Exam Tomorrow: Studying Hard (Honest!)

Shame there's not much in my fridge...

I have an exam tomorrow (wish me luck!) which I’ve actually studied reasonably hard for over the past few days (these are the final assessments of my degree after all) and although today has largely been spent perfecting the art of procrastination (see above comic strip) I would have felt incredibly guilty had I spent an hour or so of it thinking deeply and writing in depth about football rather than The Great Gatsby, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and other stalwarts of American Literature.

As such, there’ll be no post today and it doesn’t look good for tomorrow either. I’ll write my predictions on Saturday morning as usual but next week may be a total write off as I have exams on Wednesday and Friday as well as an interview for a postgrad journalism course to prepare for on Wednesday – busy times. I will try and get something written, but I’m not making any promises: consider it a ‘winter break’. Still, do check back every now and then, and I’ll be back before you know it.

All the best everyone. Now, back to that study…

One Whole Year of They Think It’s All Over…!

It is precisely a year to the day since I sat down and wrote the first ever They Think It’s All Over… blog post, something that I think deserves a small celebration. The site that began as a casual project by a student with no previous journalistic experience has evolved into well, a fairly respected football blog written by a student who now has some journalistic experience. From a bit of fun, journalism has become my main ambition in terms of a career, and for that I have to thank you, the readers.

Without regular readers and people willing to comment and give their feedback on the content of the site, this wouldn’t have lasted nearly as long as it has. Writing for the sake of writing can sustain you for only so long but happily I’ve gradually built up an audience here on this site and have enjoyed immensely sharing my thoughts and ideas with you and hearing yours in turn. So thank you, as always, for visiting the site and I hope you’ll continue to allow me to indulge my passion for writing about the beautiful game.

Today’s post then, will serve as a small celebration of the history of the site so far. Normal service will resume tomorrow as I’ll look back on the weekend’s international action but for now, feel free to click through and check out the statistics that tell the story so far and remember, as I said at the beginning: They Think It’s All Over… has only just begun.

A Worthy Cause: The Homeless World Cup

Ukraine took home the prize from the 2009 Homeless World Cup.

So I’ve been pretty busy of late, which unfortunately meant that I completely missed the Homeless World Cup! Played in Milan this year, the annual event harnesses football’s unique ability to bring people together and unites homeless people from around the world giving them a chance to improve their lives. This year’s Champions are Ukraine who pipped Portugal 5-4 in the Final last weekend, but (running the risk of sounding extremely corny) everyone who took part was a winner in many respects.

According to the HWC press release “77% of players involved in the Homeless World Cup experience a significant life change; no-longer using drugs and alcohol, moving into homes, jobs, education, training, repairing relationships and becoming coaches or players with semi-pro teams. 94% claim to have a renewed motivation for life.” Clearly then, this is an event that is worth our attention and support as it continues to go from strength to strength.

If you, like me, missed out on it this year though, don’t worry – you can still make a contribution. My friends over at Soccerpro.com are the exclusive online retailers for the tournament T-Shirt which features a pretty nice design and even better – all of the revenue from the shirt sales goes straight to Homeless World Cup so as to help future competitors turn their lives around. With a cause like that, I’d say it’s well worth getting yourself one.

So go on, click through and do a good deed while earning yourself a snazzy shirt in the process…

Back on Monday!

"Gone footballing" doesn't have quite same ring to it...

So in an hour or so I’ll be boarding a ferry with my football team the Karori Magpies and heading over to Nelson to play a couple of matches as part of end of season tour, which knowing the rest of the lads, will involve far more drinking than it will playing. It promises to be a good weekend indeed, but I won’t have any internet access at all (I’m expecting withdrawal symptoms) which means that I won’t be posting again until sometime on Monday (NZ time).

Never fear though, as I got myself organised and posted the usual Premiership Predictions a day early this morning and with all the football going on over the weekend I’m sure you won’t miss me too much! If you do though, there’s plenty of archived posts on this here blog so you’ll find something to read somewhere. Hope everyone has a great weekend then, and I’ll see you all on Monday, assuming the ferry doesn’t sink.

Subscribe, Subscribe, Subscribe!

Find (and click!) these buttons in the sidebar.

Just a quick post this one to keep everyone in the loop with regards to the site and what I’ve been upto – as I mentioned briefly in yesterday’s post I’ve added some new subscription buttons to a widget in the sidebar. Up until now I’ve had links to my RSS Feed and Twitter jammed in randomly, but I figured that they deserved their own box and so came up with some nice wee buttons to make them more noticable and accessible for you, my loyal readers.

I also have had a couple of requests for some sort of newsletter, which I don’t actually have time to do but I figure the next best thing is to offer email subscriptions, which I’ve thusly setup via Feedburner and which you can also sign up for by clicking the appropriate button in the sidebar box. Thanks to those of you who requested/suggested updates to the site; I’m always keen to hear feedback and if I have the technical knowhow to introduce something then I’ll always take readers’ suggestions on board.

So please keep reading, commenting, giving feedback and most of all, enjoying the site.

Apologies & Annoyance

The ugly side of the beautiful game.

Hi all, apologies for the fact that there will (probably) not be a proper post today (unless I have a flash of inspiration/motivation later on). I wrote a 4000 word essay looking at Aubrey de Grey’s Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (it’s more interesting than it sounds) today and to be fair, I’m pretty much all written out. Normal service should resume tomorrow though, all being well.

In other news, quick mention to the idiots who ruined a good game of football at Upton Park last night, and once more brought the game of football into disrepute. It only takes one isolated incident every couple of years to reassure the world that football fans are the scumbags they’ve been led to believe we are (in fact football actually made a top story on NZ news, which never happens otherwise), so thanks to those idiots (who aren’t football fans) for ruining our reputation.

What’s more, after a week in which one of West Ham’s players was himself viciously attacked and stabbed and another lost his father in a road accident, you’d have thought that the people involved in this violence would have gained a sense of perspective wouldn’t you? You’d have thought they’d have realised that at the end of the day, football is just a game and that people’s health is far, far more important. Shame on the lot of you.

My Best to Calum Davenport

All the best to Calum and his family.

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Calum Davenport and his mother were viciously attacked and stabbed by two complete and utter scumbags in their hometown of Bedford on Saturday afternoon. Reports indicate that Davenport has undergone surgery on both legs and that the injuries inflicted on him could be career threatening. My thoughts are with Calum, his mother and his family and I hope he can make a full recovery and that the bastards who did this are caught and fucking punished.

There will be no other post today as I’ve zipped across the Cook Strait from Wellington to Nelson ready for a couple of weeks home cooking and I’m frankly knackered. More so though, it’s hard to think about football after what has happened to Davenport – it puts things into perspective. This sort of thing happens far, far too often in this world and of course Davenport’s case will receive more attention, but something needs to be done to stop this sort of thing from happening.

Once again, all my thougts and best wishes go to Calum Davenport and his family.

Ttiao… Season Build Up: Features Preview

As I said yesterday, I’m starting to get very excited about the kick off of the 09/10 football season, and with that in mind I’ve been putting some thought into my regular features that I’ll be running throughout the season. I pride myself here at They Think It’s All Over… on writing daily articles, which for a one man band is a decent achievement I think! Obviously I’ve been falling short during pre-season but when the footy gets underway again, I fully expect to be back posting daily.

Of course, it can be pretty difficult to keep up the creative opinion pieces and so once again this season I plan to run some regular features which will appear regularly on the site and follow a standard sort of format. While my main focus is to provide thorough and engaging discussion based articles I think that all of these other features of the site really add a little bit to the site and hopefully will encourage regular contributions from my regular readers.

They Think It’s All Over… has a new kit!

With the kick off to the new Premier League and A-League seasons approaching fast, both within two weeks in fact, things are starting to get pretty exciting. Much of the footballing summer has been devoted to following the unveiling of new players and new kits and so when the new season gets under way everything will have a slightly new look to it… and They Think It’s All Over… is no exception!

Today begins my build up to the new season and I’ve got a few things lined up to that end, but today’s post sees the unveiling of the new and improved graphics that I’ve created to add a fresh look to the site ready for the new season. The page ‘headers’ and post ‘toppers’ are important functional elements to my site but I wanted to give them a tweak to make them cleaner and crisper, so I’ve created v2.0 of the site’s graphics, codenamed ‘Glass’.

Summer Holidays

Most Premier League clubs will have begun pre-season training this week, and as they return to action, so do I. My absence though was not planned, but was a consequence of some stuff I won’t go into as this is not one of those annoying, whiny personal blogs of which the internet houses too many. Suffice to say that I didn’t feel like writing, but my apologies go out to anyone who may have missed me during my absence.

While I’m not back to full speed yet, I will attempt to return to posting daily, though the lack of actual football taking place and the fact that most football ‘news’ at present is in fact just the sort of transfer tosh that I won’t validate with any acknowledgement means that a post every other day may be a more realistic expectation. Please do check back regularly though, and together we can look forward to and build towards a great new season of football: one of life’s few constants.

Cheers, Adam.