THE EURO ZONE: A SOCCER MISCELLANY:Photo of the weekend (any weekend), taken during the trouble in Poznan on Saturday night and posted by mr_klaster1 on Twitter - caption: "We kept the peace last night." Magnificent.
School of hard Knox: Wee Oscar keeps sunny side up
Oscar Knox, says the Twitter account run by his family, is a "3-year-old Belfast boy whos a wee bit sick". He suffers from neuroblastoma, "an extremely rare and aggressive childhood cancer" – you can read more about Oscar at oscarknox.blogspot.ie. He was the star of Twitter yesterday when this photo was posted.
Racist, us? Mail response.
David Hills of the Observer gave a taste yesterday of the response from Daily Mail online readers to an article about “the vile racist storm engulfing Euro 2012”.
Many, it seems, were utterly outraged by this racism:
“Not sure why poland and ukraine got this tournament, they are backward.”
“No sports tournaments what so ever should be held in eastern Europe till they learn to stop being aggressive barbarians and learn to be more civilised.”
“They all live in the eighteenth century.”
“Why people in ukraine and poland so idiot?”
Hills didn’t comment – there was no need, really.
Tweet of the weekend?
It has to be Stan Collymore’s rather impressive best wishes to the Irish team:
“Ádh mór na hÉireann go maith. Ba mhaith linn tú a bhuachaint!
It’s not the first time he’s tweeted as Gaeilge either – you’d imagine it leaves some of his 280,000 followers confused.
Start your engines
“We need to improve on certain things . . . it is not like the World Cup where you can have a sort of warm-up game. Here you start at 100 per cent, like in Formula One, only without a warm-up lap. You can’t start the tournament chasing after the music.”
– Joachim Löw after his German team was a bit slow off the grid, but eventually overtook Portugal.
No sympathy: Germans delight in Dutch misery and Bavarian minister slags Robben
IT WAS good to see German paper Bild offering its heartfelt sympathy to the Dutch after their setback against Denmark on Saturday. The headline on their website? “Ha, Ha, Holland!” Followed by: “Wonderful Holland! This fiasco makes us happy!”
It would seem, then, that there’s a bit of rivalry between the two nations, one that was stoked a little by Bavarian minister Horst Seehofer when he paid a visit to The Hague last week.
Seehofer, by the sounds of him, is a Bayern Munich fan and hasn’t quite forgiven Arjen Robben for missing penalties in their Champions League final against Chelsea and their crucial Bundesliga meeting with Borussia Dortmund.
So, a chuckling Seehofer told his Dutch audience that he hoped Robben would be their penalty taker during Euro 2012.
Did he stop there? No. According to the Dutch website AD, he had a little joke to tell: “A judge told a convicted man that he had good news and bad news for him. The bad news is that the man was sentenced to death by bullet. But the good news: Robben will miss, ha ha.”
We’ll trust that President Higgins will be a little more diplomatic during his visit to Poland.
So, how did the Dutch media respond to that defeat by Denmark? When you don’t speak the language, it’s not easy finding out, but half of De Telegraaf’s headline (left)made it plane enough. (The second word, apparently, means ‘threatened’). Guttedness in football is, it seems, an international language.
Wojciech’s woe: Front man Szczesny’s nutty campaign
GOOGLE TRANSLATE struggled a bit when given the task of telling us what Polish website Wirtualnemedia had to say about a Euro 2012 advertising campaign launched just before the tournament. The campaign’s slogan, said the translation, is “Money, Lays and Pepsi straight from the package and from the nuts”. We’ve heard catchier ones, to be honest.
So, which Polish star did Lays and Pepsi choose to front the campaign? Yes, Wojciech Szczesny. You know, the fella who gave away a goal and a penalty and got himself sent off against Greece and suspended for the second game – and might not get his place back. His face even appears on Pepsi bottles and Lay’s crisps bags. The sound you hear is their marketing executives wailing.
