It is that time that comes around only once every four years.

It is the World Cup!

We are 26 games in, half way through the group stages, so I thought I’d fill you all in with my insight and punditry on this most special of sporting events.

Firstly, beer is nice.

Mmmm, lovely monkey beer. Makes even the boring matches fly by.

It makes even the England games bearable.  Well, nearly bearable.  I like how England decided that in this World Cup they were going to give every other country a sporting chance by fielding a team of grandmothers and builders rather than the sporting professionals that you might expect, and Fabio Capello’s decision to lure the rest of the world into a false sense of security seems to be working.  Let’s hope he remembers to field a team of actual players for the next match though eh?

After the last England match I went to visit me old’ mucker, Roy Hodgson, to ask him for some tips that I might pass on to a’capello and the choir boys, but as we were talking his head started to fill with hot air and he floated away.

Roy Hodgson, full of hot air.

I assume he was going to try and hot-air balloon his foot-balling brain to the South Africa base camp to give the boys the benefit of his sage advice in person.  Good bloke, that Roy.

So, with Roy out of the way I decided to try and think over the England tactics myself.  Like a general with his toy soldiers, arranging his miniature troops ahead of the actual battle, Giantmonk and I turned to Subbuteo:

Is that Subbuteo guy huge or am I smaller than you imagined?

Here I am picking the England keeper.  I know who he is, but I am not going to tell you who he is.  In fact I am not even going to tell him who he is.  We will find out only when I put my monkey paw into a hat and pull out a random name.  The first time I did it I pulled out ‘Robert Green’.  When I watched him play I didn’t think much of his goalie skills, but it turns out that he is just a hat-maker from Kettering and I had accidentally picked out the label.

I asked Giantmonk for his input, and I think that he has the best game tactics so far:

Eat my goal