It's been an exhausting summer so far and I have had little time or energy to devote to my blog. It all began with Roland Garros or was it Euro 2012? Difficult to remember at this juncture but by the time I had made it through to the finals I was really in no state to take on the likes of Rafa. Rafa duly won but was not to know that he would get his comeuppance at the hands of an unknown in a few weeks' time.
The Euro 2012 football championship was one of the best I can remember. Once "the lads" had departed, suitably gutted, I could sit back and enjoy watching teams who actually knew how to play football. On the strength of their display in the final, Spain must be one of the greatest, if not THE greatest team of all time. If one looks back at the great sides of the past, they are all, fairly or unfairly, associated in our minds with one player: Pele, Cruyff, Beckenbauer, Maradona, Zidane. Spain has any number of stars but no one player is singled out as a sort of shorthand for the team as a whole. Theirs is essentially a team effort.
And so to Wimbledon. Andy Murray must be one of the unluckiest players in tennis history, not in the sense that he deserved to beat Roger Federer but in the sense that it is his misfortune to play in the same era as three exceptional players: Federer, Nadal and Djokovic. Did you know that these three have won every single grand slam title - with one exception - since 2005? By way of contrast, the last 15 major golf championships have been won by 15 different players!
But wait, there's more! The Olympics are almost upon us, affording an excellent opportunity for the government to redeploy our troops. I hope I won't be considered unpatriotic if I say that the Olympic Games are increasingly coming to resemble bloatware, like Microsoft Office or the Eurovision Song Contest in which the British entrant Gerry Dorsey (born Englebert Humperdinck on 1st September 1854) was routinely humiliated by a rigged jury.
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