Qatar 2022 World Cup

…or why football is utter bollocks.

There’s a bit of a hoo-ha about holding the 2022 World Cup in Qatar at the moment.

It seems that people have just realised that with the World Cup taking place in the summer months (North of the Equator, anyway), it might be a little warm in the desert at that time. Nothing like forward thinking … and this is nothing like forward thinking (or any thinking at all, come to think of it).

Now I thought I’d read somewhere that to counter this potential issue, the stadium designs included some clever technology to air condition the stadia to reduce temperatures down to a more acceptable level for the footballers and spectators.

So what’s their gripe?

I mean we all know that footballers are a bunch of wusses when compared to, say motorbike racers. The former are off for weeks for minor injuries whereas the latter tend to just get it plated, sewn up and given painkillers so they can race the next week, or indeed they just race with the bones broken.

But then for the MotoGP, the bike racers simply raced at night when it was less hot.

FIFA don’t know what to do: they can’t postpone the World Cup until the winter months as that would play havoc with domestic championships and upset UEFA in terms of European competitions too.

So maybe it wasn’t such a good call to go to Qatar. But now they have chosen that location, maybe it’s time to tell the players to “man up, bitch!”

Qatar 2022 World Cup

…or why football is utter bollocks.

There’s a bit of a hoo-ha about holding the 2022 World Cup in Qatar at the moment.

It seems that people have just realised that with the World Cup taking place in the summer months (North of the Equator, anyway), it might be a little warm in the desert at that time. Nothing like forward thinking … and this is nothing like forward thinking (or any thinking at all, come to think of it).

Now I thought I’d read somewhere that to counter this potential issue, the stadium designs included some clever technology to air condition the stadia to reduce temperatures down to a more acceptable level for the footballers and spectators.

So what’s their gripe?

I mean we all know that footballers are a bunch of wusses when compared to, say motorbike racers. The former are off for weeks for minor injuries whereas the latter tend to just get it plated, sewn up and given painkillers so they can race the next week, or indeed they just race with the bones broken.

But then for the MotoGP, the bike racers simply raced at night when it was less hot.

FIFA don’t know what to do: they can’t postpone the World Cup until the winter months as that would play havoc with domestic championships and upset UEFA in terms of European competitions too.

So maybe it wasn’t such a good call to go to Qatar. But now they have chosen that location, maybe it’s time to tell the players to “man up, bitch!”

Bikes on t’Telly

Hmm. It seems that coverage of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship will be leaving ITV1 (and indeed ITV4) and will now be shown on Channel 4 as “a one-hour highlights programme on the Tuesday night after each event, with a repeat later in the week.”

We’ll ignore the satellite offering because there’s no way I’m paying Murdoch a load of money to watch his overpriced shite and stick some sort of chav accessory on the side of my house, thankyouverymuch.

So instead of live coverage of one race and highlights of the other, I’m reduced to watching an hour’s programme (with probably four ad. breaks as seems to be Channel 4’s wont these days) and no doubt it’ll be at stupid o’clock at night. Unless, that is, Channel 4 has learned from its frankly pathetic attempts at televising World Superbikes a couple of years ago which frankly killed it stone dead and drove despairing bikers towards Sky, whilst concentrating on ‘quality’ output like “Big Brother”, innit?

Meanwhile, the first two rounds of World Superbikes – four races – have been and gone unnoticed by me as there’s no terrestrial or Freeview coverage I’ve noticed.

Fortunately, the BBC are consolidating their broadcasting successes recently by showing MotoGP so that’s what I’ll be concentrating on watching again this year.