A Dukla Prague Away Kit

This would not be this blog were it not to preview the impending European Championships. Football is Mallorcan life, well bar-life anyway, and this blog of course reflects all human life in Mallorca and some which isn't.

But then I ask myself, should I rise above all this BBC-desperation who will you support for God's sake we've stumped up a Ronaldo salary to get the rights so we're going to make damn sure those saps tune in malarkey? Of course I should. The real Euro football angle we should be adopting is that it is better to not take part. Ah yes, remember those good old days before the Second World War when England thumbed a nose, a laced leather ball the weight of several house bricks and a baggy pair of shorts that could accommodate much of The Mile's belly fraternity to the rest of the world in the sure knowledge that England, had they deigned to turn up, would have walked it, or perhaps even run off with it. Or even those good old days like the '74 and '78 World Cups and various Euros as well. Let Johnny-Rep foreigner battle it out on the footy pitch while we're lounging on the beaches of Mallorca. You can have your total football or your catenaccio; we could, were we bothered, take the field having bucketed some sangria and had it all done by half-time.

Maybe I should, but I can't. There is something that stirs deep in my football soul that is forever European. Whereas others waited once every four weeks or so by the letter box for the paper boy to deposit the "Football Monthly"-fattened daily blah, my monthly anticipation was for a slimmer work - "World Soccer". I attribute this contra-convention of pre- and early adolescent non-peer group football reading to one event - Hungary versus Czechoslovakia in the '62 World Cup, a game viewed in the graininess of dodgy black and white transmission, a celebration less of central and eastern European Soviet bloc soccer skill and technique but more of the strange-named. Hungary may be the Nottingham Forest of European football - a 15 or 90 minutes of fame in the footballing floodlights and the long ball of mediocrity ever since - but it was they and their curiously-monikered continental team mates that fanned a fandom of pan-European football. Oh my Ujpest Dosza, my Hadjuk Split, my Dukla Prague of youth.

Sad the young of today deprived of the fleeting moments of European football mystery and appellations by the familiarity brought not only by the foreign presence in the domestic game but also by the fact of the bloke fixing the domestic appliance who would, in an earlier era, have been lumping the ball for Gornik Zabrze.

As for this year's championships, I frankly couldn't care less who wins. As I feed from the generosity of its land, then Spain and a Spanish triumph would be satisfying were it not for the fact that, in winning, Spain would cast off its underachieving achievement, one that it has fought long and hard to preserve - just like England. The best thing about Euro 2008 is that Danny Baker is being restored to 6-0-6. Forget your Mellors, your Littlejohns, your Greens; this is football as it should be with one eye on the oddball or even the odd ball.


QUIZ
Chain - Toyah Willcox was in Quadrophenia and is married to Robert Fripp, he of King Crimson. And what links King Crimson and The Nice? Yesterday's title - no not Niall Quinn, it was Keane, "Maps" (see this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6JEyWrpmxw). Today's title - which group wanted this for Christmas?

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