Saturday, May 27, 2006

We wuz robbed

Well, no, we weren't actually but we did lose.

Swansea City Football Club was in a play-off today at the Millennium Stadium. I'm not a football fan and I had to have it explained to me so now I can explain it to you. It seems that once where there were Divisions 1-4, it's now Premier, Championship, and Leagues 1 and 2. And Swansea and Barnsley were competing to see who would go up from League 1 to the Championship. Or in old words, from Division 3 to Division 2.

Even though I didn't understand the whys and wherefores I knew there was a big game - the biggest game of your careers, the manager told the players - and I knew it was happening today. Because it was being shown on Sky (I spit on the name), it meant we couldn't watch it so while I made chilli and flapjacks, i listened to it on BBC Radio Wales.

Now I can listen to rugby games because I can picture what the commentators are talking about; not so with football. I didn't even know the names of the players but, thankfully, we had a suitably biased commentating team on BBC Wales so I could tell when something good - or bad - had happened.

With the score 2-2 at the end of extra time, it went to penalties and Swansea lost.

I wasn't unduly upset. Not like in the World Cup in France in 1998. We happened to be camping in France at the time and gathered in the bar with other Brits to watch England play Argentina. (Younger son has just reminded me that a young lad cheering on the Argies came close to being more than shouted at when he blocked husband's view of the screen: husband gets very edgy at big games.)

That night after England had lost on penalties, I couldn't sleep. It was all so unfair. And this was me, Welsh through and through. It was very disturbing.

1 comment:

Jon said...

Gutted! There's always next year.