Sunday 26 June 2016

Goliath usually wins

Avoiding EURO 2016: A self-experiment — Day Seventeen


‘Mom! Ireland has a penalty!’. Half a minute later: ‘They scored!’

It is not easy to not follow a football match when a kid in the house is watching it. Even if it’s a friend’s kid and the television is in another room. It turned out Ireland played France and ended up losing 1:2. Another favourite is through. Boring.

And judging from the reactions from the same gathering’s Croatian representative when someone mentioned Portugal, maybe the team with the chequered jerseys (are they even in this tournament?) lost against the Iberians, but I’m not sure about that one. If so, it just confirms that all the favourites go through in the end.

I hope it is not the case for the other two matches that I happened to see or hear are taking place today or tomorrow: Belgium vs Hungary and England vs Iceland. After Thursday’s referendum, not even the English seem to support their (part of what is still a) country against the refreshingly unconventional Vikings.

I once read that England has only lost two wars ever. One of them was when King Canute the Great of Denmark took over much of Britain. The other might have been when Allan the Tiny did the same some 900 years later:


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