Sweet Nothings

Can it really be four years since the carnival of football that was the Brazil 2014 World Cup extravaganza? (Yes.) That tournament will be remembered for a cracking group stage full of expansive, attacking football that petered out - with one hilarious exception - into a mealy-mouthed defence-fest during the knockout stages. This negative trend continued into the newly-expanded Euros, whose new faces weren't good enough to play on the front foot but could shut up shop well enough to frustrate the decent teams (and England) and bore the arse off neutral spectators. So what will Russia 2018 bring, besides unprecedented corruption levels? (lol jk) The change in draw format to divide the pots by ranking has largely done away with the usual Group of Death/Big Team Cakewalk scenario, and with some intriguing debutants and a few absent stalwarts (ItaLOL, the NetherLOLs, the US of lAme, etc) we might get a bit more balance and/or novelty value. Here come the group previews! We al

As well as being the traditional time for looking back and taking stock, this January has extra significance for our little family. I'm now officially spending the next few months as a househusband whilst my wife is having a couple of weeks' holiday before returning to full-time work (and therefore beginning part-time motherhood). Because memories have a habit of coalescing into ordered chunks, we can neatly divide our daughter Charlotte's early life into two. Since this mid-October cutoff point, she has been genuinely delightful - smiley, playful, interactive and flirting with all and sundry. For the first six months, however, she was bloody horrible. Some caveats: of course she's still a grouchy little madam sometimes, and melts down with brutal efficiency when she runs out of food at mealtimes. And yes, those early months weren't entirely awful. I remember bursting with pride on Father's Day, and a pleasant summer period when we would visit Nationa