Kevin Whitcher's Arsenal Blog

Messi’s crowning moment… (in Ann Summers nightie?)    And in the end… FIFA confirmed as Qatar’s bitch    Monday 19th December 2022    And so it ends, confirming one criticism that had been leveled at the host country’s suitability to stage a World Cup. It isn’t actually a country that cares very much about football. And in that sense, it doesn’t really ‘get’ football. So you had Qataris catching the first half of a game and then going home. They’d flavoured the experience, seen a bit of the match, but had better things to do. And in fairness, a culture that got football would have appreciated the sanctity of the occasion of the trophy being lifted, for the winning nation. However, instead of celebrating Lionel Messi’s crowning moment, when future generations see the images, they will think – what the f*** is that black thing he’s wearing? No disrespect to the gesture of the presentation of the bisht , regrettably an unfortunate anagram of something that man...

  One last spurt - Messi turns it on in surely his last World Cup    Qatar gets its dream final    Thursday 15th December 2022    How ironic. Qatar – owners of Paris St Germain, the club who can afford whoever they want – will see two of PSG’s three big stars meet in their World Cup final on Sunday. So Mbappe versus Messi it is. In a pre-tournament predictions competition, I had my semi-finalists as Brazil v Argentina and France v Belgium. However, I then foresaw a Brazil v Belgium final with a sixth World Cup for Neymar and company.   Once the last four became apparent, much as I’d prefer to see Argentina win (for Messi, who is worthy of winning the trophy after what he has given the game), I also wanted a decent final, and thought France would provide that more than Morocco, in spite of the much touted romance of an African side taking part. Much as I take my hat off to the spirit of the side captained by Chelsea’s Ziyech, they don’t really exci...

  Al Bayt, 2022 - Another entry in the canon of critical missed England penalties    Brazil, Holland, Portugal and England go home    Saturday 10th December 2022    Friday and Saturday saw the return of World Cup matches after a break of two days. The feast of football is almost over. We have now seen 60 of the 64 matches played, the first 56 of those over an intense 17-day period. I caught the first four and last three days of those in the UK, two of them I was traveling to Qatar and back, and the other eight days I was in Qatar attending matches in the flesh.   It’s handy to watch the knockout games on TV – you do ultimately, have more sense of the specifics of a game that you don’t get from being there… unless you have a screen with the TV feed in front of you as the media and certain of the VIPs do. And of course, certain people enjoying hospitality (alcohol) out of sight of the pitch will watch the whole game on a TV screen at the stadium, si...

Michael - without beret! - gets in the mood on the beach at Sunderland    Back Home    Friday 9th December 2022    So, back in chilly England. No air conditioning required to avoid the danger of uncomfortably high temperatures here. And on that note, I learned when I was back that the 974 stadium (the one the Qataris admit will be dismantled) was the only one not to have air conditioning. The fact I didn’t even notice this when I attended the Brazil v Switzerland match there says it all. It wasn’t required for the evening games. During the finals, a total of 15 games kicked off in daylight. Out of 64. When, possibly, air conditioning might have made life more comfortable, if you couldn’t take temperatures in the high 20s for two hours. If they’d known that the tournament was going to take place in the winter when they started building the stadiums, they could have made do with just four of the stadiums being fitted with the a/c – but hey, so much money has ...

  The Clusters, Barwa Barahat, Al Janoub – Once stayed, never forgotten    Homeward Bound    Saturday 2nd December 2022    Fairly brief one today (this is being penned on the following Tuesday). Just kind of wrapping up the physical trip to Qatar before I simply write about the football of the knockout rounds. I’ll also do some posts with more photos as well, once I work out how exactly to do that in Blogger. So firstly the good news is that I departed Qatar without the powers that be spotting my critical comments and deciding to deport me ahead of time or some other fate. In fairness though, even if you can’t wear a rainbow t-shirt to a match, when it comes to freedom of speech, there does seem to be something of a short term amnesty for the duration of the tournament. The PR for Qatar has been so bad in the build-up to these finals, even they are not going to consciously do anything to make it worse. So political pitch invading protestors have not fa...