AlanAllport.Com

The football (or should that be soccer?) World Cup has started in South Africa. The first two games have been played – both ending in draws.

Waiting for the opening England game tonight and also looking forward to Argentina versus Nigeria today also.

It’s a once every four years event that I always enjoy watching so I’m going to try to catch as many games as I can over the next three weeks of the tournament so my work schedule is going to take some sort of battering.

I’m a bit worried about England defensively – we don’t even know who our number one goalkeeper is! The best England teams of the past were built on a solid defence that was marshalled by a very strong and usually vocal personality in goal. This is lacking at the moment.

Up front we definitely have one of the best players in the world right now in Wayne Rooney, so if the service is good enough then I’m sure he will be. And we have some decent ball-playing and creative midfielders in the likes of Stephen Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Gareth Barry to provide the supply for the attack – it’s just that defence. We’ll see.

The opening game between South Africa and Mexico seemed to be a good one. Only managed to catch some of the radio commentary on this and catch some tv highlights later. It ended in a 1 – 1 draw with the hosts South Africa scoring a superb goal that was equalised late on by Mexico. Mexico had the lion’s share of the possession in the first half but, typically for Mexico, didn’t really have a cutting edge to convert that into goals.

The second game between France and Uruguay wasn’t really a particularly good match. I was able to watch all of this. I wanted Uruguay to win – I really like their striker Diego Forlan. Anyway a fairly lacklustre 0 – 0 draw was all this game could muster. France were unable to make anything significant happen even when Uruguay were reduced to ten men after having a player sent off.

I really struggle to understand how the French manager, Domenech, has managed to be in the job for 6 years given that his tactical nous always seems to be so poor – he just doesn’t seem to be able to make the best use of the players at his disposal by reacting to how a game is unfolding abd changing things accordingly. France were truly dire at the last European Championships and don’t look much better here on this evidence. We’ll see if they can improve.

Anyway, getting ready to watch all of today’s three matches – South Korea v Greece, Argentina v Nigeria and then, the big one, England v USA – my brother in law’s invited me round for a beer or two tonight so no doubt plenty of shouting at the tv will ensue!