If there is one thing worse than losing all your cash on what you thought was a sure thing – then that’s losing all your cash on what you thought was a sure thing and having the north London Turkish community rub it right in your face.
There are many communities in North London – forget the Islington stereotypes of organic yoga and Tony Blair, Islington sprawls further than N1... it goes all the way down the Holloway road through N5 to N7... which is where I am.
There are many nationalities, races, communities, religions, perversions, addictions and ‘ways of life’ represented here – you name it and it’ll be walking down the Holloway road at some point on a Saturday afternoon (usually wearing an Arsenal shirt).
Two such nationality-based communities that are particularly well represented ‘round our way’ are the Greeks and the Turks... for some reason they don’t get on very well... they have some ‘history’ apparently.
The road I live in is on the Greek/Turkish divide and, the other night we had all the pissed up Turkish community driving up and down until the early hours of the morning honking their horns, windows down and playing some cheesy Turkish pop song (I assume that it’s the Turkish version of ‘3 lions’).
Their was a fight at one point when the Greek members of the street (we live predominantly Greek road) all piled out to give the Turks a good hiding for parking up at 2:30 am, stereo on full blast with all the doors open whilst standing on the roof, singing their lungs out.
Spawny bastards... you woke my kids up – twice... The match looked hard – I don’t know how Turkey do it – oh wait, yes I do! It’s good to see that they got the ‘power-aid’ mixture right this time and nobody got sent off for flipping out with their eyes rolling around their heads whilst chewing their cheeks out... that’s progress!
On to another Match – last night’s game with Russia and Holland... how did Russia do it? They looked so fresh-legged – for the whole game... and that was with much less of a break and harder matches than the Dutch - I know that they are a young squad but – they just kept running like machines!
So that’s all my money gone... well apart from the sweepstake at work, I’m still in that with Russia... I also put a bet on pre-tournament on what was then a considerable long shot – this was on the advice of The Joker... if that comes off then I’ll be up and then some. But – in all honesty, I doubt that they will get past Italy.
Which brings us neatly on to tonight’s match:
Spain v Italy @ Vienna
Italy to get through – nothing to do with form, skill, fitness or football or anything like that – Italy will have prepared for this and Spain just don’t have the clout. I’ll be watching carefully... and wondering where it all went wrong?
