I did not sleep particularly well the night before last, perhaps because my American friend and I had made a visit to the John Lewis store in Solihull and had some difficulties negotiating our exit and then once I got to bed following the Spain v. France football match I had to set the alarm early for the following morning. I started off the day by ordering some more medication online and this is delivered by post a few days after ordering, it removes some of the strain of having to take prescription requests from doctor to chemist and the occasional hiccups that sometimes occur. Yesterday threatened to be a long day as is the long anticipated day of our U3A trip to Port Sunlight which is accessed mainly via the M6 and this motorway, as well as the M5, is notorious for delays but we shall have to see. Meanwhile, a massive talking point is how France, the favourites to win the World Cup, could have played so badly and to be beaten so comprehensively. The answer may lie in Spain’s superb defence and general teamwork but it hard to be definitive. One commentator captured the sense of shock and despair among the France players on a day when their World Cup dream died, in a 2-0 defeat to Spain that was as emphatic as the scoreline suggests. ‘It is an immense disappointment. We lost against ourselves. We didn’t lose against the referee, we didn’t lose against Spain, we lost against ourselves. You all know that everyone was scared of us. The only team who were capable of eliminating us was ourselves.’ Today is terrible. Asked what France lacked in their performance, the commentator replied ‘Everything. We were beaten technically, we were beaten tactically, we were beaten in the duels.’ It was a scathing assessment. France, the World Cup favourites, were outplayed, outfought and outthought, which is a compliment to their opponents first and foremost. Not for the first time, Spain demonstrated that their controlled brand of football — a mix of patience, precision and penetration — is too much for France. The French team have played delightful football but perhaps this is the first time that have met opponents who were their equal and it showed. I thought that it was impossible for England to beat the French and this is even more true were England to beat Argentina and find themselves in the final. Meanwhile, domestic politics is due to an interesting time in the week or so ahead. t looks as though Andy Burnham will become Prime Minister after next weekend but before that, there are interesting political developments. The so-called Hillsborough law has been passed enforcing a degree of candour on public officials so that the cover-ups we have experienced in recent times may become less likely. After the death of Ann Widdecombe, it looks as though MPs may need extra degrees of protection as the anti-terrorist authorities have some suspicions that the murdered Ann Widdecombe may have been the object of a targeted assassination. Furthermore, some of the latest COVID post-mortems have indicated the scale of the waste in the PPE procurement scandal associated with the last Conservative government but does not acknowledge the cronyism that was all too evident to the rest of the political class as close associates of the Tory party were awarded contracts at inflated prices for sub-standard protective equipment that did not work and much of which had to be jettisoned at tremendous cost. Baroness Heather Hallett criticised the ‘vast” waste in pandemic procurement, amounting to two-thirds of the £14.9bn total the UK and devolved governments spent on PPE. The combination of the World Cup and the imminent accession of Andy Burnham to the premiership have rather pushed this huge political story off the front pages but the scale of both the waste and the fraud can be said to be eye-watering.
So yesterday was my day trip out to Port Sunlight on the Wirral and a thoroughly enjoyable day it was as well. Port Sunlight is a model industrial village in the Wirral, Merseyside, built in 1888 by soap magnate William Lever to house his Lever Brothers factory workers. Spanning 130 acres, it features over 900 Grade II listed Arts and Crafts-style houses, parkland, as well as an art gallery and a museum. The day started off by my daughter-in-law giving me a lift down to the coach pick up point after which we headed up the M5/M6 and had a coffee stop at Sandbach services. An hour later, we had arrived in the village itself and we had an official guide who came on board the coach in which we toured the village which was excellent as owing to its size it would have been too much on foot. The quality and varied styles in the housing, as well as the facilities provided (churches, schools, a hospital, social facilities) makes one wonder whether society has progressed since the 1880’s. After the official tour, I made for the little restaurant and enjoyed a meal of genuine ‘scouse’ which was delicious, sharing my dinner time table with trip participants who had been on an earlier trip who I remembered spent their early youth in Leicester. After lunch, I did a tour of the art gallery and enjoyed some pre-Raphaelite painting and then made a tour of the typical workman’s house which was remarkably advanced for the time period in which it was built. Then we set off for home at about 3.30pm and arrived back in Bromsgrove where my son collected me. At 8.00pm we had the England vs Argentina football match in which the first half was a tetchy affair with masses of fouls on both sides. Some i5 minutes into the second half England scored a goal but from then on tried to hang on repulsing wave after wave of Argentine attacks. The Argentine team are well used to coming back practically from the dead towards the end of the match where they scored first an equaliser and then a winning goal. England had made some substitutions where they just tried to defend the goal for 30 minutes and whilst that strategy might have worked against many inferior teams, it would not and did not work against Argentina who now go on to play Spain in the final. England and France will play for the 3rd place (the ‘Bronze’ match) on Saturday and, in truth, I do not think the England team as players could have done more. Whether the strategy of all-out defence for the last 30 minutes of a game is sensible is ultimately down to the manager and not to the individual players.