Soccer City, Johannesburg, 2/7/10. aet 1-1: pens 4-2

This game had everything.

Both teams going for it, momentum see-sawing, chances at both ends, crunching tackles, neat passing, a surprising long range goal, a superbly struck free kick, a sending-off, a last minute (of extra time) penalty – missed. A game like this is why football can be so enthralling.

Sadly the culmination was a penalty shoot-out; never a satisfactory way for a team to lose.

The first half was one of two quarters. It looked bad for Ghana – not at the races early on. After about twenty minutes there was a stat that said: Corners; Uruguay 4-0 Ghana.

Then Ghana got their first and suddenly it was all them and Uruguay “fell oot it.*”

Ghana deserved their lead at the break. The second half was more even. Ghana were shading it in extra time but Uruguay were never unthreatening.

Btw it took till extra time before the commentators noticed Ghana were stationing two men on the goal line at their attacking corners – something I clocked very early.

I also thought that, since the keeper had come out, Stephen Appiah might have been offside before he hooked the ball towards goal immediately before the handball on the line and that therefore it shouldn’t have been a penalty – but that would have deprived us of the compelling finale.

* (phrase © a schoolmate of mine.)

Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium Nelson Mandela Bay/Port Elizabeth, 2/7/10.

This match had drama but it wasn’t a classic. It was too stop-start, there were too many fouls. And any game where someone is sent off ends up unbalanced – and unsatisfying. But, as I recall, the Holland-Brazil game in 1974 was a bad-tempered, niggly affair too.

You couldn’t see the result coming at half time. Holland had created nothing, Arjen Robben kept running into blind alleys, Brazil had scored through a very direct route indeed.

In the end Brazil pushed the “destroy self” button, or the Dutch pushed it for them.

The irony is that a team built (against the national stereotype) on being solid at the back was undone by defensive mistakes.

The winning side wasn’t the Holland of Cruyff and Neeskens – nor even Gullit and Rijkaard – but something rather more pedestrian and workmanlike. They’ll probably reach the final now, though.

And maybe go one better than either of those more flamboyant teams did.

Neither of these two songs was originally going to be featured in this series (despite them being the progenitors of heavy metal.)

However, the sad death recently of founder member Pete Quaife and the consequent possible unsuitability of the video for a Kinks song that I did intend to include meant I lean this week towards these early examples of his work with The Kinks.

The first is a rather rough live recording.

The Kinks: All Day And All Of The Night – Live

The second is from the studio.

The Kinks: You Really Got Me

Pete Quaife; 31/12/43 – 23/6/10. So it goes.

I’ve been asked through Jim Steel to write a review for Interzone of debutant novelist Hannu Rajaniemi’s forthcoming The Quantum Thief, due in September I believe. I said yes.

This does represent something of a conflict of interest for me as Hannu is a fellow member of the Edinburgh and East Coast Writers’ Group and of course of Writers’ Bloc. But, as Jim reminded me, everybody in British SF knows just about everybody else and the book’s title suggests a Science background might be an advantage in assessing it.

I mentioned Hannu a while back when he got his writing deal. He knows string theory, though, which wasn’t around when I were a lad.

Some of my time in July will naturally be taken up with this project but the review won’t, of course, be appearing here.