The Insider

The beautiful game can be a cure for insomnia

EUROPEAN football can be thoroughly boring; just ask fans who’ve been trying to watch the Euro 2016 tournament now on in France. Portugal and Croatia took the prize for the most boring international game played in many years when they faced each other on Saturday. “Six minutes left. Then the sweet, blessed relief of a game-ending penalty shoot-out. I’ve spent happier times in a dentist’s chair,” one contributor commented during the BBC’s live coverage of this dead match.

Another, fearing that even a penalty shoot-out would fail to kick some life into the match, remarked: “It’s clear that when this game does go to penalties, not a single one will be on target. This will never end.” Yet another offered the marketers some advice on how to make money from this awful game: “They could genuinely sell the DVD of this game as an insomnia cure.”

And you thought only SA’s premier league was one big yawn.

Portugal, by the way, won the game 1-0, scoring with about three minutes of extra time left, but many viewers were fast asleep by then.

UK again rouses Iceland

TWICE in the past week Iceland has received good news from the UK. The most stunning piece of good news, delivered courtesy of the England football team in Euro 2016, came on Monday night when Iceland, against most expectations, beat England 2-1 in the competition’s round of 16.

England were out of Europe and, to twist a famous wartime quote of Winston Churchill from the Battle of Britain: “Never in the field of human conflict was so little owed by so many (furious English fans) to so few (the footballers who failed). So, it’s back to the drawing board for the English football team, which, apart from winning the 1966 World Cup on home soil, has never won any other competition.

While Icelanders welcomed England’s defeat, they also welcomed the outcome of Britain’s referendum on EU membership. It was “good news for Icelanders and presents an opportunity for Iceland and other countries in the North- Atlantic”, President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson (not a household name in our part of the world) was quoted as saying by Iceland Monitor, a website that keeps an eye on the Iceland media.

Some pessimists in England are starting to believe the loss of a Euro football match hardly scratches the tip of the iceberg.