Disappointingly, but not wholly unexpectedly, England’s football team were knocked out of the 2010 World Cup by Germany at the weekend. Despite being beaten by a margin of three goals, loyal fans nevertheless bemoaned the fact that the referee made an erroneous decision by failing to notice that the ball had crossed Germany’s goal line.

Of course, the cries once again went up for some kind of goal line technology at top-level football matches to make sure such a state of affairs never happens again.

But that misses the point.

We don’t watch football matches for clinical, emotion-free decisions. We watch football matches as they’re (often) passionate, emotion-charged affairs. We watch them – not to get overly-philosophical – as it reaffirms what it means to be human and brings us together. Technology is not always the answer.

Think of all of the times when someone has proposed to you that technology is the solution. Do they even understand the question? Perhaps you should seek to clarify that first. :-p

Before I went away I mentioned on Twitter that it would be great if we could have a Twitter Fantasy Football league. Low and behold, @damian613 @iusher set it up and @tombarrett texted me whilst I was away to say it was going ahead.

If you’d like to get involved, get in touch and I’ll send you the details!

Here’s my team and the standings after the first games:

Congratulations to Lisa, but there’s a lot of games left to play… :-p

My Dad and I went to see Sunderland vs. Arsenal yesterday. I bought the new shirt, and my parents kindly bought Ben his first Sunderland strip!

Below are some pictures of the day. Click on them to be taken to the larger versions on Flickr.

Sunderland are now on 30 points with 7 games left:

We’re not free from relegation worries by any means, but at least we’ve got a win under our belts and are not in the bottom 3! The final 7 games for Sunderland are:

• 29 March – Sunderland vs. West Ham
• 5 April – Fulham vs. Sunderland (a 6-pointer!)
• 12 April - Sunderland vs. Manchester City
• 20 April – Newcastle vs. Sunderland (local derby)
• 26 April - Sunderland vs. Middlesbrough (another local derby)
• 3 May – Bolton vs. Sunderland (another 6-pointer!)
• 11 May – Sunderland vs. Arsenal

Not the easiest of run-ins, then, but I’m sure we can snag 6 points or so…

Along with other members of my church, I attended the National Christian Football Festival (NCFF) 2007. This is a yearly event organised by Ambassadors in Sport, and I’ve been for the last couple of years. As we’re a bit of a motley crew who don’t play 11-a-side together, we usually meet with somewhat limited success. In fact, the Fair Play award is the only award we’ve been likely to win. Things changed a bit this year though…

As anyone who’s been in the UK for the last few months will know, the weather has been unseasonably awful; this last week’s been no exception. The pitches we play on at the NCFF are owned by Manchester University who have other events to host this summer. After the first half-day session on Saturday, it was decided that if the pitches were to survive another few tournaments, we’d have to cancel ours.

We were all ready to go home on Saturday night, and in fact a few did. The rest of us, however, stayed for Saturday night – we went out for a curry and I learned how to play poker (beating everyone else in fact and now being the proud owner of a lot of matchsticks!) On Sunday morning we were informed that this year’s tournament was to be resurrected in the guise of 5-a-side at the JJB Soccerdome near the Trafford Centre. The pitches there have ’3rd generation’ synthetic surfaces which are grass-like.

28 teams entered, with those teams who had not gone home simply splitting their squad in half and registering two teams. We, therefore, had two teams. I, despite being 26, was one of the older players in the squad, so went with the ‘oldies’. We ended up doing a little better than our younger counterparts. There were 7 teams in each group on 4 pitches and we all played each other once. We won 4 matches and drew 2. We ended up top of our group, and I scored 2 goals – one of which was a cracker.

We therefore ended up top of our group and qualified for the semi-finals. What I haven’t told you so far is that there are actually two tournaments run side-by-side at the NCFF: one for ‘affiliated’ teams (i.e. those who play together regularly in a league) and ‘non-affiliated’ teams (i.e. those who don’t, like us). We had beaten some affiliated teams in the group stage, but unfortunately in the semi-final we met the team who ultimately went on to win the tournament. They were excellent and hammered us 4-0 and also hit the post twice, all in the space of 5 minutes. We were suitably impressed.

Despite the setbacks, it was a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. The lads were in high spirits despite the double dampener of the weather and the cancellation of the original schedule. It just goes to show what can happen when a bunch of Christians get together…