Temperatures in June/July look quite pleasant. Should be very suitable for european style football.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/world/c...ml?tt=TT000600

Last time I looked 8 out of the 10 top world ranked teams were european. Any of the consistently good tournament teams could win it - Italy/Germany/Brazil. Of the rest England have as good a chance as any and can hopefully get out of the group easily and avoid a top team in the 1st knockout round.

I see Kenny Wharton left NUFC today. Made me think of this incident from his playing days years ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAG5qHfwY38

Wharton's playing career in Toon nicely fills the gap between me leaving the UK and the advent of the internet.

Class bit of time wasting though.

No European team has won a world cup outside of Europe. I expect that to continue.

Interestingly I am mightily mightily facked of to learn this morning that the WOrld Cup games are not included in my Rogers package. Apparently all group games will be shown but the knock out stages are pay per view.

My work colleague has just checked Bell and it is the same.

I am working on obtaining the costs but it appears these Canadians will sell their arses for a few sense.

Eh? Much of it is being shown on the main CBC network isnt it?
http://www.cbc.ca/sports/soccer/fifa...broadcast.html

"Bold" (whatever the hell that is) claim to have 8 exclusive games, but it seems to be available across all the usual digital subscription suspects (Rogers, Bell, Cogeco, Shaw, etc) for a cost.
http://www.cbc.ca/bold/subscribe.html

Im off to the motherland for ten days in a week. I expect that by the time I return that my better half will have had our cable disconnected anyway

Yes your link does show the games on CBC. I am due to pay my Rogers bill in the next few days so I will have frank discussion on what is being shown and not so that we can all make the appropriate plans ahead of time.

Basically all games are on CBC eventually....8 of the the 3rd games for each team in the 1st round are on CBC Bold (formerly CBC Country Canada) when another game in the same group is on CBC. Once the game is over on CBC they (CBC) will show the game that had just been on CBC Bold.

This website explains it all. Basically, I think we will be pretty well covered here in Canada.

http://footballtvcanada.blogspot.com/

Brazil are the only team to have won the world cup outside of their own continent. Germany, Italy, Holland and Argentina have been finalists outside of their own continents. A winner from outside those teams seems unlikely. The african teams have the potential to knock anyone out.

But lets hope we have proper BBC or ITV commentators and not some Canadian twat who knows bugger all about football or some obscure Brit who couldn't get a job anywhere else so he's cheap. CBC should just buy the ITV/BBC feed and have done with it.

It's rare to get domestic Beeb/ITV feed of matches/build-up anywhere outside the British Isles for technical/rights reasons - we tend to get the International Feed ie. British comms like John Helm who are no longer at the top of their game.

Still, better than Japanese chimpentary - 'headingu shooto', 'nice keepa', 'just meet' , 'goal geetttoooooooo' etc - I'd prefer to have the games in vuvulezan!

Hooray

Crap.

Ah.. the special footballing definition of 'mutual consent'.

Although, as I'd read that he's entitled to GBP 16m compo, I'm sure he's not going to be weeping into his beer for too long.

According to the gruaniad he was offered 3m pounds to leave by "mutual consent". They also say he's off to Inter to pick up the trail of the special one.

At least they've still got Hicks and Gillette still ruining the place.