Pokey to the rescue

Yesterday had all the makings of a bad-hair day: it began when our baseball team got soundly whipped by our nearest division rivals (with yours truly contributing a stellar 0-for-4 to the team effort...). "Never mind," I thought, "things'll pick up this evening with England's opening game of the Euro2004 tournament." Yeah, except that England lost the game in the dying seconds.

England losing the game is no longer a big deal to me - it used to be that this kind of defeat would pretty much ruin my year, but that's no longer true, and it took me all of about five minutes to get over it. However, to add insulty to injury, they lost to the French, which means that my life is going to be miserable for the foreseeable future. For an Englishman living in France, this was the worst possible result - think Red Sox fan in the Bronx after Game 7 of last year's ALCS and you'll have some idea of the crap I'm gonna take this week. Still, it goes with the territory - when you live abroad, you automatically become a representative of your country, whether you like it ot not. You have to have an opinion on everything from Tony Blair's foreign policy to Prince Charles's love-life, and sports are one of the things you have to follow. So last night I did my ex-pat duty and watched the game - even though I would rather have been watching some baseball - and now I'm going to have to suffer the consequences.

So, it was in a miserable state of mind that I fired up my computer this morning, only to have my day saved by Boston's Pokey Reese, who somehow transformed himself into Michael Jordan to rob the Dodgers' Dave Roberts of a hit at Fenway last night.

Admittedly, if that's all it took to pull me out of my early-morning depression, then it probably wasn't much of a depression to begin with, but still... I didn't yell "Holy shit!", but it did bring a big smile to my face.

I live for this!