Last night, Spurs lost 0-1, at “home” (i.e. Wembley), to Man U. I had been half hoping that Spurs might lose, because this would make it less likely that Man U would want to replace their current manager, Solskjaer, with the man whom he outmanaged last night, Spurs manager Pochettino. Spurs really need Pochettino to stay, and they want Man U to back off trying to lure him away with their infinite money. It is all explained in this piece. I said that! But alas, I didn’t say it soon enough.
This being why the Spurs strikers were so careful to aim all their shots at goal straight at the Man U goalie, David de Gea. They want The Poch to stay with them too.
Just kidding. de Gea did really well. And concerning that, I liked this tweet at the end of the game last night from Watford goalie Ben Foster:
I see a lot of people saying all De Gea saves were straight at him, please factor in that the guy has some mad sense to know where to be at just the right time, you can’t teach that. Proper goally
But not very proper punctuation. What has Ben Foster got against full stops? Maybe he used up all his stops, performing a similar miracle to de Gea, for Watford against Crystal Palace.
I recall hoping on a previous occasion that my football team would lose. England were playing Germany at home. It was again a management issue. It was worth England losing to Germany if that resulted in Kevin Keegan ceasing to be England manager. Keegan is a great guy, but was wrong to manage England. England did lose. Keegan did step down. Soon after this, England beat Germany in Germany, 1-5. But sadly not in the World Cup or the Euros or whatever it was, which England and Germany both qualified for. Germany presumably won that.
My thanks to Patrick Crozier, with whom I dined earlier this evening, for lots of details about the above, which I had either forgotten or never knew in the first place, like Foster being the Watford goalie and England playing Germany in the last game at old Wembley and then winning 1-5 in Germany.
Emmanuel Todd has written another book, and it has been translated into English. And, it is a book by Emmanuel Todd that I have been awaiting for a long time. The title alone is the clue. “From the Stone Age …”. What that tells me is that there is at least a good chance that Todd will tell me something of how he thinks those distinct family structures of his, the ones that explain ideology and are among the causes of progress got established in the first place.
