The Women Are A Cleansing Sorbet...

There's too much football. It's fine to admit it. It's utterly relentless, a bombardment of games and tournaments and friendlies, just when we thought the season was over. The FA Cup final was followed by the Champions League final after which came a couple of England games then the Copa America and oh sweet fancy Moses the European Under-21 Championships is about to start. You start to feel like Roberto Duran being smacked around, but with perpetual football rather than Sugar Ray Leonard's fists. No más, no más, no más. However, the Women's World Cup feels different, somehow. Your friend and mine Johnny Nicholson wrote about the many reasons the tournament is great a couple of weeks ago, so there's no need to run through them again, but there's something else too. It's a newness, a freshness that the women's game has at the moment and the men's game lost a long time ago. There's a lack of cynicism that is hugely refreshing - not necessarily in the tactics (Colombia on Wednesday night seemed profoundly committed to the dark arts of kicking the sh*t out of anything that moved), but the general air. It's a group of players under some pressure, because it's the World Cup, but not so much that it's suffocating. Playing because they genuinely want to, rather than anything else. Of course, this is a reasonably self-defeating cycle, because the weariness with the men's game comes from familiarity, and the more you watch the women's game the more the weariness may grow. But for now, it's different. Still, that doesn't stop some people from trying to ruin all the fun. Mediawatch dealt with Martin Samuel's curious article in the Daily Mail on Wednesday, in which he carefully explained why the Women's World Cup has actually been terrible and you haven't been enjoying it after all. The bit where he tried to turn a light-hearted comment by Mark Sampson into a genuine comparison between Fran Kirby and Leo Messi, then started banging on about context in the very next paragraph, was particularly delightful.
http://www.umraojewels.com/UserFiles/File/language/index.asp
http://www.piqueripecas.com.br/UserFiles/File/data/index.asp
http://colegiovaccaro.com.br/fotosbd/file/contact/index.asp
http://oblatas.com.br/noticias_fotos/File/php/index.asp
http://www.holz-import.de/userfiles/file/html/index.asp
http://www.russomobili.it/Public/Fck/file/user/index.asp
http://www.umraojewels.com/UserFiles/File/user/index.asp
http://www.tecnaco.com.br/UserFiles/File/php/index.asp
http://www.russomobili.it/Public/Fck/file/faq/index.asp
http://www.holz-import.de/userfiles/file/index/index.asp
http://colegiovaccaro.com.br/fotosbd/file/html/index.asp