I can cope with England going out tonight. I can cope with a new variant of coronavirus sweeping in and killing a third of humanity. I just can’t cope with BOTH
None of us would cope with the latter. At least not in any recognised sense of the word 'cope'.
(But I know what you mean)
It’s like, I kind of feel we deserve to win this euro thing, just because covid has been so shit. Sure, it’s been shit or shittier for others, but I’m English.
Also, both together (euro loss plus plague) seems vindictive by God
I’m reminded of that amazing, smacked-up interview Dennis Potter gave Melvyn Bragg, as he was dying of cancer - with a few weeks left
Potter said he thought his lifelong skin problem would at least give him a break, now he was dying. It did not. He still had the skin issue AND he was dying. Potter said that seemed “unfair”
Indeed my nerves about England and my generalised anxiety about Covid have blended into some unique and potent cocktail of unsettledness
In more important sporting news:
Chris Tavaré was seen weeping into his evening beer as news from Southampton confirmed he had lost his title as the most stubborn and slowest batsman of all time.
Looking at next week’s weather, I think the equation is simple.
Somerset go through. But then, given the way the ECB have been cheating and lying to keep them out of the running for reasons that defy rational explanation, I’m actually quite pleased about that.
One of Surrey, Glos and Hants will join them.
But - next week’s forecast is poor.
Surrey have to win and hope Glos v Hants is a total washout. Which is not impossible but is highly improbable.
If Glos beat Middlesex tomorrow - which may be a tall order given how easy the pitch has become and the minor detail they are missing three first choice bowlers - they only need to draw to qualify for the First Division. Hampshire would have to win.
If Middlesex draw, then Gloucestershire need to beat Hants. Which isn’t going to happen, if only because the forecast for Cheltenham is absolutely awful.
So I would make Somerset and Hants very near to certainties to go through unless Glos win tomorrow.
And Glos have nobody to blame but themselves. Nobody should be beaten by Leicestershire.
Gosh- is Cheltenham really that placid?
If Hampshire don't make it, they won't be able to complain that much- that's twice they've just failed to close out on the final day when it looked straightforward.
Cheltenham is a pitch that rewards tall, fast, accurate bowlers.
David Payne isn’t there. That leaves Matt Taylor, who isn’t accurate, Dom Goodman and Ollie Price, who aren’t fast, and Dan Worrall, who isn’t tall. And George Scott, who isn’t any of the above.
Plus, with the sun out, batting’s looked easy. Nice hot day forecast.
I think Middlesex can draw. They need Eskinazi to go big, or at the very least long, but he looks like a man with a point to prove.
I admit that Middlesex did quite awesomely badly in their first innings, but surely they can’t bat that badly again.
Next week, if there’s any play Kyle Abbott should be quite a handful for Gloucestershire’s batsmen. Those that are still fit.
BoZo would absolutely support the other home nations...
Twat
You really are a sad bitter man. Its a bit of fun, Starmer will also have a photo of himself in his England top etc, as will many of the 20 million tune in to watch the match.
I can cope with England going out tonight. I can cope with a new variant of coronavirus sweeping in and killing a third of humanity. I just can’t cope with BOTH
None of us would cope with the latter. At least not in any recognised sense of the word 'cope'.
(But I know what you mean)
It’s like, I kind of feel we deserve to win this euro thing, just because covid has been so shit. Sure, it’s been shit or shittier for others, but I’m English.
Also, both together (euro loss plus plague) seems vindictive by God
I’m reminded of that amazing, smacked-up interview Dennis Potter gave Melvyn Bragg, as he was dying of cancer - with a few weeks left
Potter said he thought his lifelong skin problem would at least give him a break, now he was dying. It did not. He still had the skin issue AND he was dying. Potter said that seemed “unfair”
I always feel the counter to "why me?" or "why us?" (and I have some skin in the game here) is "why not?"
Midlife crisis Moron is still banging on about pressure in sport...not like the war...
Who??
Piers Moron has been having arguments with a load of sports stars for 2 days now about pressure in sport, and how the young lass in the tennis bottled it the other day.
Midlife crisis Moron is still banging on about pressure in sport...not like the war...
Who??
Piers Moron has been having arguments with a load of sports stars for 2 days now about pressure in sport, and how the young lass bottled it the other day. It sad attention seeking by him.
Midlife crisis Moron is still banging on about pressure in sport...not like the war...
Who??
Piers Moron has been having arguments with a load of sports stars for 2 days now about pressure in sport, and how the young lass in the tennis bottled it the other day.
It sad midlife crisis attention seeking by him.
I was puzzled as to to why you thought the gentleman in question was having a midlife crisis or obsessed with sport.
Then I read it more carefully and realised it said ‘Moron’ not ‘Macron.’
Admittedly, I’m not sure about Moron having a midlife crisis. Don’t you have to have a life before you can have a midlife?
They should really hold every major football tournament in the UK. Even in the midst of a pandemic, when it is virtually impossible to travel to the country for away fans, we can rustle up thousands of Danish away fans based in the UK to support their team.
No DCL in the squad again so no straight replacement for Kane. Dumb.
I don't get it, when you can name so many subs. We don't need Coady on there, when have a whole load of other defenders who are versatile. Literally the whole back 4 would have to get injuried and then they would still have Henderson play there before Coady.
This Majorcan square is full of drunk, happy Germans. It’s ok for them, they’re already OUT
Imagine being Scottish, and never having any anxiety about sports EVER, because you know you are totally useless on a world class level, and you can never win ANYTHING
They must be supremely chilled. As we see daily
Fuck off, we have some really intense curling finals at the Winter Olympics.
Or something.
Edit - in fact we don't, because that's Team GB. D'oh.
Brits will, however, be offered vaccine booster shots (probably Novavax and Moderna/Pfizer) in the Autumn.
Delta will, on the whole, be regarded as a positive, as it will ensure that large numbers of (mostly low risk) Brits will have antibodies.
Covid 19 is a constrained virus: if it mutates much, it simply won't be able to bind with the ACE2 receptor. And that should make us all pretty optimistic that the bug is on the way out.
Do you think there will be a de facto lockdown during the winter?
I remember how quiet the country had become before the first lockdown.
I'll never forget that eerie moment in March 2020 when at 5pm there were six people at Manchester Piccadilly station when normally it is usually like the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan.
No.
Covid is over. We just haven't woken up to it yet.
A few days ago you were asking whether UK cases had peaked. Three weeks ago you said you thought delta would just be a blip that would soon burn itself out. This just seems like wishful thinking I'm afraid.
It's over.
Everyone who wants the vaccine can get it. The vaccines are 98% effective against hospitalisations.
Schools will close and that's the major vector of both transmission and testing.
It's over.
I'm not sure it's 98%
The FT did a breakdown of the vax efficacy yesterday. AZ and PF are between 92-96% effective against hospital admission, with a probable consensus around 93%
That means more than 1 in 20 will go to the hozzy. 7%
It's way better than no vax but if you get one million cases that's 70,000 hospital admissions, if you use this raw data
@Leon : that data is *entirely* consistent with Pfizer (and probably AZ) cutting hospital admissions by around 98%.
The people that have been double vaccinated are the 60% of people who are most clinically vulnerable. So, you're comparing overall hospitalisation rates, with those of the more vulnerable.
It’s good to see a confidence in our opening play; a refreshing change from the ‘pass back and hope something turns up’ style we’ve seen all too often in the past.
BoZo would absolutely support the other home nations...
Twat
He probably would support them (inasmuch as he gives a crap about football, which I doubt is very much), he probably supports England more though.
I cannot work out if you would be furious or not if he had worn a non-English shirt at some point though. "He has no right to wear that, the twat, he's expressing dominance of England!"
It’s coming home. And if it isn’t, I’ve got £50 on Denmark at 3.4.
The best thing about this tournament has been seeing crowds again.
My favourite moment of the tournament has been the end of regular time in the France against Switzerland game, and the cheer that went up from the - presumably largely neutral crowd. It was 3-3. They had just watched one of the greatest international football matches of all time. And they'd been given the tremendous good fortune to get an encore. A cheer just for the sheer joy of being in a crowd of people watching football.
This Majorcan square is full of drunk, happy Germans. It’s ok for them, they’re already OUT
Imagine being Scottish, and never having any anxiety about sports EVER, because you know you are totally useless on a world class level, and you can never win ANYTHING
They must be supremely chilled. As we see daily
Fuck off, we have some really intense curling finals at the Winter Olympics.
Or something.
Edit - in fact we don't, because that's Team GB. D'oh.
BoZo would absolutely support the other home nations...
Twat
He probably would support them (inasmuch as he gives a crap about football, which I doubt is very much), he probably supports England more though.
I cannot work out if you would be furious or not if he had worn a non-English shirt at some point though. "He has no right to wear that, the twat, he's expressing dominance of England!"
If Scotland were the team still in, and the PM wore a Scotland shirt, those criticising him now would still be criticising him.
BoZo would absolutely support the other home nations...
Twat
He probably would support them (inasmuch as he gives a crap about football, which I doubt is very much), he probably supports England more though.
I cannot work out if you would be furious or not if he had worn a non-English shirt at some point though. "He has no right to wear that, the twat, he's expressing dominance of England!"
Our regular reminder of why millions of people will not be made to self-isolate this Summer: test and trace won't be able to find them...
Kate Nicholls, chief executive of the trade body UKHospitality, said that around a third of staff in the sector are self-isolating at any one time at the moment because they have been asked to self-isolated by the app.
“The app is pinging more and more people, and that number is going to go up in the coming weeks. The economy is going to grind to a halt,” she said.
Ms Nicholls described the app as “overzealous”, adding that “people are just starting to delete it”.
“My timeline is full of people saying they have turned it off because their sister’s wedding is coming up and they don’t want to miss it,” she said.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer raised the issue with the Prime Minister in the Commons on Wednesday afternoon.
He asked Mr Johnson: “What is the Prime Minister going to do to stop people deleting the NHS app? Because they can see precisely what he can’t see, which is millions of them are going to be pinged this summer to self-isolate.”
He added that 19 July “won’t feel like ‘Freedom Day’ to those who have to isolate — when they are having to cancel their holidays, when they can’t go to the pub or even to their kid’s sports day”.
The answer to Sir Keir's question being, of course, that the Prime Minister is going to do nothing to stop people deleting the app - firstly because they can't reasonably be forced to use it, and secondly because mass deletion will hamstring test and trace and therefore prevent the tsunami wave of self-isolation that many people are panicking about.
The rules exempting the double-jabbed aren't meant to change until nearly the end of Summer, but in practice most people who have either never used the app or have decided to dispense with its services are already exempt now. Once the schools have broken up then, whilst some of us will keep using the app and/or LFTs, the numbers of people who aren't symptomatically ill with Covid who end up marooned at home because someone else coughed within a quarter-of-a-mile of them should be really quite modest.
Starmer will also have a photo of himself in his England top
Will it have Keith on the back?
If it weren't for the word BORIS on the shirt, the photo would have been fine. Probably. No 10 supporting a national team.
Something about his use of his stage name crosses a line somehow.
There are loads of photos of Tony Blair with a football shirt with his name on it with number 10. Its totally unremarkable.
Such moments are when we discover who actually cares deeply about such things, even if they say they don't care about such trivialities (since the comments prove that's not so). The sensible people, unlike us, aren't commenting on the shirt or commenting on those commenting on the shirt.
The world’s tallest sandcastle has been completed in Denmark, towering more than 20 metres high and comprising nearly 5,000 tonnes of sand, according to its designers.
Standing 21.16 metres in height (69.4 feet), the castle is more than 3 metres taller than one built in Germany in 2019, which previously held the title, according to Guinness World Records.
Starmer will also have a photo of himself in his England top
Will it have Keith on the back?
If it weren't for the word BORIS on the shirt, the photo would have been fine. Probably. No 10 supporting a national team.
Something about his use of his stage name crosses a line somehow.
There are loads of photos of Tony Blair with a football shirt with his name on it with number 10. Its totally unremarkable.
Such moments are when we discover who actually cares deeply about such things, even if they say they don't care about such trivialities (since the comments prove that's not so). The sensible people, unlike us, aren't commenting on the shirt or commenting on those commenting on the shirt.
But what about the people who are commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on those commenting on the shirt?
Meanwhile, we have a result at the tennis. Men's semi-finals on Friday will be Djokovic v Shapovalov and Berrettini v Hurkacz.
If I'm correct then three of those men are in their first Grand Slam semi-final; Djokovic is contesting his forty-first, and has only dropped one set (the first one in the first round, against Jack Draper.) If he doesn't win the tournament from this position it will be an enormous surprise.
NB Have been watching the tennis highlights, and saw news of the start of the collapse on the BBC website. I decided this was going to happen so it wasn't worth the bother of sitting in front of it. It's what always happens, after all.
Husband says at least the pubs will have made some money out of it. Such is life.
Comments
Interestingly a couple only realised they had it through the mandatory testing
Also, both together (euro loss plus plague) seems vindictive by God
I’m reminded of that amazing, smacked-up interview Dennis Potter gave Melvyn Bragg, as he was dying of cancer - with a few weeks left
Potter said he thought his lifelong skin problem would at least give him a break, now he was dying. It did not. He still had the skin issue AND he was dying. Potter said that seemed “unfair”
David Payne isn’t there. That leaves Matt Taylor, who isn’t accurate, Dom Goodman and Ollie Price, who aren’t fast, and Dan Worrall, who isn’t tall. And George Scott, who isn’t any of the above.
Plus, with the sun out, batting’s looked easy. Nice hot day forecast.
I think Middlesex can draw. They need Eskinazi to go big, or at the very least long, but he looks like a man with a point to prove.
I admit that Middlesex did quite awesomely badly in their first innings, but surely they can’t bat that badly again.
Next week, if there’s any play Kyle Abbott should be quite a handful for Gloucestershire’s batsmen. Those that are still fit.
That’s another thing I’m looking forward to getting rid of.
It sad midlife crisis attention seeking by him.
Not the best way to feel before a busy day’s teaching...so I do them the night before.
It's only his face that shows the lines, the confused look in his eyes, the incipient bald patch.
Then I read it more carefully and realised it said ‘Moron’ not ‘Macron.’
Admittedly, I’m not sure about Moron having a midlife crisis. Don’t you have to have a life before you can have a midlife?
But, he'll get away with it - because he's Boris.
Something about his use of his stage name crosses a line somehow.
Or something.
Edit - in fact we don't, because that's Team GB. D'oh.
The people that have been double vaccinated are the 60% of people who are most clinically vulnerable. So, you're comparing overall hospitalisation rates, with those of the more vulnerable.
I rather want us to win.
Have put a small bet on Denmark at what I consider quite generous odds (3.25).
It’s coming home. And if it isn’t, I’ve got £50 on Denmark at 3.4.
How was that not a back-pass then?
I cannot work out if you would be furious or not if he had worn a non-English shirt at some point though. "He has no right to wear that, the twat, he's expressing dominance of England!"
My favourite moment of the tournament has been the end of regular time in the France against Switzerland game, and the cheer that went up from the - presumably largely neutral crowd. It was 3-3. They had just watched one of the greatest international football matches of all time. And they'd been given the tremendous good fortune to get an encore. A cheer just for the sheer joy of being in a crowd of people watching football.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWIUp19bBoA
Kate Nicholls, chief executive of the trade body UKHospitality, said that around a third of staff in the sector are self-isolating at any one time at the moment because they have been asked to self-isolated by the app.
“The app is pinging more and more people, and that number is going to go up in the coming weeks. The economy is going to grind to a halt,” she said.
Ms Nicholls described the app as “overzealous”, adding that “people are just starting to delete it”.
“My timeline is full of people saying they have turned it off because their sister’s wedding is coming up and they don’t want to miss it,” she said.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer raised the issue with the Prime Minister in the Commons on Wednesday afternoon.
He asked Mr Johnson: “What is the Prime Minister going to do to stop people deleting the NHS app? Because they can see precisely what he can’t see, which is millions of them are going to be pinged this summer to self-isolate.”
He added that 19 July “won’t feel like ‘Freedom Day’ to those who have to isolate — when they are having to cancel their holidays, when they can’t go to the pub or even to their kid’s sports day”.
https://inews.co.uk/news/health/self-isolation-rules-change-fully-vaccinated-boris-johnson-change-millions-deleting-nhs-app-1091576
The answer to Sir Keir's question being, of course, that the Prime Minister is going to do nothing to stop people deleting the app - firstly because they can't reasonably be forced to use it, and secondly because mass deletion will hamstring test and trace and therefore prevent the tsunami wave of self-isolation that many people are panicking about.
The rules exempting the double-jabbed aren't meant to change until nearly the end of Summer, but in practice most people who have either never used the app or have decided to dispense with its services are already exempt now. Once the schools have broken up then, whilst some of us will keep using the app and/or LFTs, the numbers of people who aren't symptomatically ill with Covid who end up marooned at home because someone else coughed within a quarter-of-a-mile of them should be really quite modest.
The world’s tallest sandcastle has been completed in Denmark, towering more than 20 metres high and comprising nearly 5,000 tonnes of sand, according to its designers.
Standing 21.16 metres in height (69.4 feet), the castle is more than 3 metres taller than one built in Germany in 2019, which previously held the title, according to Guinness World Records.
He is England's weak link.
If I'm correct then three of those men are in their first Grand Slam semi-final; Djokovic is contesting his forty-first, and has only dropped one set (the first one in the first round, against Jack Draper.) If he doesn't win the tournament from this position it will be an enormous surprise.
Danes playing well, not intimidated at all.
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/en/football/uefa-euro-2020/england-v-denmark-betting-30669262
And a silly foul
We're going home
Husband says at least the pubs will have made some money out of it. Such is life.
No need to panic