I’ll get to the subject soon enough, but first of all, I want to talk about the England performance against Croatia on Wednesday evening. First thing to note is what the hell was Maclaren playing at? playing 3-5-2, that has never suited England, and they looked frail at the back because of it. The danger signs were there in the first half and England were lucky to get away with going in at half time with the score level! But he persisted with that formation and eventually Croatia made the breakthrough in the 61st minute when Eduardo looped a shot over Paul Robinson who was 10 yards off his line. You have to say that it was a goalkeeping error that caused the goal, if Robinson was on his line, he would have claimed it comfortably. Croatia’s second goal was astonishing, not because it was a good shot, but because no Croatian player was involved, it will be counted as a Garry Neville own goal when the Manchester United player passed back to Robinson only for Tottenham keeper to miss the ball completely, and subsequently dribble into the back of the net to give the home team a 2 – 0 lead. I could jump on the bandwagon and put all the blame on Paul Robinson, but I won’t do that as he was unlucky as the ball hit a divot in the pit just before his foot, you could say that if he side footed it instead of going for a full blooded kick he may have stopped the ball, but that’s neither here nor there really. But it certainly looks like Maclaren’s honeymoon period is well and truly over and it leaves the fans wondering if he is the right man for the job. I think that he has made tactical errors in formation and player choice, but that said he was without injured Owen Hargreaves, Joe Cole and suspended Stevie Gerrard, but that doesn’t excuse the piss poor performance from England, if anything Paul Robinson was man of the match for England making several excellent saves to keep the rampant Croatians at bay for 61 minutes; he should be patted on the back, not criticised!
Right onto the subject matter, on Wednesday night I went out with Stephen to Reflex/Flares and ended up being lectured by Stephen about relationships. He ranted that I should forget about ever getting it together with Helen and sleep with every one I could to find some-one special. But that isn’t my personality, I don’t go in for one night stands just for the hell of it, it’s also not that wise in today’s climate, even with a condom, you could be unlucky and get a girl pregnant or contract some sort of STD, sorry STI, it’s not a disease these days is it?… I eventually got fed up with the lecture and left the club and went for a walk to think about things. I eventually got home at about 3am to find I was locked out as I had left my keys at home because I couldn’t find them before going out. Anyway I tried texting and calling Stephen without any luck, then tried texting Nic to see if he had his phone switched on, I even tried to text Helen as it was so bloody cold outside. After waiting around outside for a couple of hours I decided to walk to my dads house as I knew he would be up at 5:45am to pick up my spare key. I eventually got home at 9:30am, then eventually passed out at about 2pm through pure exhaustion, 36 hours without sleep isn’t good for the body!
Finally, FUCKING MICROSOFT, why can’t they make a browser that is fully compliant with W3C standards, as mentioned previously I am working on a web project and the design doesn’t quite work in Internet Explorer (v7 RC1). The table cell spacing and padding is radically different, which messes up the template as it uses scrolling DIV layers, not all the images fit within the DIV as they do should; like it does in Firefox, the bottom row is cut off 2/3 the way down the image row, it’s not a major problem, but it bugs the hell out of me!!!