Football Daily | It’s World Cup week – will the hope, memes and dreams be as good as it gets?

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Geopolitics World Cup Week is upon us, baby. We stand on the edge of greatness. Who will dream, who will dare to stay up on Friday night for the 3am (BST) kick-off of South Korea v Czechia, and live to tell the tale? Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. Silence the pianos and, with muffled drum, bring out the television, let the morning come.

Podcast-wise, I only listen to Football Weekly of course (ahem …) but I did happen to hear an interview with Jürgen Klinsmann. What’s fascinating about him is that whenever he’s interviewed he always trots out a story about Diego Maradona at Napoli doing a famous warm-up with ‘Live is Life’ playing in the background with him and his teammates warming up in the corner of the pitch and looking at him in awe. The problem is, that happened in a game in 1989 between Bayern Munich and Napoli in the semi-final of the old Big Vase but Klinsmann was at Stuttgart at the time. Stuttgart did play Napoli in the final, but Maradona didn’t do that warmup then, so he must have seen footage of the warmup so many times that he’s conflated the two. Memory is a funny old thing” – Noble Francis.

Re: Graham Potter’s claim to be the best non-Swede to take the country to the World Cup (Friday’s Quote of the Day). Either he is unaware of the remarkable achievement of the English manager George Rayner who took them to the 1958 final (where they lost to Pelé’s Brazil) or he expects to win the whole damn thing! I’m weighing up whether to put this month’s housekeeping on them at 150-1” – Bob Wilcox

Imagine my shock when I read Friday’s Football Daily only to find that Neale Redington – whom I’m sure meant nothing by it – suggested that my questioning whether Andoni Iraola really wanted the potentially thankless job of Liverpool gaffer/convenient target meant that I might be a fan of Tottenham. But in the interest of full disclosure: no. I don’t really have a horse in the Premier League race, other than enjoying recent seasons of Manchester City for the sake of watching Erling Haaland turn world-class defenders into so many kanelsnurr. The team of my heart is the San Jose Earthquakes, but while I pull for a club that hasn’t won anything in quite some time, I still do not have the level of masochism necessary to be a Spurs supporter. Sorry. Wishing Iraola luck (he’s likely to need it)” –Ray Anselmo.

May I ask who this Ricardo Lopes is who plays for Cape Verde and ‘Shamrock’? It couldn’t possibly be Roberto “Pico” Lopes of Shamrock Rovers, could it?” – Neill McGowan (and 1,056 others).

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