Adieu Zizou
Thi should technically be under "The Annals of Sport" but I don't want to add a new category so here goes. Te World Cup Final yesterday was a hard game to watch. While these sorts of contests are always unfair, it seems doubly so that Italy came out at the top of the pile. With their uninspiring and opportunistic football, they are scavengers on the greatness of other teams. It seems to bear out the general trend to reward mediocrity - although now I feel that I am not giving the Italians their due. It's just that they don't make me love the game in the same way that other teams do, and in this case in the way that watch Zidane did.
Which brings me to Zizou himself: how sad is it to end on a note like this. If he hadn't orchestrated the solid defeat of Brazil and the dismissal of Portugal, perhaps then he could just fade into memory in the same way that Johan Cruyff had for so many people. Whlie the internet is awash of photos of the now notorious incident itself and the ensuing red card, it's much harder to find the more iconic image - that of Zidane walking, hangdog, past the World Cup trophy into the darkened tunnel of the stadium - and of course history. It's a sad thing to see a man so close to greatness and the school-boy-fantasy end to his career and to see it all unravel at the threshold.