*
First England match with McClaren in charge and I obviously had to watch it, so I settled down on our very comfortable sofa with a cup of tea ready to yell my opinions at the tv. And then Terry scored. Great! Brilliant start to his captaincy, and from someone who wanted him to get the captain's armband** I was happy. Bit more yelling at the tv, yes Gerrard's fine, he's just winded, yes thank you Mr Commentator for saying what I just said. Then Lampard scores. That's 2 - 0. Glad to see Lampard has finally got a shot on target and in the back of the net. Ok, so England are playing well...

Then suddenly the light went off and the tv cut out. "Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike!" I yelled. He was already on his way downstairs. "Has something tripped the switch?" I asked following him towards the electricity box. But nothing had. "I suspect the power in the whole street has gone."
"But I want to watch the England match!" I collapsed despondently onto the sofa. "What do you do in a power cut anyway? You can't even read, it's too dark!" Mike handed me a torch but the humour of reading one of Gilly's law books to annoy her was hugely outweighed by the option of practically falling asleep on the sofa and moaning that the power would undoubtedly be back on as the final whistle is blown. After a while Mike went to investigate if they were attempting to fix the problem and came back with the information that there was a little JCB type digger thing so they were clearly dealing with it.

About half an hour later Gilly returned home to find Mike and I sat in the dark and to the information that there was a power cut. Gilly looked at her phone, "oh, I was just about to ask if my phone would work..." I was still collapsed on the sofa. And still moaning that I had now missed half an hour of the England match. And Gayle couldn't even help by telling me what was happening via text because she was stuck in some restaurant and having to sneak to the toilet to text me. Gilly pointed out that she had candles if we didn't want to sit in the dark and then walked into the kitchen, "will the water work?"

Eventually, over an hour later, the light came back on along with the tv. Eighty five minutes on the clock. Right, so I was close, it's nearly full time. And we're winning four nil. What? Hang on, what did the commentator just say? Did he just say Crouch was near scoring a hat trick? Oh you are joking, so the other two goals were from Crouch?
I had to wait until the end of the match to find out that I'd missed two goals from Crouch and a possible third because the waterboard are inept and don't know not to cut through electricity cables.


* Because it was only a matter of time before a picture of Crouch ended up on here. Shamelessly stolen from the BBC Sports site.
**Yes sorry Gayle, Stevie G is god, but I still wanted Terry as captain.