the great responses from my friends who support other clubs: Rangers, Everton, Man Utd, Arsenal, Motherwell and er… Montrose. No thanks to the Chelsea.

Here’s one trophy you fuckers can’t buy.

J.