Sunday 20 June 3pm When Slovakia have finished getting beaten, I have to get moving for the second game of the day. I hitch a ride with Ben, a professional photographer who I've met a few times at different games, down to The Southerner near Aldwych. (He's on a mission to shoot fan portraits from the tournament – I'll link here if/when he puts something online!)
In a cunning reversal of their iconic rugby team, New Zealand's footballers are called the All Whites, which sounds a bit racialist to me and probably not the sort of thing that you want to be calling yourselves in South Africa, even if apartheid ended a long time ago really and we're all equal now, honest.
Whatever, they've taken the lead by the time we get there and the capacity crowd are in top form. Everything gets cheered. Replays of the goal are cheered. Replays of Italians diving are cheered. Or jeered. Shots of topless Kiwi men in the stands are cheered several times. The enthusiasm is only briefly dented by Italy's equaliser, but not permanently: soon, the excitement of holding the 2006 world champions to a draw takes over. When the final whistle comes, it's greeted as a victory and quite right too.
Glen (in the middle, above) lives in crap glamorous new town, Hemel Hempstead. Quite unnervingly, he's got some sort of missionary zeal about Club Med ski holidays: we discuss this at length and he nearly - nearly - persuades me that it's worth looking into. I start off by assuming that such a holiday would be a horrific, Butlins-esque holiday concentration camp but come away thinking that actually, hey, it does sound like pretty decent value. And avoiding the stress of booking everything you want on holiday? Well, that's something everyone can appreciate. Glen, if you really don't work for Club Med, you're wasting yourself.
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