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As an England supporter, its not really funny.

Ok, blog at ya from Tokyo in a couple of days.

No, not my San Diego apartment and its 88F internal temperature. It turns out that the happiest place on earth is – Denmark. I’ve been there for a week and can easily see why although locals were telling me that during the winter months when there is little sunshine, they have a high suicide rate but that doesn’t seem to figure into the assessment.

The USA finished 23rd in the survey; the UK 41st. The bottom two countries were Zimbabwe and Burundi. Click on the image for a pretty map of the results.

It took being down to 10 men for England to finally show how well they can play and, as many had said they would, Lennon and Crouch were the guys leading the charge. If they could have played like that throughout the competition I think they’d be in the semis and one of the favourites. It does allow us to indulge our national pasttime – berating the coach and players in the press, I am sure we will see coach Erikkson and Wayne Rooney get a good roasting.

I think my Beat The Press entry is down the toilet although I doubt many had Portugal in the last 4. Perhaps if its a Germany Brazil final I might bring off an upset.

And in the meantime, England gets a new coach and the preparations start for qualifying for Euro 2008.

The highlight of this match for me was my TiVo. I deliberately got up 20 minutes late so there would be some “tape in the bank” so I could fast forward over the half time show. It also meant I could fast forward over the many times one of the Paraguay players rolled around on the grass “hurt”.

Oh yeah, there was a game though not much of one. England need to shape up if they want to win this thing. I’ve never liked the send the ball forward, hope it hits the head of an attacker strategy the national team uses. Give the ball to Joe Cole, let him run with it, take them on and get people into positions. They should play how the Premiership teams play, aggresive attacking.

As with all England games, each one is going to be in doubt until the final whistle.

So, the Portuguese coach says he definitely isn’t going to be the next England coach; apparantly he doesn’t like being hounded by the press. Go figure. But it seems to me that the England football coach should be an Englishman, not some bloody foreigner. Can you imagine the French or German teams hiring someone from another country? Now, it may be that we don’t have any decent coaches (unlikely) but even if true, the England coach should be like the England players: English.

I know everyone has seen this before a thousand times over but in celebration of England’s 2-1 defeat of Uruguay last night, uninspired or not, and the fact we are only 100 days from the World Cup, let’s revisit:

the badgers celebrating Euro 2004

It only comes round once a year and often the build-up is more worthy than the game itself but this year I was enthralled by a greatly entertaining match. And a great result, too, its not often that Scotland beats France in Rugby Union, or indeed at anything for that matter.

Truly an event worth having a big screen TV for! Too bad I couldn’t get to watch it live. And England beat Wales the day before so a great sporting weekend all round. Well, if you ignore that tedious crap they call football in this country, then it was a great sporting weekend. Fortunately I tuned to the paint drying channel and was way more entertained than had I been watching that other event. Wow, just thinking about American Football makes me sleepy.

So I have this sexy new iPod and not enough content for it – what to do? Grab podcasts!! And in my search for entertainment I found a series of podcasts from the very funny Ricky Gervais, he of The Office fame (the original funny one, not to be confused with the lame NBC version). Anyway, look it up in iTunes or go straight to the source for the first two episodes.

Today was the draw for the World Cup Finals being held in Germany next year. England are in Group B with Paraguay, Trinidad & Tobago and Sweden. Of course all games at this level are difficult (and any game involving England is ten times more difficult than it needs to be) but one would expect us to have a very good chance of progressing to the next round. You can see the rest of the groups here at the BBC.

Enough ranting and moaning, here are a couple of pictures from a trip I took with my Dad to Marwell Zoo last month; to see all of them go to this Flickr photo set.