It's the little things

Minor irritations. I have a theme running for some of my poems, intolerance. It meets head on with a second theme of the 'great british isles' quite frequently. No doubt it's all a part of becoming a more opinionated person as I grow older, being more certain that I should express my opinions, whether or not anyone is interested!

So, the World Cup. What the hell was it with the abundance of single colour strips? Don't we all love seeing what the latest strips will be? Which teams Adidas had invented a new stripe for, in ALL of it's 'new' creations? As an avid collector of Subbuteo teams over the years I have to say that references 21, 41 and 42 were amongst the most boring; Leeds, Liverpool and Chelsea, not exciting in the way that a 50, 164 or even a 156 were; Brazil, France and (West) Germany.

Having grown up with black and white telly I got the fact that the strips had to be as opposite as possible to each other for the cameras. But as time's gone on it's been incredible how some strips evolved, shocking at times, wonderful at others. Within Subbuteo and table football generally this translated into incredible machine prints initially and then hand painted strips reached incredible levels of detail, I love these in particular:

Algeria '82

Belgium '82

It was weird therefore seeing so many single coloured strips out in Brazil. Not weird, wrong. For all the brilliant games and superb excitement, definitely the best tournament I can remember, there's always a niggle somewhere, this was mine!!

Another grumble will follow this one. You have been warned.