The 1990 World Cup was both awful for England and wonderful. I watched most of it from between my fingers. David Platt (whose squad inclusion was contested by the press every bit as fiercely at first as Peter Crouch’s or Owen Hargreaves’s) robbed Belgium, and then came Lineker’s goals against the run of play versus Cameroon. It was all awful. But we won…
I watched Sir Bobby Robson’s memorial service through my fingers too. I did this partly because I didn’t really want to admit to myself that he was really gone: that that supremely reassuring presence was taken. But I did so also because his tastes aren’t mine, and I found the whole affair – broadcast, I’m happy to say, on BBC TV, BBC Radio and Sky Sports News simultaneously as he deserved – unbearably mawkish. On days like these, you put your tastes and your mawkish responses where they belong. The cameras span from Durham to Newcastle to Ipswich to.. and that is what matters.
Sir Bobby Robson was a self-declared patriot, and I hope he would have liked this video as our kind of tribute to his life. It’s not a victory. We kind of lose. But what a team.. Waddle, Beardsley, Lineker, Gascoigne.. in the end, as good as any we’ve come up with. Shilton went to Mexico in 1970..
Here’s the best online tribute to Sir Bobby, written, as you might expect, by the superb John Nicholson of F365.
And here’s the game . From a non-British point of view. Enjoy, and remember.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT0ZTYHg3nc]
Waaaaay off topic, did you see the Euston Arch is being dug up and rebuilt. I wasn’t quite sure what the news bit of this story was – perhaps the official go-ahead?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1215583/Historic-arch-destroyed-60s-planners-rebuilt-station-stones-dumped-river.html
[the Mail story isn’t very accurate in places – the Arch never stood there, it stood in the middle of what is now the station – but it has the best pictures’
Wow! Now that’s what I call off-topic. Yes, it used to stand on “our” platform – at the head of what’s now platforms 9 and 10. (It’s always been platform 9 for me. The Streatham Hill and Sutton trains from Victoria used platform 9, as did the Sutton trains from Wimbledon. When I saw that what was shortly to become London Overground did so at Euston, I groaned inwardly).
Sadly, the DM article is just playing catchup. I’m on the Euston Arch mailing list, and bugger all has happened since Dan, in his dashing wetsuit, got the stones out of aqua chokey. He was up here a couple of weeks back, and everything still hinges on (1) a quick end to the recession (2) the generosity of Euston’s redevelopers (3) the redevelopment happening at all.
(3) is the biggie: Euston is now the orphan child of London termini, and nothing HAS to happen to it to keep it going. Unlike St P, or KX, or Paddington, it was, after all, rebuilt as recently as the Beatles era, to the same design, of course, as the ’70s Penguin Classics. All of the money that’s left is being pumped into what will be a spectacular reimagining of KX and my bet is that the Euston Arch, like so much else, awaits better days. Which is a hell of a nuisance if they were planning to put a pub into it.
At least this scenario has the good old “Doric Arch” being left alone..