There will be two items of news gripping the nation as we awoke yesterday morning. The first of these are the developments following the murder of the prominent right wing politician, Ann Widdecombe. The latest news is that a 28 year old white male has been arrested in South Yorkshire, an initial white male suspect having been released the day before. It appears that Ann Widdecombe hd been murdered at least 24 hours before the discovery of a body which followed her non appearance for a TV interview. No doubt, the police will give out further information as and when they see fit but in the meantime, prominent members of the Reform Party are being given round-the-clock police protection as a precautionary measure. The huge question arises whether this was a political assassination or just an opportunistic murder and no doubt the political airwaves will be full of speculation until more information is supplied to us. The second huge story is, of course, Englands progression in the World Cup as England progress towards the semi-finals having beaten Norway 2:1. The match was quite a tense affair and one has to say was not filled with the ‘beautiful’ football that we associated with France and Spain who are drawn against each other in the first of the semi-finals. Both England and Norway had potential goals disallowed after VAR reviews so a kind of parity was in evidence. England probably made more attacks on their opponent’s goal but without the normal killer touches we associate with a top team. Norway scored their goal after the normal terrible England defensive lapse where our back line went to sleep and were not aware of the potential danger of a counter attack which is a common pattern these days. But the hero of the day was undoubtedly Jude Bellingham who scored both of the England goals, the second being an opportunistic rebound after the Norway goalkeeper had failed to clear a shot on goal. In the post match interview, the England manager was of the view that England were to some extent lucky and had not played very well, which view was contradicted by the players themselves. England will now meet Argentina who prevailed against Switzerland in the other quarter final, having beaten them 3:1 after extra time. For the third successive match, Argentina earned a chaotic win with an underwhelming performance despite starting the match as clear favourites. After taking the lead early on, they went nearly 90 minutes without another shot on target between Mac Allister’s opener and an acrobatic Lisandro Martinez effort deep into second half injury time that was well saved low by Kobel. Switzerland were playing with 10 men for some of the second half as one of the their players received a second yellow card following an incident in which was adjudged to have dived. So two yellow cards equate to one red one and so the offending player was sent off, reducing Switzerland to ten men. According to some match reports, Switzerland proved to be the better team for much of the match but Argentina seem to have a knack of always scraping through in the end. I doubt many people in the country stayed up to watch the Argentina match after the excitement and extra time of the England match. In some ways, as sometimes happens, the semi-finalists of France and Spain will meet each other, and these two teams would have provided the best football were they both to be in the final. My predictions for the rest of the World Cup are for a final between France and Argentina with France actually winning the World Cup but, as always, the games will be decided on incredibly fine margins and, perhaps, some refereeing\/VAR decisions. There is a definite change in the weather pattern today as it is both cloudier and more windy than of late but I think that most of the country would really welcome a few dramatic thunderstorms and downpours from this point onward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the morning, I deliberately took it very easy as I had a late night the evening beforehand as the football had delayed things so much. The political news is still dominated by the Ann Widdecombe murder case and although few details have emerged so date, we know that a white male as been arrested in South Yorkshire and the police has gone so far as to say there is no evident terrorist or even overtly political motivation in evidence. This must be a sort of good news because anything resembling a political assassination might have all kind of unpredictable consequences. In the late afternoon, my American friend and I \u00a0went off to a (free) recorder concert in the local parish church as part of the Bromsgrove festival. This went on slightly too long for our tastes at about an hour and a quarter so we were relieved to have taken along some cushions with us to alleviate some of the hardness of the wooden pews. We returned home to make a salad tea together and to reflect that this was the first night for as long as we could remember when there wasn’t a football match to occupy and divert us. My son and daughter-in-law made contact after their brief holiday \u00a0in the Lake District and we discussed some possible \u00a0dates when we might meet up with our distant cousins in late July. The week ahead is going to be quite a busy one what with one thing or another the highlight being a day trip out to the Port Sunlight industrial heritage site on Wednesday. It looks as though the weather is becoming slightly more tolerable for us in the few days ahead but a massive fire has started in the North Wales area near the Conway valley which Meg and I used to visit when her aunt and uncle were still alive and living in that area. The weather has been so hot and dry for so long that the whole country must be like a tinder box and it is only to be hoped that fires do not break out in several parts of the country. It will not be long now before Andy Burnham takes over the leadership of the Labour Party and we know that one of his long term ambitions has been to establish a National Care Service to parallel the National Health Service. But the age-old question remains of how, as a society we are to fund such a much needed venture – politicians \u00a0of all political stripes have kicked this particular can down the road for decades because of the enormous costs involved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There will be two items of news gripping the nation as we awoke yesterday morning. The first of these are the developments following the murder of the prominent right wing politician, Ann Widdecombe. The latest news is that a 28 year old white male has been arrested in South Yorkshire, an initial white male suspect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8412,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8411\/revisions\/8412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}