Anyone for a game of Uno?
Thursday Night from the Sports Desk
One of the many joys of parenting an autistic child/young human being is the breaking of their routine. My lad lives on certainty and so with two games of football at Euro 2024 and a highly important game of cricket at the T20 World Cup in the West Indies, we had our routine cuddle and hug before a cooked breakfast and then I felt secure enough to drop the bombshell on the beautiful young man who lights my life that I simply had to watch my Afghanistan boys give the might of India a damn good thrashing with a cricket bat and ball before being bored to death by a England team with a football at their feet before reinvigoration and the tiki-taka of glorious and beautiful football from those cherubic masters of a football from Spain would surely defeat the more defensively minded and pragmatic Italian approach.
Or rather I said I’d take him to Ironbridge for fish and chips over the weekend and in the meantime I’d let him thrash me at a game of Uno and he readily accepted. He sure likes winning at a game of Uno does my beautiful son!
Alas my Afghanistan heroes, led by their leg spinning talismanic captain Rashid Khan went down in the expected flames of defeat to a much stronger India team, England did indeed bore everyone to death with their stale, one paced tactics (nothing changes) and Spain, my pick purely on their style of beautiful football played exactly where God intended (on green grass) beat the living piss out of a woeful Italian team, should have been 5 or 6 goals to the good by half-time and by full-time into a never before seen double figure lead, but still had to rely on a comical Italian own goal their incredible performance and win merited.
Despite Rashid Khan scalping 3 Indian wickets at the cost of just 26 runs, the Afghanistan team around him couldn’t prevent India from posting 181–8 and thus setting my boys an immediately looking impossible task of 182 runs to win. They’d come up 47 runs short as I too was defeated in the first of two sessions of Uno and by the time England kicked off their dreadful snooze fest with Denmark, I was already trailing 3 games to 1 to a jubilant son. We shared the opening 2 games as I made a last ditch comeback to win game 2, but 2 further defeats were inflicted upon me before Harry Kane and his 3 Lions sent everyone in the footballing world for an afternoon nap.
It was ever thus. England have a cliched “Golden Generation” once more and they have a midfield from the Gods in the shape of Jude Bellingham, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Phil Foden. Yet they were dreadful with a capital D, but they’ll qualify for the last 16 for sure in their last Group game and everyone will cheer and proclaim them champions elect in a couple of weeks time.
A smack in the face from reality is in the post for all England football fans.
It was ever thus.
Spain’s Pedri was back to his masterful self this evening and boy have I long admired this kid from the English holiday island of Spanish choice, Tenerife. The kid plays the game as it should be played, on the green grass of a footballing God who surely smiles whenever she watches this genius play. A waif like figure in a man’s world, Pedri just makes any team he plays in “tick” in an old fashioned way and way beyond his tender years and I hope he wears a winners medal in 3 or so weeks time.
Time, that beast none of us will ever tame, will tell, but I fear Spain will eventually be out-muscled by a physical team who simply won’t stand for their pretty boy football, England will lose in the semi-finals, their fans will throw chairs through German shop windows as their genial hosts looks on aghast at not only the rampant destruction of their city over a game of football, but also their own defeat in the final to France.
Who knows?
All I do know for sure is that I reversed the 3–1 afternoon defeat at Uno by sharing the opening 2 games of the evening session before rampaging like a wild bull through the final 2 games of the evening to square the score on the day at a very equitable 4–4. It’s 100 points to a game, leave your opponent with the most amount of high cards in their hand, tally the mini-game scores as we go and as soon as someone (normally my son) reaches 100 points, it’s a game and a win in the score book.
We’ve played Uno in the car, on a train multiple times and even during a particularly hot summer in Ironbridge when, without a garden, I treated the toy town of Ironbridge as my garden and why not? There’s nothing like seeing 2 silly kids sat on the pebble stones surrounding the oldest iron bridge in the world playing a game of cards in the heat of an afternoon sun.
Silly memories and another added to the memory bank today.
My son leads our lifetime contest 412 games to 265, and boy does he revel in this on-going card playing defeat he inflicts on me!
I reckon he cheats as he makes cards disappear quicker than David Blaine.
Must go. More cricket to watch. It’s the turn of my Bangladesh boys this evening as they take on those mighty brutes from Australia. There’s only one winner.
But everyone loves an underdog.
Mahalo.
Thanks for reading. Here are two examples of my self-published pride and joy which are all available to purchase from Amazon if you’re in a book buying kind of mood:
