Football Daily | Netherlands fume over World Cup ‘amateurism of the highest order’

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Given the astonishing amount of knee-knack which blights women’s football, you could be forgiven for presuming the World Cup organisers would go out of their way to provide participating nations with adequate pitches upon which to train. Leah Williamson, Fran Kirby, Mallory Swanson and Janine Beckie are among the household names missing out on the tournament after jiggering their knees, while the England captain’s teammates at Arsenal, Beth Mead and Vivianne Miedema, will also be tuning in from home. Forced to travel without their star player, it is perhaps understandable that the Netherlands have spat the dummy over having to train at the Bay Oval in Tauranga, which cricket fans will remember as the scene of Jimmy Anderson’s four-wicket haul for 18 runs when England battered New Zealand back in February.

In looking for news of the Women’s World Cup kick-off, I was shocked to see the headline on Big Website: ‘Lioness believed to be on loose in Berlin.’ The opening words were even more ominous: ‘Residents on the south-western outskirts of Berlin are being urged to stay indoors after overnight sightings of a “loose, dangerous animal”, suspected to be an escaped lioness.” Having just finished reading about Mary Earps’ righteous indignation and truly justified anger at the FA and Nike for making it impossible for her fans to purchase her goalkeeper’s kit (yes, I am a former keeper, why do you ask?), it made me wonder if Earps somehow slipped on to a plane in Brisbane” – Peter Rehwaldt.

Your wholesome news about Saudi Arabia’s PIF ‘buying’ Allan Saint-Maximin from Saudi Arabia’s PIF (yesterday’s News, Bits and Bobs, full email edition) confused me. I mean, how do you buy something you already own? And then I remembered all those wheezes the UK government have come up with over the years, offering us the chance to buy utilities I could have sworn we owned. The Saudis are just playing catch-up” – Colin Reed.

I can truly relate with what Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani is going through with the protracted Manchester United takeover (yesterday’s News, Bits and Bobs, full email edition). It just befuddles me when I go to the store to try to buy Tin. The line is often long and slow-moving. Then you get up to the clerk and they have to run to the back to get something. When they get back to the counter someone else approaches the clerk, cutting in front of you to ask a question and initiate a transaction they think will take seconds but invariably seems to take hours. And don’t even get me started about trying to pay cash and the time it takes to get proper change. Yup, poor me and Sheikh Jassim; two blokes just trying to buy something they want” – Steve Mintz.

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