Last week I wrote this:

Normality will resume; flags will quietly be binned, Tim’ll lose at tennis, Andrew will lose at Cricket and the Rugby team will forget that once they were quite good”

Do I get a prize? No? So it seems me and the other 10 million people who predicted the same will be disappointed. Still we can at least assuage our disappointment by drinking deep from the fountain of I told you we were rubbish“. If it’s good enough for the media, it’s good enough for me.

Watching the game, buffered from its’ awfulness by a bucket load of beer, it rapidly became clear that neither side deserved to progress further. The Portuguese play in a playground style of mum, he’s hit me, he did, he did, he did, honest” and after one particularly petulant incident, I fully expected them to collectively blub, before taking their ball home. Our team was separated from greatness by exactly the same gap which separate the hype from reality. For the first sixty minutes, we seamlessly transferred our dreadful, laboured form from the first four games into this one. And then their was the small matter of Shrek and the Groinal stamping. For which he was given his marching orders.

I dunno. In my day, playing at a level which generally involved drinking before the match, an opposing defender attempting to violently harvest your bollocks through a scything challenge, grudgingly engendered a little professional respect. Aye, he was hard bastard but fair” you’d wince while examining the stud marks marching up the inside of your thigh.

Still with Rooney in the changing rooms presumably laying into the kit man or chewing on the benches, those left on the pitch did their best. It was almost enough with a Canadian who thinks he’s a German playing with a verve and passion that best defines an Englishman. I know I said he was rubbish but this was merely a clever motivational strategy.

And then the inevitable penalties. Martial law was declared in our house and a media blackout followed in the barn. Children were banished as were any electronic devices that could broadcast the inescapable nay predestined outcome. For want of anything better to do, my time was occupied polishing a set of wheels and pretending I didn’t care. When I finally returned to the house and the glum faces surrounding the TV, I found I still did.

Everyone knows sport is just nationalism dressed up in a tracksuit but we’ve been so comprehensively stuffed this last couple of weeks, we’re reduced to supporting a Scotsman. Oh he pretends to support the English and talks of British Sport” but the United Kingdom was just a crappy marketing Brand nearly four hundred years ago, and it’s fooled almost no one since. You only have to listen to the second verse of the national anthem to see that.

Maybe we should change the Anthem to something more uplifting. Land of Hope and Glory perhaps although Land of Mope and Snory seems more appropriate (the first post result, the second post result hangover). Or maybe we should just set more realistic expectations. No, /Sven mode/ *sorry, sorry, sorry*, I’m just being silly.

Still, it’ll be good to see the end of the flags though. Patriotism is one thing; exploding children cooked in the back of window locked cars is quite another.

UPDATE: So Murray lost. Never mind eh, misery loves company. I have it on good authority that we’re in with a sniff of a medal at the under 13 allcomers tiddywinks competition.