Not Much of a Story

Stoke City 2 Charlton 1

Yassin will be out for a few weeks

I use Hotmail for some of my emailing requirements; have done since about 1998. If you control it properly, it is as good as anything else. I have it set up in English, but I originally signed up for it here in Spain, so when I log out, and this is the case even if I am in the UK or the USA, it reverts to a Spanish page. And of course all the publicity that sits next to the inbox is for Spanish-based stuff as well.

What you get comes up on a random basis but there seem to be about 5 different products, and one of these is called be2. I only noticed it properly last night, though I now realise it has been appearing for a few weeks. This what it says (my translation):

Maria, 35, from Segovia, was looking for a stable relationship.
Pedro, 41, from Madrid, was looking for the woman of his life.
be2 joined them together.
Click here to read more be2 stories.

I repeat that it is my translation and while "joined them together" might seem not the best English, the Spanish was "unió", part of a verb which, besides meaning helping people to unite, is also used in plumbing for connecting pipes, which conjures up images of.... well never mind.

What struck me about all this, as I looked at it consciously, as I say, for the first time, is that you'd have to have run out of bank circulars or the backs of cereal packets if you were so hard up for something to read that you'd want to read more stories like that one. And yet if the woman of your life is in Segovia and you are in Madrid, you might not meet her, even though it's only about 40 miles away...

But the brevity of the "story" (I don't believe a word of it anyway) reminded me of something, and it dawned on me that it was the reports of the debacle at Stoke. Charlton drew at home on the first day of the season and everyone was taken aback. We all said (I certainly did) that we had known all along it would happen, and it was because Scunthorpe were like a lower-league cup opponent, and Charlton had stumbled and all that, and I also thought, but did not say, that Charlton were quite likely going to have one of those seasons like three years or so ago where they did very well away and fell down a bit at home.

For me this sensation was increased by the cup win at Swindon, and by Saturday I was considering Stoke, who almost made it into the play-offs last season, as the very kind of typical and tough opposition that it would be a job to get the three points out of, but that we'd do it just the same.

Well, we didn't, and I have very little information. Pards points out that Charlton were 1-0 up, and then Yassin Moutaoukil got injured and had to go off, and that was when Stoke struck, in the disorganisation that followed. I got that info from the Charlton page (now helpfully linked at nº 6, at right). The Observer carried a few second tier reports, but there wasn't one about Charlton.

The BBC had a link though, for a little while on Saturday night, but when I read the story, it amounted to nothing. Stoke got two goals. Charlton got one first. Jonathan Fortune scored Charlton's. He had played on loan for Stoke last season. Ricardo Fuller scored the equaliser and Jon Parkin, the winner. Fuller was once on Charlton's books. Parkin presumably wasn't. The times of the goals and the name and home region of the referee were duly noted, and that was that.

As a story, not exactly Guy de Maupassant, more like the story of Pedro from Madrid and Maria from Segovia.

But there are 44 league games still left, so people are refusing to get downhearted, or at least to admit it. And now comes the news that Yassin Moutaoukil is going to be out for a few weeks, and Osei Sankofa is injured as well, and Kish has been sold, as Wyn Grant points out, so heaven knows what we will do for a right back against Sheffield Wednesday this weekend.

And the other be2 stories? There aren't any. I clicked, out of curiosity, to see if they might have improved on the banality of Pedro and Maria, and was told that be2 has been helping people all over Europe get together for ages, or some such. I thought it couldn't be a Spanish outfit, for if you say "be2" in English, it sounds like "be two", i.e., become a couple. But if you say the same thing in Spanish, you are saying "bedos", which means nothing at all, but it sounds quite like "pedos", which means "drunken stupors".

What this signifies I hesitate to say.