2002 is probably my favourite World Cup for a number of reasons. Four years after I had attended my first tournament in France I was determined to not miss this one. I had never been a fan of Asia as a region, although I have to admit I do have a penchant for far eastern ladies. My mother, the original CMF once said at a family meal that she didn’t like anything in the Far East because of all that “Plinky plonky music”…Yes, my mother thinks that life in Japan, China and Korea is accompanied by some medieval Musak.
In 2001 I got the “best job in the world”. Somehow I managed to blag a role that essentially saw me have to fly around Europe, first class all week, collecting air miles in return for a very fat salary and the occasional report on how certain sales teams were doing. This was the second coming of the Internet bubble and you could not do better than working for a US internet company who literally threw money at everything. In fact they were throwing too much money at everything and as 2001 became 2002 everything started to unravel. The signs were quite evident…offices suddenly closing, doors being locked from the inside in others to stop the bailiffs and then wages not being paid. Continue reading
“I know many football supporters (myself included) are prone to spinning yarns when regaling friends and family with stories from their latest football trip abroad. The local constabulary were ‘baton-happy’ in Rome. The hostel in Barcelona was so rough I could have been paid for my room by the hour. So when I told my partner I had finally discovered my football utopia, she rolled her eyes, shook her head and sighed “didn’t you say that after Istanbul”?. OK maybe I did, but this time I really mean it. I’ve have just returned from a city……