A shocking World Cup for England. Also a bad World Cup for FIFA:
1. They gave us a brand new and much-hyped match ball, the JABULANI, which is supposedly the most ‘advanced’ football ever. Unfortunately, Every single Jabulani seems to have been BEWITCHED, presumably by some capricious African witch doctor with a hatred for goalkeepers. In other words, it is plain awful. FIFA have now (finally) acknowledged there is “a problem” with the ball, but have said they can’t do anything about it. Well done chaps.
2. They have repeatedly refused to consider any kind of ban or sanction on the notorious VUVUZELAS, those loud plastic trumpets which drown out any real atmosphere at games, and make TV commentary inaudible for millions watching at home in their slippers. According to FIFA the vuvuzelas contribute to, rather than drown out, the atmosphere at games. Unless by ‘atmosphere’ you mean the perpetual and deafening drone of a solitary low B♭, a cacophony not unlike the sound of a million bees flying around and around and around inside an amphitheatre the size of Wembley Stadium, I fail to see how this is the case, however.
3. They arrested and are prosecuting a group of ten or so women for wearing ORANGE DRESSES at a Holland match. The wearing of the aforementioned dresses was apparently covert advertising for some dutch brewery, and according to FIFA this compromised Budweiser’s sole sponsorship rights (for which FIFA gets a lot of money). So much for civil liberties, of course, but it was also pretty counter-productive given the press coverage the dutch brewery received as a direct result of FIFA’s draconian behaviour.
4. And now there have been two absolutely PREPOSTEROUS refereeing decisions (costing two key goals in two key games) which could have easily been avoided if FIFA allowed even the minimal use of video technology by referees or fourth officials, which they of course do not because their president is an ignorant technophobic fool.
a) On Sunday afternoon a Frank Lampard shot bounced off the crossbar and two feet over the goal-line, but the goal was not given by referee or linesman. Within 30 seconds everyone at home had seen a TV replay which confirmed that it was a perfectly good goal, and yet nothing could be done to change the decision. Reportedly on seeing the TV replay at half-time the referee had simply shouted, “Oh my God”. Quite.
b) On Sunday evening Carlos Tevez scored a goal for Argentina from a blatantly offside position. The linesman had failed to see this, but within seconds the WHOLE STADIUM had seen a replay on the stadium’s big screen showing that the goal was offside and shouldn’t have stood. The Mexican players surrounded the referee, imploring him to look at the replay on the screen. He was sadly unable to do so, or to change his original decision because of the strictness of FIFA’s rules on how decisions can be made (essentially, “no videos”). Again, idiocy.
In both cases, FIFA’s attitude to technology has been shown to be stupid. It is making nobody happy. If they don’t want technology, then every time decisions like these go wrong, Sepp Blatter should be publicly flogged by Pele and Franz Beckenbauer at a place of their choosing, and then forced to apologise in person to everyone whose day was ruined by such unnecessary injustices. This is the only reasonable alternative.
Yes, the referee was an incompetent moron – on several occasions, but most of all when disallowing a perfectly good goal by Peter Crouch. Yes, the pitch was a complete disgrace, by any standard, but especially for a showpiece FA Cup semi-final – and it cost us Pompey’s first goal, Michael Dawson’s slip that left Piquionne unmarked attributable entirely to the unstable Wembley surface. But when I really think about it, Tottenham’s 2-0 semi-final loss to already relegated Portsmouth was primarily our own fault. The fact is, we had the possession and the opportunities, not to mention the players, to have comfortably won in normal time. And in truth, yesterday’s loss was a simple repeat of a weakness we’ve had all year, on which has already cost us dearly. We find it very difficult, when we don’t score early, to break down poorer quality but tenacious and defensively minded teams, that are set up so as to pack the midfield and crowd out our attacking players. On two occasions this year we have lost 1-0 to Wolves, both games that we should have won comfortably on the night. We lost 1-0 at home against Stoke, to a late goal, having dominated the entire match. We drew 0-0 at home against Hull having, again, controlled the whole game. There have been other occasions too (twice against Aston Villa) when against a defensive team we’ve failed to translate possession into goals, or take the chances we have created.
Plaudits to Seven Sisters contributor Mr. David Tonks, who is in (electronic) print on this blog as having predicted that Mark Hughes would be sacked by Christmas. In response to a post of mine in which I criticised Hughes, Dave said 
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