The Travails of being a Liverpool supporter

Man, it's actually like hard labour supporting this team.

At the end of both of last week's matches, I was completely exhausted by the sheer mental exertion of sustaining hope for an equalising goal. They managed one last night, but they should have been going for a victory, not a draw!

Usually, when I call out a player and declare him incompetent, he will go on to defy my judgment and perform heroics for the rest of the season. So, here goes ... Voronin, WTF??? What the hell was that pussy-footing around in the first half when there was such a great scoring chance? It should have been 2-0 by the half hour mark! I just had this sinking feeling in my stomach when Liverpool failed to capitalise on that chance and true enough, Spurs equalised minutes later.

Well done to Spurs, though. They have managed to draw with both of my teams this week. I will not begrudge them the points. Although I am decidedly NOT looking forward to constant reminders from commentators that "Villa was 4-1 up at this point and look at how that ended up".

Otherwise, it was a great sporting weekend in terms of results that went the way of my personal preferences. Raikonnen won the F1 Grand Prix in Shanghai and the World Championship title race goes down to the wire (although I think Hamilton will still win).

And most gloriously and improbably, France will meet England in the Rugby World Cup semifinals! I like the All-Blacks, but the back-to-back upsets in the quarterfinals were just the stuff of sporting heaven. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I woke up on Sunday morning, checked the BBC website and saw that France had beaten the mighty All-Blacks!! I had watched until the first half and went to bed, expecting that New Zealand would handily retain their lead or even extend it.

After all the blustering about the superiority of Southern Hemisphere rugby, there will be a Northern Hemisphere team in the final. And two of the mighty Tri-Nation teams were out in the quarters! Unthinkable! I know a thing or two about Aussie and NZ parochialism in sport commentary and I wonder how smoothly the humble pie is going down! Of course, the New Zealand journalists may well blame the loss on the referee not penalising the forward pass that led to France's lead-taking try. Which would not so much be pie, but something of a fruitier vintage.