Monday, 16 June 2008
Thursday, 12 June 2008
A Royal Visit For The Brit Oval
As the Twenty20 Cup launches this week, Surrey County Cricket Club are looking forward to more than just cricket with the announcement that The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall will be visiting the Club’s home ground on Friday.
The last time a member of the Royal Family visited the Brit Oval was when The Duke of Edinburgh opened the OCS stand at the Vauxhall end of the ground ahead of the historic Ashes series in 2005.
Their Royal Highnesses will be taking in all aspects of the Club’s activity when they visit next Friday, including a look at the Ben Hollioake Learning Centre which sees over 4,000 children a year come through its doors and experience cricket based education programmes. In addition, The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall will meet both the Surrey and Kent teams ahead of their Twenty20 match, and take in the atmosphere from the 23,000 strong crowd expected on Friday.
Paul Sheldon, Chief Executive of Surrey County Cricket Club commented: “The Prince of Wales has always been a supporter of the work we do here at Surrey, both in terms of cricket all of the work we do with the local community, including a Prince’s Trust cricket initiative. We are looking forward to showing both The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall all of these programmes in action when they visit the Brit Oval on Friday.”
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
Thursday, 5 June 2008
Countdown to the European Championships...
Who's looking forward to the Euros...?? I'm actually quite excited by the prospect of watching top class international football without that familiar sense of dread associated with being an England supporter...
Footypedia By Daniel Maier
Published in Hardback by Century on May 01 2008, Priced £9.99
To celebrate winning the FA Cup by wearing its lid as a hat.
The smell inside a Ford Fiesta carrying five overweight England fans back to Lincolnshire.
The nagging feeling of resentment when you let a four-year-old score a goal past you in the garden.
The lovely velvety bag the cup draw balls are kept in.
Every football fan has seen or known these things. But who has the words to describe them?
How have we talked about football for this long without a word for surreptitiously timing a pre-match minute's silence, just to see if it's accurate? Or one for the feeling of frustration that the half of the league table you catch sight of on TV is never the half with your team in? Shouldn’t there be a verb that means: to reduce a 2-0 deficit to 2-1 in injury time, grab the ball out of the net and run back to the half-way line with it in order to get the game restarted as quickly as possible, despite the fact that your actions are completely futile since it’s the other team that’ll be kicking off again?
Yes. There should be. And there is. Footypedia: The Alternative Dictionary of Football is the hilarious, insightful and essential repository for all those things in football that up ‘til now have simply taken too many words to describe. The year's funniest, most off-beat and irreverent football book.
Baldock (n) – Inability to tell Thomas Gravesen and Lee Carsley apart.
Foyle (vb) – To ironically cheer opposition fans for their belated attempt to sing.
Quantrill (n) – Training exercise that appears to consist of players in woolly hats having a laugh.
Woffinden (n) – Utterly unintelligible post-match interview with a foreign player, left in the highlights programme solely to give the presenters and pundits something to laugh at.
About the Author:
Daniel Maier has written for television, radio and theatre. His credits include: Harry Hill’s TV Burp, Alistair McGowan’s Big Impression and Big World Cup, and The Peter Serafinowicz Show. He must have a sense of humour: he supports Newcastle United.