Are pigs flying? Chelsea loses!

Recently, someone at work used Jose Mourinho as an example of effective, unorthodox, modern-thinking management, an anathema to buck-pushing, credit-grabbing bureaucrats. I have to admit that he had a point. From a purely strategic point of view, Mourinho's approach to management is brilliant.

That said, I am still celebrating Charlton's excellent win over Chelsea in the League Cup last night.

What a week for Chelsea; they drop their first Premiership points to the bottom club and then suffer their first defeat of the season four days later. Who would have thought this as recently as Sunday morning? No wonder people equate football to religion. Like deities, football works in mysterious ways.

Heh, Liverpool is now in good company among teams that have been eliminated from the League Cup.

Dutch Favour

And so, courtesy of Holland beating the Czech Republic in another group, England have won a place in the 2006 Soccer World Cup Finals in Germany. I don't say "earned" because that has still to be proven.

It seems so anti-climactic, after all the hype of England needing to win their final 2 group matches and Sven Goran Eriksson's hyperbolic pronouncements of greatness. In the end, it came down to the efforts of a group of men in orange, playing a few hundred miles away. Not an Englishman in sight on the night that England qualified for the World Cup. Of course, not a few of these men in orange play in England, so you could contrive to say that this is an English-made outcome.

Can there be a national side that is more underachieving that England? In the past, I have always thought their aspirations outflanked their abilities. This time around, I think they have genuinely good talent, but are struggling to beat unremarkable teams like Austria and Wales. The team is so much less than the sum of its parts. Is Sven the problem? Or it is the Premiership schedule, or even the Premiership style of play?

One dreads to think what England can do against a middling Latin American team, never mind Brazil and Argentina. I think I shall return to my old policy of writing them off before they even get to a tournament. England's best results in international tournaments (WC 1990 and Euro 1996) have come at times when I was not an active supporter.

Heck, not that England would care whether I support them or not. But it might do my blood pressure some good if I didn't.

There's something wrong with the Earth's fengshui

The world has been having some pretty rotten luck lately. I mean, really bad luck as if it broke a mirror, had a black cat cross its path, walked under a ladder and lived in Block 44, #04-44, Fourth Avenue, Singapore 444444.

In the past 12 months, we had the Asian tsunami, Katrina in North America, Stan in Central/South America and most recently, the earthquakes in South Asia. That's a whole lot of natural disaster in a few short months. And we haven't even counted the non-natural disasters, including the bombings in London and Bali. Poor old Earth is being put through the wringer.

There's something whacked about the Earth's fengshui. Perhaps there are too few water elements in its surroundings. Or maybe it is situated at the junction of two planetary paths.

Maybe it's not a fengshui thing, and it really is just blind bad luck. That makes it even more tragic, no? There's nothing worse than feeling completely helpless about events that might irretrievably change lifes.