www.torkington.org

It’s been nearly a month since our last blog update, so I’d better do a quick round-up of what’s been going on:

Charlotte is now 14 weeks old and is developing her own little personality. As well as letting us know when something isn’t right — hungry, wet, tired, etc — she now smiles and chuckles when Sara and I do as we are told.

Charlotte still runs the show — she likes to get up very early in the morning; she likes to play for an hour after feeding; she likes a long sleep in the evening — but we’re learning to work around her.

I’ve put together another video clip (21Mb), click here.

I went to the CeBIT Exhibition in Sydney last month. Sara and Charlotte flew up to join me for a few days, it was a nice break. We watched Manchester United win the Champions League at the hotel. John “Captain Courageous” Terry missing his penalty was hilarious, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Thanks for all the funny texts and emails, sorry I haven’t replied to any — it’s been hectic at work this past couple of weeks.

We’ve had a nightmare month dealing with things back in the UK. We’ve been trying to remortgage our house in Oldham so that we can buy a property out here — more about that soon. Barclays assured us that this would be a simple process and all would be completed within 6 weeks; 11 weeks later and it still wasn’t done, meaning that we were in real danger of losing our new house and incurring severe financial penalties.

On top of that, the estate agent managing our property in the UK, Key Moves, ceased trading last week. No great loss, they were shocking. But as yet we haven’t had any correspondence from the new company who have taken over their affairs. The tenants seem OK though, so we’re not too worried about that at the moment.

It’s a public holiday here on Monday — the Queen’s Birthday — so today we’re going to head over to Mornington for an event called “UK Fest” to sample some traditional British Fayre. Sara should be able to stock up on crisps and I’ll sample the “Three Lions Pub”.

Edit: UK Fest was pretty poor, definitely not worth the $20 entrance fee. There were only three or four stalls, selling overpriced stuff we can easily get elsewhere. The “pub” was a draughty hall with $8 cans of John Smiths sold through a serving hatch. The live entertainment — Morris Dancing and a Magician — wasn’t our cup of tea either. At least it was sunny. No chance we’ll be returning next year unless they change the venue and drop the entrance price.

I always said he was a good player.

You can’t really argue about going out of Europe like that.

There’s no point making excuses about individual mistakes, the injuries to key players, lack of depth in the squad or Fergie’s 4-5-1 tactics, the bottom line is that Milan were by far the better side last night and United were poor. I just hope Milan play this well in the final against the Scousers, rather than rolling over again.

In truth it’s probably a good job we didn’t meet the Scousers in the cup final in Athens, there would’ve been a riot and I could see English clubs being banned from Europe for years to come.

So, United’s next big challenge is the derby game against City this weekend. If we get a good result there the league’s virtually wrapped up.

Edit: Bernard Manning, Curly Watts, Noel Gallagher, Little & Large, Stuart Hall… your boys took one helluva beating.

I’m sat here at 5:06am watching United on ESPN. Three nil up inside 19 minutes.

It’s my birthday today too.

Edit: Ronaldo makes it 4-0 just before half time.

Edit: Five nil, Ronaldo again!

Edit: A second goal for Carrick, 6-0!

Edit: Six-One with 20 minutes to go.

Edit: 7-1, Patrice Evra!

Fantastic performance, great atmosphere. Man of the match for me… Darren Fletcher.

A poor performance from United on Saturday, but a great result. Well worth staying up until 2:30am.

I’ve always said John O’Pie is a good player and I was really pleased when Fergie decided to bring him on as a replacement for Larsson.

The main reason for this post, however, is to show off my new “calm down, calm down” Scouser smilie:

It’s been really nice to have a day off, just chilling out. Even though we’ve just had a long break from work, it soon catches up with you again.

Sara is lucky enough to get a “free” week off work over the Christmas period but I need to book annual leave for anything except the main days. This year, unfortunately, I can’t take any extra time off at all because there’s a lot going on at work. So I’m back in work — and off to Sydney again — tomorrow morning.

Today we took a drive out to Lilydale and the Yarra Valley wine region, stopping off to potter around Healesville. There was very little open, with it being Boxing Day, but it looks a really nice place. We’ll definitely go back and visit the wineries and the animal sanctuary in the new year.

On the way home we stopped off at Bunnings to pick up some “Baygon” insecticide. It’s been three months since I last sprayed around the outside of the house and we’re now starting to see the odd spider indoors, which is freaking Sara out a bit. So we’ve just bought a drum of the strongest type and I’ve been all around the perimeter, making sure that all the door frames, windows and eaves are covered. I’ve also bought an indoor version, just to make sure that all the nooks and crannies are spider free.

This evening we’ll just have a quiet meal in — Sara has become quite an accomplished cook since we’ve been out here, it must be all the fresh ingredients — with a few glasses of wine and we’ll watch a bit of telly. I won’t stay up late to see United tonight because of my early flight tomorrow, so I’ll have to watch the game when I get back home on Thursday evening. (Speaking of United, did you see Scholesy’s goal on Saturday? It was nearly as good as the one he scored against Bradford a few years ago.)

It’s been a while since I blogged about football but I haven’t missed a United game since we got here. Now that the clocks have gone forward I’m able to catch fewer live games — a 3pm kick off is now 4am over here — but I’m still recording them all and watching them the following evening.

Today’s massive derby game, being a 12:45 kick off in the UK, meant that I could watch it live. So we bought pizza and a nice selection of imported beers before settling down to watch the game on ESPN Asia (it’s basically re-branded Sky Sports footage with alternative English commentary).

I won’t go into too much detail about the game, you can read that elsewhere, but I thought United played some excellent football and did well to withstand several City attacks after Rooney scored the first goal. We were fortunate to go in 2-0 ahead at half time, with Saha bundling Heinze’s cross over the line.

Van Der Sar made some very important saves and Vidic, who seems to have settled in nicely, also stood out defensively. Up front Ronaldo and Rooney, in particular, could’ve easily have had hat-tricks on another day.

Once again I was amazed by Fergie’s tinkering — as soon as he took off Saha to bring on John O’Pie to “firm up the defence”, I just knew City would score and it’d be a nervous last half hour.

United are now 9 points ahead of Chelsea at the top of the league (although they do have two games in hand). They face Arsenal tomorrow. I’m hoping that Mourinho does a “Keegan” under the pressure.

I can’t remember looking forward to a match more than this one. All week I’ve been humming “If You All Hate Scousers Clap Your Hands”, “In Your Liverpool Slums”, “We Won It Two Times” and all the other chants that go with this particular fixture.

After setting up the Media Player in the living room and making sure that all of the Asian channels that usually show live Premiership games were working properly, I got myself further in the mood by playing the tunes that United usually run out to at Old Trafford: Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life and This Is The One by the Stone Roses.

At 10pm I settled down to watch the game with a six-pack of Cooper’s Sparkling Ale, enjoying the pre-match presentation for Paul Scholes who was making his 500th first team appearance today. A true United legend and a nice, modest fellow too, which is a rare thing in football these days. I’m so pleased that the rumours of his early retirement from football for health reasons proved to be untrue and it’s a pleasure to see him back in the United team and playing well.

I remember Scholesy being interviewed during the last World Cup and when he was asked about his favourite player of all time, as a lifelong Oldham Athletic fan he named “Frankie Bunn” and, when the interviewer looked confused by the answer, Scholsey added “He scored six times for Oldham in a League Cup tie against Scarborough, you know”.

What a game! After a bit of a shaky start United took control of the game and, once Scholesy followed up his own parried shot to score United’s first, Liverpool weren’t in the running. Evra looked excellent on the left, Saha was very sharp and Rooney’s movement pulled the Liverpool defence all over the place. Carrick showed promise (but gave the ball away a bit too often) and even The Scottish Player had a more than decent game for once. Rio Ferdinand, of all people, scored the second.

The atmosphere sounded superb. One of the funniest things I heard was the “Does the circus know you’re here?” chant when Peter Crouch was brought on. Quality.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I managed to watch both of Manchester United’s friendly games in the LG Amsterdam Tournament this weekend.

I won’t post the details here in case they close down the sites, but I was pleasantly surprised to find decent quality live streams with full English commentary. Not only that, I’ve also found free streaming access to MUTV and a selection of over 30 live football matches this week.

I seriously considered getting up early to watch the United vs Porto game yesterday, but just couldn’t get myself out of bed in the middle of the night for a meaningless friendly game. Luckily they repeated the entire match later on, so I watched it at a more civilised hour. I gambled that they’d do the same thing with the United vs Ajax game this morning and they did.

Rooney and Scholes were both sent off in Friday’s game and, if their red cards are carried over to the domestic league, will miss the first Premiership games. New £18M signing Michael Carrick went off injured after just fifteen minutes of Saturday’s game and also looks doubtful for at least a couple of weeks.

It was good to see some of the youngsters getting a run out. Rossi looked very impressive again and will hopefully feature more this season now that Ruud has gone. But Darren Fletcher, who I slated constantly last year, looks like he’ll be getting even more verbal abuse from me this season.

You can’t watch the World Cup without having a bit of a flutter, so yesterday afternoon a few of us from work stuck a couple of quid in the kitty and had a silly one.

Inspired by something I read on a message board, we decided to have a 22 match accumulator backing “dead certs” in the Group stages:

• Germany vs Costa Rica
• England vs Paraguay
• Sweden vs Trinidad
• Mexico vs Iran
• Portugal vs Angola
• Italy vs Ghana
• Czech Republic vs USA
• Republic of Korea vs Togo
• England vs Trinidad
• Mexico vs Angola
• Italy vs USA
• Czech Republic vs Ghana
• Switzerland vs Togo
• Ukraine vs Saudi Arabia
• Spain vs Tunisia
• Poland vs Costa Rica
• Germany vs Ecuador
• Paraguay vs Trinidad
• USA vs Ghana
• Brazil vs Japan
• Spain vs Saudi Arabia
• France vs Togo

The idea of a 22 match accumulator is a bit daft but you can actually see those results coming in, can’t you?

The odds we got for this are 6067/1 so our £15 stake could return £91000!

Edit: So far so good. Germany beat Costa Rica so out stake is now £18.75 going in to the second game. Come on England!

Edit II: Steve has had a new projector and large screen installed at the King’s Arms so that’s where I’ll be watching the game.

Edit III: England scrape through so there’s now £28.12 going on the next game.

Edit IV: Bollocks. You useless Swedish tarts.