Let’s hope the Nations League break goes by quickly

I requested that the editor postpone today’s deadline so I could comment on last night’s crucial Nations League clash between Italy and Belgium. Unfortunately – despite the event’s unmissable nature – this was not possible. Thursday evening’s first round of matches had already been sufficient for me: a spectacle of ugliness perhaps only comparable to the Europa League. This is the nature of the job, and I still have more than a triple-header of matches to cover each evening, hoping to emerge unscathed from these three challenging weeks without the Premier League (I would prefer to be arrested by the #MeToo police for my jokes about women’s football). At least tonight there is England v Spain, and I am expecting at least an honourable defeat.

One way to avoid succumbing to these pointless days is to steer clear of reading any sports media. I have observed that in Italy, a new literary genre has recently emerged alongside the great classic of interviews with former footballers who discuss how, in their day, they used to play in the streets and did not think about money. I refer to articles along the lines of ‘here’s why So-and-so didn’t make it in Such-and-such a team’, with the variation ‘here’s why Such-and-such a team didn’t believe in So-and-so, who’s now kicking their opponents’ arses’ (it’s just a figure of speech, no homophobia intended, I swear). Conditions are no better with the overused “how it’s always gone whenever a manager has returned to the Italy dugout” – the sort of thing one hopes Mancini does not read, or, if he does, that he reads while touching wood (or balls, take your pick).

Speaking of pointless tournaments, I have been informed that in Canada they are still playing by the ‘Wenger rule’ on offside, whereby an offside is only called if there is a gap between the attacker and the defender: imagine a game of eight-a-side football among fifty-something friends – that is precisely what it is like.

I have only recently become aware, with some delay, that an Italian national football team reached the final of the World Cup for humanoid robots held in Beijing last month. I do not know—and I do not wish to know—whether they won, but after reading the news, the algorithm subsequently presented me with numerous videos of robots playing football: The content led me to reassess the value of women’s football matches and to feel more serene about the hypothetical end of the world caused by artificial intelligence, which, in my view, will only occur when a team of androids beats England in a World Cup final—a distant prospect, but one that will eventually materialize; just to avoid winning that cursed Cup again, we might even lose to a national team of robot vacuum cleaners called Jack.