Football’s coming home. That’s the song from the world cup of 2006 that poured out the nation’s emotions about how its about time we brought the World Cup ‘home’, to England, where it belongs. The land of the 3 lions. Ahhhhh.

There’s a big difference between ‘football’s coming home’ and ‘the footballers are coming home’, usually early, just after the tournament gets a bit sudden deathy and knockoutish. But NOT THIS YEAR. This year is our year. The end of suffering, the end of torment, we have a great squad (of Spurs players, bless ’em) and WE COULD BLOODY DO IT!!!!

Ok, that’s the hype. As is customary, we play much better before we’ve actually kicked a ball. That’s when it starts to go a bit wrong, but: this is football. Anything could happen. And it pretty much already has after just the first weekend of the games.

Ok, its a group match, there’s always early nerves and jitters, which must actually favour the underdogs, from whom nothing is ever expected beyond picking the ball from the back of their nets on a repetitive basis, so they have ‘nothing to lose’. And then, buoyed by first game success of some degree, like perhaps, not losing to Brazil, those teams can move along quite nicely.

Greece won a European championship, Leicester won the Premier league. Its football, anything can happen.

I managed to miss virtually all of the extensive footballing telefest this weekend, due to commitments. I did catch a soupçon of Peru playing Denmark, which was almost as exciting as the traffic jam on the M1 yesterday coming home from Leeds (don’t ask). I also caught a snippet of Iceland playing Argentina but that didn’t go as planned by the Argies whose footballing royalty couldn’t best the smallest nation in the competition. I thought it was more interesting that all the Icelandics have names ending in -sson whereas those of the Danes end in -sen. Hmmmm.

Brasil couldn’t beat Switzerland which is an amazing result for the watchmakers and numbered bank accounters of Neutral Europe. Germany actually lost to Mexico. Germany!!

So anything can happen. To a degree. Spain couldn’t beat Ronaldo and Messi messed up.

The England fans in Volgograd for tonight’s game with Tunisia have been told to ‘be mindful of the cultural differences in Russia’. Which translates as ‘try not to be black or in any way racially diverse’. Yet so far all is peaceful out there, which we hope continues all the way to the end, when England win the World Cup.

So agains the footballing powerhouse that is Tunisia, we should win 5-0. 8-0 maybe. But it will end 1-1. I can’t remember an England opening game in any tournament not ending with that bland and horrible scoreline. But we’ll take it.

Come on England

A xxxx