How would you like to sponsor Screen Break? It gets thousands of reads every week
here, and I plug it as regularly as I can when I'm on Talksport. Just think of the prestige. It could be your company when our sponsorship from the
UK Concrete Show runs out
Meanwhile, here's a taster of tomorrow's (Mon July 4th) column...
Those wretched Germans.
Not content with going round winning
tournaments, getting to semi-finals and so on, they've now started subverting our
much-loved national stereotypes.
I mean, what are European football
championships for, if not for jocose exchange of saloon bar slurs lobbed at our
near neighbours; the cool, unemotional Swedes, the Italians who
don't-like-it-up-'em, the Scots who, er, don't turn up, those people?
In these circumstances, you will
know that
le mot juste when talking
about Germany -
das richtige Wort, as
they like to put it - is "efficiency."
I always put myself on
"efficiency" watch when Germany are in action; but lo and behold, in the
quarter final against Italy, they go and miss an unprecedented three
penalties.
I had to wait until BBC
Breakfast the next day before the efficiency bomb was cracked open.
Over footage of Boateng handling the
ball in the penalty area, the newsreader began his report, "The Germans,
usually so efficient at defending…." (And invading Poland, annexing the Sudetenland
etc., by implication).
That's more like it.
And bless Antonio Conte, Italy's
demonstrative manager obligingly living up to every cliché about those
emotional, effusive, Latin types; kicking every ball on the touchline,
gesticulating wildly, joining his goal-scoring hero in a crazy group hug.
Short of breaking into a chorus
of O Sole Mio in his technical area, he couldn't have been more Italian.....
If you want the rest of the column, it's on sportingintelligence.com from 10am Monday. The old ones are there too.