Football farce

 

7.30 pm arrived, and we duly took our places in the TV room and switched on, to be confronted with this happy smiling face, and the biggest farce for many a long time!

Followers of English football will already know what happened last evening, but for the rest of you, here's the sorry tale. The England Team had travelled to Warsaw to play a World Cup qualifying match against Poland in a fairly new stadium with an opening/closing roof. During this summer's European Cup the stadium was used on several occasions with the roof closed, however yesterday whoever was in charge of roof closing decided it didn't need to be closed, so it was left open. Then it started to rain, . . . and rain, . . . and rain - so much so that the pitch was waterlogged, and the conditions were deemed such that it was then too dangerous to close the roof (apparently it cant be closed if its raining or windy!), so the pitch just got wetter and wetter, until eventually about an hour after scheduled kick-off time the match was called off. It was quite hilarious to see the rules being rigidly enforced, the ref had to come on to the pitch and throw the ball to see how well it would bounce . . . it wouldn't! In the mean time some of the spectators made their way on to the pitch and pretended to be swimming, except that it almost wasn't pretending!

An official report of the evening's entertainment can be read here on the BBC website.

The roof was eventually closed overnight and the match has been rescheduled for 4pm this afternoon, and will probably be played in an empty stadium, as no doubt all the England fans (and probably Polish as well) will have had to make their way back home!