Tonight England play France in the biggest match since matches began. Mainly because the game being played is always the most important ever because nothing in the past is relevant and even I can’t predict the future. And I’m brilliant.

So why do I waste my time and efforts reading the pundits, the analysis, the player ratings, the history, the averages, the aggregated results over the last 100 years, the prices and/or salaries of the teams, the number of tattoos per square cm of skin, fucking EVERYTHING? But taking all that into account, running the statistics, performing my own analysis of such a deeply mathematical nature that I can’t even spell it, and using the full Tarot, I have come to the absolute and unarguable result:

No one knows.

When the match is played, we’ll know who’s winning at any particular time, and even that isn’t always a valid predictor of who’ll end up the victor. It’s football. Anything can happen. Brazil should beat Croatia. Manchester City should never lose. It all depends on immeasurable contingencies at the time. A good bounce here, a tug on a shirt there, the eventual result is the outcome of 237,493,091 various incidents and events during the match. (Using my special maths… stuff). Therefore the answer to ‘who’s gonna win?’ is meaningless until the final whistle blows.

So we shall have to wait and see. Like they did last night when Argentina, eventually, beat Holland, sparking the third mass brawl of their evening as Lionel Messi dragged his otherwise mediocre team to the semi-finals.

All I hope is that we set up a proper attacking line-up, in a manner which will enable Jude Bellingham to strut his stuff, rather than making him the 7th defender. Because we need to score goals. As you feel France probably will. Can Kyle Walker tether his man? Doubtful but it’ll be a good race.

Happy Quarter Final day

A xxxx