Last night I sat at home dreading the ‘bzzz’.
On Monday night I was sitting at home unaware that the ‘bzzz’ was anything to be overly worried about. In this world where so much is wrong and messed up, it ranked low on my list of concerns.
How wrong I was. I watched an episode of a show called ‘Gyeongseong Creature’ on Netflix (enjoyable, btw, if you’re looking for something to pass the time that doesn’t involve goddam dragons or hobbitses), and then I was playing a bit of Playstation. At peace, as much as is possible, with everything.
Then, ‘bzzz’. The ‘bzzz’. My phone vibrating as a new message arrived. What could it be? My first thought was it was another of the emails I get about 10 times a day from ‘media buyers’ who are keen to find out the price of a sponsored post on Arseblog News. I mostly just delete them, but occasionally will reply with a price of €100,000 and the petals of a rare flower than can only be found on the side of a Himalayan mountain in springtime. They never reply to those but if you ignore them they keep trying.
‘I know this is my 17th attempt, and please tell me if I’m being annoying, but can you put me in touch with the right person to speak to about a sponsored post’.
Note to self: Set up an auto-response for all future emails of this sort, because they are being annoying. And stupid. If you can’t infer from someone’s complete lack of response to your litany of missives, you’re probably a bit thick. Not necessarily Jamie O’Hara thick, but in that ballpark.
Anyway, it wasn’t that. It was a WhatsApp from Andrew Allen at 21.14. With news. Not good news.
You’ll have seen the images of Odegaard yesterday making his way onto a plane using crutches, which doesn’t really augur well, but then when your ankle goes underneath you in a challenge, it’s unlikely to be good news anyway. How quickly he will have a scan on it, I don’t know. Perhaps it happened yesterday, it may well be today, but after that the club will have a better idea as the timeline of his absence – which, being a bit glass half-empty this morning, I fear could be significant. That’s just fear though, not information.
I’m very afraid of finding a scorpion in my boot (number 5 on the list of ways I don’t want to die), but so far that hasn’t come to pass, so I’m hoping Odegaard’s injury is a scorpion in a boot (not a protective boot).
I’m getting away from the point here. I saw the England team to face Finland and I saw that both Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka had been selected from the start because … of course. And so I sat there last night dreading the ‘bzzz’ with the news of another injury to one of our players.
I have most notifications off on my phone, so it’s only really emails and messages. I looked at kick-off time and we got to half-time and nothing had vibrated. The only thing that happened was my doorbell reported seeing someone, but it was just someone passing by whose dog had a sniff in the garden and set off the alert. I continued to play Playstation willing my phone to stay silent. I mean, it was already on silent, but vibrating makes a noise.
Nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. I began to get comfortable. I let myself relax. Surely that was that. We’d made in through without any other kind of freak accident or clumsy challenge in which our player came off worst. Phew. But then …
… 21.55 … ‘bzzz’.
Oh no. Part of me didn’t want to look. Part of me felt that if I simply didn’t look, whatever catastrophic news was being delivered to me wouldn’t be real. Like if you can’t see the monster under your bed, he’s not there. That’s not how it works though. I had to man up, and see what it was, regardless of how devastating it was going to be.
I opened up my phone, fully expecting something like this …
Instead, it was my brother who was at Ireland v Greece at Lansdowne Road last night, complaining about the defending for Greece’s first goal. ‘Some of the worst defending I think I’ve ever seen’, he said.
I have never been as overjoyed by bad defending in my entire life. I looked up the goal, it was pretty bad to be fair, but the finish from the Greek lad was also very nice. It turns out that Saka played for 66 minutes before being replaced, while Rice (of course) played the full 90 but he’s not available for the weekend so he has time to recover.
So, it looks like the rest of them (including Gabriel who played 90 for Brazil as they lost 1-0 to Paraguay) have made it through this cursed Interlull. Mikel Arteta has a couple of days to work with them, and work out a plan for Sunday, but this morning I’m just relieved that last night was a relatively ‘bzzz’ free experience.
Till tomorrow.
