The centenary community shield

Manchester United have beaten Portsmouth on penalties to win the Centenary Community shield. The match was decent. Man Utd played a rather curious line up with Carrick on the bench and O’ Shea in midfield. Fletcher screwed up numerous chances of varying difficulty levels . Teves was awesome. Giggs played well . Gary too put in a good 65 minutes. However we just couldn’t find the back of the net despite complete domination for all the 90 minutes and the match ended with the scores ties 0-0 at the end of regulation time.

Penalties were never going to be a problem for United and we brushed aside Portsmouth 3-1 .

In somewhat related news: This is probably the most ludicrous demand ever!

 

A gem from Football 365

Football 365 reports :

“Inevitably, after Alex Ferguson said on Friday that he wanted to sign a striker before the start of the new season, the paps have gone into overdrive in speculating on who that forward might be.

And most rags seem to think - presumably in the absence of any imagination/fact - that Dimitar Berbatov is the man in question.

In summary, here’s what The Sun and The Daily Mirror have to say on the subject:

‘Alex Ferguson aims to land Dimitar Berbatov…blah blah blah…£25million deal…yadda yadda yadda…will be enough to secure the unsettled striker…rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb…’

Seriously. That’s what it says. Check if you don’t believe us.”

 

Ever wondered how Beijing 08 got it’s logo?

 

08-08-08 is finally here

After months of hype and build up the Olympics , the second biggest sporting event in the world , have finally started. The opening ceremony was quite good , though as usual the march past of all the countries was very boring. The fact that the DD commentator kept screwing up the names of the countries and the whole coverage was shabby at best. I particularly liked the part with some guy very loudly telling the commentator that the old guy the cameraman was focusing on was the President of Brazil.

The 100 m dash , tennis  and the football are the only events i plan to watch . Most of the rest is boring. And India  will surely live up to expectations and come up with nothing yet again.

 

oops!

All I’ve read for the last two months in the sports sections of various newspapers tabloids are stories about Cristiano Ronaldo’s imminent departure from the club all supposedly validated by his ‘close friends’ ,’ sources close to Man United’ , ‘his agent’ , ‘his mother’ , ‘advisors’ .

What have you got to say now , Suckers?

Pune Mirror reported recently :

“‘Cristiano Ronaldo has refused to come back and face Sir Alex Ferguson - in a last desperate bid to force Manchester United to sell him to Real Madrid’

“Cristiano is not going back today, tomorrow, or any time soon. Everyone knows what he wants.”

Sad , isn’t it? Two months of effort down the drain. Tch Tch.

 

Deathstar Canteen

 

United bids farewell to it’s favourite son :20LEgend

I remembered how shocked I was last August when I heard the bad news that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had retired from football. I also remember being super-depressed when it hit me that I had heard the rapturous ‘Ole Ole Ole Ole ‘ from the Old Trafford for the last time , that the last minute goal against Blackburn was the last of the customary late heroics that Ole kept pulling out time after time. The two best memories I have of Ole is those goals against Nottingham and of course the greatest moment in sports history.

Today’s testimonial was Ole’s last appearance on the football field as a player. He didn’t start but came on as a late sub , like he has done over a 150 times for Man United. Man Utd won the match 1-0 with Frazier Campbell scoring in the 81st minute.

Goodbye, Ole. We’ll miss you.

 

The last few days

The  past few days have been quite good.

On Sunday morning , i took my first SimCAT at IMS. I realised that I totally suck at DI. Maths and English are okay.

Then went for the BCQC open quiz conducted by Sumant from The Bombay Quiz Club. Teamed up with Kunal after a really long time. Actually , it was just the second time we teamed up (the first time being in the VIT music quiz where we came second). This time we put in quite a good overall performance. We topped the elims . Incidentally , the elims also saw our greatest moment in quizzing : we (widely considered to be hindi film illiterate) correctly answered a question on hindi films which Ramanand and dada got wrong. How amazing is that!! We probably should have got a few questions in the finals. Definitely should have cracked the theme earlier. If it hadn’t been for a disputed answer (the definitely-not-the-same-thing-ness of ‘Death’ and ‘Grim Reaper’ in the Sandman series) we would have come in second. Ahh well , these things happen. Anyways the quiz was amazing. All the questions were great. It was all out hard-core, totally workable ,  ‘intellectual’ quizzing for a  Shammanthesque 5 hours. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a quiz that started at 3pm and ended at 8pm . It was a great way to spend my Sunday.

Went to college today. It was pretty uneventful until I saw the certificate  ‘in appreciation of endless efforts’ for the Basketball team that Megs was proudly showing me. Now Megs’s actual name is Maeghun Vadgaama. Not the most normal name , you would say . If the double ‘a’ in the surname doesn’t stump you , the  sliding vowel coupled with the ‘u’ (where an ‘a’ is customary) in ‘Maeghun’ is sure to.  So it’s pretty amusing when one comes across an official document in which both name and surname have successfully taken off the bails and left the writer looking like a complete idiot. The certificate for participating in the , AHEM, extremely successful franchise that is the girls basketball team had in fact misspelled both name and surname. And it wasn’t the kind of normal mistake one would expect with such a difficult name. Normally ‘Maeghun’ would be misspelled as ‘Meghan’ but ‘Vadgaama’ would be spelt quite correctly. On this certificate however in addition to the expected ‘Meghan’  , Vadgaama was spelt as ‘Vadaghum’ ! The bugger hadn’t even bothered to write Ms. before the name and left it as Mr./Ms ! . We had quite a great laugh about it. Mr/Ms Meghan Vadaghum has also blogged about it.

 

BCQC July Open

The BCQC will be organising two  quizzes this sunday ie the 27th of July. Entry is free for both quizzes.

The first quiz ,’The Interrogative’ , is a school quiz and will be set and conducted by Maitreyi , Yash and Rohit .

The second quiz will be an open quiz set by members of the Bombay Quiz Club and conducted by Sumant .

Further details are available on the BCQC blog.

 

Trust Vote

I don’t really follow the proceedings in the Lok Sabha , but I do follow most of the big stuff like trust votes. Today’s session was really entertaining and very interesting.

Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Kalawati’ speech was fun , Lalu was hilarious , Omar Abdullah’s speech was brilliant. Then the whole bribing allegations added a lot more drama to the situation. It was quite sad that the Prime Minister , Dr. Manmohan Singh , could not deliver his speech and had to just publish it on his website. The speech was really good [read it here] and it would have  been interesting to see the reactions of LK Advani and Prakash Karat , but unfortunately the BJP could not extend  the basic courtesy of not disrupting the Prime Minister’s speech.

Now that the UPA has won , the only thing left to do is predict tomorrow’s headlines. My money is on a derivative of / lame reference to “Singh is Kinng“

Btw , check out this great article. Trust Vote : Bollywood Ishtyle.