Sport

Went with a pile of friends last night to watch Australia beat Bahrain. And indeed we did, but not as impressively as we should have against a young inexperienced team.

Some questionable calls, although not too many it has to be said, combined with way too much diving by the Bahrain side took a little of the excitement away. But it was still a great place to be, seeing so many of our World Cup players back in Oz finally playing together.

Anyone else interested? The packages look pretty reasonable - 10 home games in Silver seating is $188, plus all sorts of extra stuff.

First game is Sunday week.

We went with six other friends to watch the Socceroos beat Kuwait 2-0 on Wednesday night - a great atmosphere but disappointing to see the supposedly "sold-out!!!" stadium actually fairly empty.

Still, a great time was had by all, and it was good to get out and have a yell.

Shame that CityRail decided not to honour our free travel supposedly included in the ticket price - great way to get people not to bother and just drive next time.

Great story over in SMH today showing that not just the Aussies have taken it hard about this horrible way we have been ejected from the world cup - the Germans weren't much impressed either:

"Schwein!" he said again. "Spaghetti? Nicht! Pizza? Nicht!"
He was scrubbing Italian items off his menu. And we thought we were upset.

It was a truly shocking decision, but there's been plenty said about it all over the media so I won't add much, except to say that the refereeing does seem horribly biased towards the standard established big teams - look at who has made the final eight. Yawn.

What an absolute shambles of a game! Was at a mate's place this morning with a bunch of other reasonably biased Aussie fans, but what a horrible display of refereeing. Even the usually fairly reserved Les Murray and Craig Foster were amazingly scathing of the officials at the end of SBS's coverage.

At the end we should have cheered but couldn't believe what we were seeing - a Croatian player with three yellow cards still on the pitch, missed fouls everywhere and no replays shown of an extremely dodgy three extra-time minutes.

That off my chest, we're through! Got the bus into town with said mate after the match, got off in George Street only to be faced with a bunch of excited fans yelling "Don't go to work! Don't go to work!" directly at us. It was tempting, but there is work to be done unfortunately. So I'd better go do it :)

Any good suggestions as to why FIFA's live match thingy only works on a Mac if you use Safari, not Firefox? That's pretty ugly.
Oh well, watching the game anyway - bring on the next month!
Have a nasty cold so haven't slept and feel horrible. Not sure how late I will last.

So, we decided a while back not to hang around in Europe for the (football/soccer) World Cup. But on the one day we are stuck in Bahrain with little planned to do, it turns out our beloved Socceroos will be there playing the locals as an Asian Cup qualifier!!
But do you think I can find out any information about tickets prices? Not thus far...

Maybe we can sit a few kilometres away from the stadium and watch it on TV. There's something wrong about that. Then again, it is our honeymoon...

We're through. 82,000 other fans watched it with us. What an amazing experience.
For some reason everyone keeps comparing it to Cathy Freeman's 400m olympic victory. We were there too. Same stadium, same amazing atmosphere, but only 120 minutes or so longer.
Bring on June 2006.
Edit: Some photos uploaded to my Flickr photostream.

Sydney Morning Herald: Radar

Uruguay
Due to an unfortunate lack of springboards in their country, this team of professional divers was forced to take up football

Bean has prompted me into action by noting that my blog has interesting content but I don't post often. I appreciate the first part and couldn't agree more with the second.
Except for one major problem - I do too much stuff. Here's a short listing of some of the things I've done since last posting:

• Had a gig with Jersey Kerb down the coast. Great fun, not many people turned up due to awful weather but can't have been all bad as we got about four gig offers as well as a semi-permanent spot offered. Not sure what will come of that but we have another gig in a month or so where I have changed instruments and will now be playing keyboards/sax/flute/bass. Oh dear.
  
• Got our good car serviced and bid the old one farewell. It was interesting to note that the amount we got for it is what we typically withdraw once a week or so to use as spending money. Better than the wreckers, it went to our mechanic's apprentice who is going to make it betterer and hence not get to work wet from riding his bike. An improvement!
  
• Didn't care much about the Melbourne Cup.
  
• Went ring shopping where Liz ordered the wedding band to match her engagement ring and I selected mine. Both should be ready in a week or so.
  
• Had coffee with the folks and their folks at Short Black café at Penshurst - our local café and good enough to win the Leader Small Business Awards. Pretty noisy for a family get-together inside though. Outside means the heat plus eating other people's nicotine.
  
• Went in yet again to James Squire Brewhouse for Jane's birthday beers. The food was still great, the service excellent and the prices, well, let's not talk about those. Governor King is a great beer brewed on site.
  
• Mowed the lawn a few times - have to do it every week! Remind me never to fertilize it again...
  
• Had three-day weekends. Very good to get house work done, but after the blitz of a week Mon-Thurs I typically don't want to touch computers all weekend, hence no blogging there.
  
• Went searching with SES for a lost/abducted little girl out at Lurnea past Liverpool. Drove trucks around and did land searches operating with the Police. Quite a good experience but no trace of the girl.
  
• Walked from Circular Quay to Town Hall as part of the SES 50th Anniversary Parade. There were more people out clapping and whatever than I was expecting, and it was good to be part of such a big thing.
  
• Had dinner at Kelly's place Saturday night, meeting up with old friends and watching other people try tuna tacos. Couldn't quite drum up the enthusiasm myself, sticking to the more reliable bean variety.
  
• Walked all the way to Como and back for morning tea with Liz, Jono and Penny on Sunday, after they came over to watch the first leg of the Socceroos world cup qualifiers vs. Uruguay. Well, Jono and I did - the girls went back to sleep. What a rip off that penalty was.
  

We have tickets to the next qualifier tomorrow night out at Telstra Stadium, which should totally rock. Don't have any green/gold gear to wear though, and apparently it's quite expensive. Might just wander around the city and buy some tacky tourist version.
We're off to the Hunter this weekend to hopefully talk with the wedding cake, hair, photography and flower people. No, not the same person, although that would make life much easier.

It's crazy sports season, so apoligies in advance if you, like Liz, don't really care.
Go the Swans! That's been a long time coming, and now we have some parades and stuff to look forwards to.
One of the things we would have liked to have done while in London was watch some Premiership (soccer) games, but we couldn't afford it. Looks like not much has changed.

Went to watch a game of soccer/football last night at Aussie stadium. It's been a large number of years since we did that. Cheap seats, but still undercover, and a rowdy crowd just up from us proved to make it a great fun night.
This is all in the "new" A-League that Soccer Australia is hoping will make people here finally take interest in the game at a professional level in this country.
Considering that before the season Sydney FC were tipped to win it due to the bigger fanbase and better players, we aren't doing all that well so far.
The worst leaf by far taken out of the English Premiership book however is that you can't watch the games at home unless you have some form of pay TV. Also media here isn't interested in reporting about much that isn't league. At least the cost of cheap seats at two home games a month is cheaper than pay TV, so that may end up being the best option.
Edit: added a couple of photos to my Flickr account - check them out on the left.