Just like watching Brazil

I've just got back from China where, among other things, I took part in a World Cup 7-a-side knockout tournament as an honorary Brazilian. It will almost certainly be the only time in my life that I wear a Brazil football shirt in a competitive match. But although I got in a few tackles against the Spanish team who beat us 4-1 in the group stage, I'm afraid it was more John Terry than Plattinho.

The journey home included a drugs search at the airport (something to do with the human growth hormones for my grandson - try explaining that to a Chinese customs officer). And now I find I have a gaping hole in my diary where the weekend's World Cup quarter final used to be. I might end up having to go see Bob Dylan and Pete Doherty at Vince Power's Hop Farm Festival instead.

The nice guy comes first

If there's one capitalism-red-in-tooth-and-nail aphorism that I'd like to expunge from the English language, it's that ugly, untrue US apeshit about 'nice guys come last'. It's been wheeled out again over the John Terry/Wayne Bridge drama, where Bridge's withdrawal from the England team has been taken as an indication that, unlike Terry, he hasn't got it in him to succeed at the highest level and Terry's 'mates' have been letting it be known that he was always regarded as something of a 'bottler' in the dressing room.

Forgive me for just a little whooping and cheering yesterday, then, as bottler Bridge gave tough guy Terry a lesson in dignified, focused and disciplined football while the ex-England captain continued with the schoolboy calamities that increasingly characterise his current form. Nice one, nice guy.

Football owes me

Forget about that £170 billion budget deficit that the banking crisis has lumbered us with. 'Premier League clubs owe a staggering 56% of Europe's debt,' says the headline on today's Guardian football pages. 'A Uefa report has revealed that 18 Premier League clubs owe £3.5bn in debt, more than the rest of Europe put together,' the story continues.

Get a grip, you football subs (as in editors, that is). The 'rest of Europe's debt' is an awful lot bigger than that.

The beautiful game

I'm boarding up the windows in anticipation of this afternoon's Algeria v Egypt African Nations Cup semi final in Angola. Arsenal v Tottenham has got nothing on this one, and after Algeria's explosive World Cup qualifier victory over the Egyptians in Sudan last November the north London Algerian community celebrated with a fireworks display to match the Beijing Olympics.

Chelsea and the Ivory Coast's Didier Drogba is only one of many players and officials who have been complaining about the condition of the pitches in Angola, blaming it for a glut of injuries and poor quality play. Excuses, excuses. I saw one pitch with a road cutting it in two when I lived in east Africa for a while, and another with a tree growing near the centre circle. The quality of play was still higher than you get on our local astroturf.

As for bad conditions, Didier should try playing in Peru, where the the Estadio Daniel Alcides Carrion de Cerro de Pasco stadium is not only about 4,300 metres above sea level but has some, er, challenging weather conditions to boot:

My inner Obama

Tonight I’m getting in touch with my inner Obama. My side came back from three goals down with five minutes to go to grab a draw in football earlier this evening, after calling on a bit of that ‘Yes we can’ spirit to defy the odds. I’m assuming John McCain won’t do something similar in the US election, so I’m settling in to savour the most positive political development of the 21st century to date.

Of course there are 101 things I could come up with to diminish the occasion. Obama’s no socialist, no matter what the Republican right may think. I’ve no doubt he’ll leave the major power structures of US society, and the inequality and injustice that go along with them, largely unchallenged and intact. I dare say he’ll disappoint over some of what might be considered touchstone issues. And I suspect he’ll sell the pass on occasion when we’re looking for firm leadership to take a stand.

But no one who has cast half an eye towards the United States over past months can have missed the mood that has accompanied the ascent of the man who will now surely become the country’s first black president. People who never vote, people who are disenfranchised, people who are excluded and unrepresented have been mobilised in their millions in a way that hasn’t happened in two generations. No one else – certainly not the US left or other alternative political movements – has had anything like the impact. If not Obama, then what? Quite simply, this is the best – the only – chance of change we have had in decades.

It’s not just a matter of what Obama himself will do, important though that undoubtedly is. It’s a matter of the dynamic he creates, the opportunities that are opened up, the direction the US is moving in. The old leftist slogan that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government still gets in has never been closer to the truth than in the US, where the division between Republican and Democrat has sometimes seemed so narrow as to defy definition. But the 2000 election should have put an end to that illusion for good. Who can doubt that the world would now be a different, safer place had Al Gore’s ‘stolen’ victory been upheld in court and George Bush and the neocons not been unleashed upon the world?

So the champagne is on ice ready for that ‘Yes he has’ moment. Plenty of time for the provisos and reservations later.

A very good day (yesterday that is)

Yesterday was a very good day. Not only did we trounce the opposition in my regular Wednesday evening five-a-side (eat your heart out, James), but we finished in time to watch England give us one of those ‘where were you when?’* performances that punctuate the lives of us long-suffering Port Vale and England fans. 4-1 in Croatia and the boy Walcott getting a hat-trick – who’d have thought it? There was even the vicarious pleasure for all us ABC (Anyone But Chelsea) supporters of seeing John Terry get kicked in the face.

Best of all, though, the world didn’t end at 8.32am on Wednesday 10 September 2008 (mark that moment: it will long be remembered), as some had predicted, when the button was pressed to turn on the Large Hadron Collider for the first time at Cern, the European nuclear research establishment in Geneva.

Ignore all the gainsayers (the doomsayers never merited any serious attention anyway) who say it’s just to satisfy some scientists’ curiosity, that it has no practical application and the $10 billion would have been better spent on other projects, like solving global warming or finding a cure for cancer. It’s not either/or. There’s plenty of money around in the world today to build the Large Hadron Collider and do all those other things – like guaranteeing the basics in life for everyone alive on the planet – that are suddenly being suggested as alternatives. It’s just a matter of distributing it properly.

Following our curiosity as a species, seeking knowledge and answers that might not have an obvious or immediate practical application (but will certainly turn out to do so), is part of the best of what it is to be human. That and winning at football.


* Today is one of those ‘where we you when?’ days, which reminds me that I’ve been collared by Harry Barnes with one of those blogger meme things (a glorified chain letter, if you ask me) where you’re asked to answer some questions and then pass them on to some other people to answer in turn. I will get round to doing it as soon as I can but for now my answer to the first question, ‘Where were you when you heard about the 9/11 attacks?’

Somewhat unexcitingly, I was exactly where I am now – sitting in front of my laptop typing. In those days I had a news feed in the corner of my screen, which was showing smoke coming from the World Trade Centre and a headline about a plane crash. I had some sort of deadline to meet, so I didn’t pay much attention to it. It was only when I called in to file the copy and the person on the phone asked in surprise ‘Aren’t you watching the TV?’ that I realised I might have been missing a slightly bigger story than the one I was working on.

Gordon Banks, Pelé, Desmond Tutu and me (2)

It looks as though the chance to play in that Gordon Banks XI v Pelé XI celebrity charity football game at the Britannia Stadium, Stoke, on 12 July (complete with half-time team talk by Archbishop Desmond Tutu), has gone to a dealer. The one consolation in not being able to afford the winning bid of £3,101 was that someone who’d really appreciate it would get the chance to turn out at the Britannia and the three grand would be going to a good cause.

The nominated charities will still get the money, but almost certainly not out of the pocket of ebay member dave100166, who placed the winning bid. Dave is an autograph dealer and since his bid also entitles him to keep the match ball, signed by Banks, Pelé and Tutu, plus a full kit and all sorts of other memorabilia (which he’ll probably also get signed by the stars of the occasion), he stands to make what could eventually be a tidy profit on it all.

I’d like to suggest that the organisers of the event now invest in a couple of hundred footballs and get Banks, Pelé and Tutu to sign them all. It would raise a few extra thousand for charity and undercut Dave’s profiteering at a stroke.

Shakespeare and football

I’m knackered. I’ve done a 5k-5mile-10k series of races over the weekend and I’ve got football this evening. I’ve been limited to one glass of champagne to celebrate my sort-of niece Lizzie getting a 2.1 in English Literature (‘sort of’ because she’s my daughter’s mother’s brother’s daughter, if you follow the connection, but there was never any marriage there to formalise the relationship). I could really do with a spliff right now but I know it would set back my recovery from injury out of all proportion to the pleasure I’d get out of it. And football has turned into a strange enough experience of late anyway without the assistance of some Class B psychoactive pumping through my capillaries.

One game I played in last week finished off with a punch-up between two players that only just stopped short of the kind of scenes that followed the Poland v Germany and Croatia v Turkey games in Euro 2008. Then I learnt that one of my team-mates, Andy Havill, who appeared with Kylie Minogue in last year’s Dr Who Christmas Special, is currently performing in The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Globe Theatre - a pathetic excuse for his missing out on this summer's football fixtures, if you ask me. The Daily Telegraph review says his ‘chisel-faced Ford is a sublimely comic study of obsessive jealousy and tortured masochism’ – a description that also tells you something about how he plays football.

As if that isn’t enough Shakespeare for one football story, Stephen Boxer, who is one of our Sunday evening football regulars, has just quit as Dr Joe Fenton in the daytime BBC soap Doctors and got himself the role of Petruchio in Conall Morrison’s production of The Taming of the Shrew at Stratford. I don’t know whether I should be practising my free kicks or learning my lines.

As for Euro 2008, my politically-correct guide to who to support, which for a brief spell appeared to be following the actual results, turned all-too-quickly into a ready-reference guide to who was going out of the competition. I found myself in the strange and unfamiliar position of supporting Germany by the halfway stage of their quarter final against Portugal (something to do with the Pinochet apologist, gay hater, Chelsea incumbent Scolari, I suppose, but it still didn’t feel right). Tonight, I hardly dare say that it’s got to be Spain but it really does have to be Anyone But Italy, doesn’t it?

Photo: Andy Harvill and wig. Would you play football with this man?

Gordon Banks, Pelé, Desmond Tutu and me

Mostly I’m a man of modest tastes, so it’s not often that I want to be rich. I did last night, though, when my brother tipped me off about an auction on ebay.

I don’t mean massively rich. Minor rock star rich, wouldn’t miss ten or twenty grand rich, would do.

The auction is for the chance to play in a Gordon Banks XI v Pelé XI celebrity charity football game at the Britannia Stadium, Stoke, on 12 July. Best of all, Pelé and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, no less, will manage the winning bidder’s team, which will include two former Brazilian international footballers, including a 1994 World Cup winner.

So that’s the best goalkeeper the world has ever known, the best striker the world has ever known and one of the bravest and best people the world has ever known – and you, raising money for causes such as the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund by playing football. You get to keep the match ball, signed by all three, and there’s even a half-time team talk from Archbishop Tutu thrown in for good measure.

My top football-playing claim to fame is having appeared in the same team as the foreign secretary. Banks, Pelé and Tutu, though – it doesn’t come better than that.

PS: Russia v Holland. Manichaean dualism. Darkness versus Light. Your life will be like the football you believe in.

Fitness tips for the fainthearted

How did I manage to come back from injury so quickly at my age, someone asked me at football last night, and did I have any tips on fitness training for the flabby or fainthearted? Here’s a routine that I guarantee anyone can cope with, courtesy of my personal trainer Melvyn.

The basic principle is to build up slowly. You don’t need any special equipment and you can do it in the comfort of your own living room. A couple of two-pound sugar bags will do for starters.

Ready to try it? Okay, hold one bag in each hand and raise each arm in turn, first to your side and then straight out in front of you. See how long you can hold them there, but don’t strain – the point is to build up slowly, holding the position for a little longer each day. After a while, you’ll be amazed by your progress. You can do the same thing to build up strength in your legs from a sitting position.

After a few weeks you may want to start using a couple of sugar bags at a time, or raise and hold both arms (or legs) at the same time. Again, don’t strain: build up slowly.

Once you’re comfortable with this level of exercise, give yourself a pat on the back. You’re now ready to move up a level. Try the same exercises as before, only this time with some sugar in the bags.

Anyone but Italy

Sweden, Spain, the Czech Republic, Portugal and above all Holland all winning well; Russia and best of all Italy both getting tonked; payback for the Polish papers' anti-German ugliness. It's not often the football results follow an armchair socialist supporter's wish-list quite so spectacularly; the Anyone But Italy movement (that's the lovely lads of Lazio in the photo, in case you were wondering) even had the referee and the pedants' rulebook on its side. My politically-correct guide to who to support at Euro 2008, in case you missed it first time around, is now doubling up as the hottest predictor in town.

As an added bonus, I'm marking the end of the first round of Euro 2008 group games by staging my own comeback from injury tonight at the Sobell Centre, Islington. I've been told I've got to play the full game because there are two other people nursing injuries as well. Wish me some of that Dutch luck.

Fucking immigrant? Idiot more like

In my new capacity as spokesman for the Almost Supporting Chelski Fan Club, I'd just like to say that I don't believe that a member of the Chelski ground staff called Patrice Evra a 'fucking immigrant' on Saturday, as has been reported today. I've heard some racist abuse in my time but calling someone an 'immigrant' doesn't usually feature highly in the numbskulls' vocabulary.

'Fucking idiot' I can believe, especially if the Man Utd players were getting in the way of the lawnmowers and the ground staff wanted to get off home.

It reminds me of a game of football I played a few years ago when one of the opposing team (white) called one of ours (black) a 'fucking donkey' after he clattered him with a clumsy tackle. Not nice admittedly, but then neither was the tackle. Our player was convinced he'd said 'monkey', though, and it used up all of my anti-racist credits to persuade him that maybe, just maybe, he'd misheard.

Why I'm supporting Chelski

Something very odd happened to me on Saturday. I found myself almost supporting Chelski.

I know why it happened. First, I can’t stand the herd mentality that has seen most of the press and a large chunk of Chelski’s own fans writing off their current manager, Avram Grant, as a pale shadow of the ‘Special One’, Jose Mourinho, whose ego was too big for Stamford Bridge and quit as soon as the going got a little tough.

And second, they were playing Man Utd.

It’s not just that I’m a paid up supporter of the ‘Anyone But Man U’ fan club; I’m also a card-carrying member of the ABC club too. In any case, along with (cough, choke, splutter, god how it hurts to say these things) Arsenal and Man Utd have been playing the most consistently entertaining football in the Premiership for many a year now, while Chelski have been somewhere on a par with Stoke (can we please not mention it, it’s been hard enough being a Port Vale supporter this season as it is) as the team you’d least like to be watching week in, week out.

No, the main reason for that otherwise unfathomable soft spot for Abramovich’s Harlots is that Sir Alex Ferguson (working-class lad, erstwhile Anti-Nazi League supporter and gum-chewing socialist that he is) has become such a bloody bad loser. His team gets one penalty awarded against them, the first of this Premiership season and a stonewall certain penalty at that, and they’re off kicking walls, stewards and whatever else gets in their way, with Sir Alex leading the charge.

There are people I play football with, grown men though they may be, who take their lead from this sort of thing – and I’ve got the bruises to prove it. And the folk who use my local all-weather pitches are currently calling for regular police patrols when the junior and amateur league games are on because there have been so many punch ups and pitched battles of late. How the next generation will get anyone to referee their games is a challenge to match the electoral one facing the Labour Party on Thursday.

I don’t blame Sir Alex and his crew for all this, but they certainly don’t help.

As for Chelski, well you’ve got to feel a little sorry for owner Roman Abramovich. Forbes magazine revealed earlier this month that he’s no longer Russia’s richest man. His decision in 2005 to sell his oil company Sibneft to Gazprom, Russia’s massive state-owned energy business, has meant he's missed out on the profits and share price bonanza of the past few years. Now he must be content with third place on the Forbes ‘golden hundred’ list of Russia’s richest men with a mere $24.3 billion to his name.

The list is headed by Oleg Deripaska, boss of the Basic Element holding company, whose fortune is estimated at $28.6 billion – up by $11.8 billion in a year. In second place is steel tycoon Alexei Mordashov, whose $24.5 billion more than doubled in 2007.

There are now so many dollar billionaires in the birthplace of Bolshevism that every hamlet could buy themselves a Chelski if the money was spread around. So many, indeed – 110 in all, including 74 in Moscow, now the billionaire capital of the world – that ten of them don’t even make Forbes’ golden hundred.

Russia's top one hundred are worth a staggering $522 billion between them, having accumulated an extra $100 billion in the past 12 months. Oh Vladimir Ilyich, where are you when your country needs you?

Paul Read (1951-2007)

It was bloody cold yesterday at Wallingford on the bridge over the Thames, where Jo rode pillion on Roger’s Yamaha (red polka dots on a yellow frame – it’s Roger’s idea of high visibility) to scatter Paul’s ashes in the river as they drove across. Then it was on to Fox’s Diner, the biker’s café on Oxford Road, for the 'Gutbuster' breakfast before another stop at Ipsden Heath to scatter the remaining ashes among the bluebells.

Paul wasn’t my oldest friend – there’s a handful of people I’ve known longer – but there’s no one I’ve stayed in such regular contact with over such a long period (we first met in 1979). He died on 27 April last year, and this weekend nine of us, including his widow Jo and his daughter (by a previous marriage) Lucy, marked the anniversary by travelling to a few of his favourite places for this little ceremony. I feel privileged to have been among the nine.

Paul’s death, at 56, was one of life’s injustices. A martial arts expert, who’d been practising Baguazhang since his 20s, he was one of the fittest and healthiest people I knew. He turned his back on the smoke and the other drugs long before the rest of us; he ate well, meditated daily and drank only in what passes as moderation among much of my company. But he injured his toe when a bike fell on him before flying off for a holiday last April. The doctors think he may have developed DVT (deep vein thrombosis, blood clots within the veins) as a result of immobility during the flight. At any rate, he had a stroke on the beach and died in the local hospital a week later.

Paul could be an awkward, cantankerous bugger and I didn’t like him at all when we first met. He once physically prevented me from seeing my girlfriend (who was also perhaps his very best friend) when I’d been behaving particularly badly. It took me years to grow up enough emotionally to realise that he’d been right to do so. Later I came to learn that he was exactly the sort of man who, in the favoured phrase of an old miner friend of mine, you’d want in the trenches with you. I don’t ever recall him striking a blow in anger, and he wasn’t the sort of person to start a fight. But he’d stand up to anyone who did, and you knew he’d be with you shoulder-to-shoulder if you got into one yourself.

When I was told that he’d died, I assumed immediately that it was due to one of two things: an accident on his motorbike (probably caused by someone else because he was too good a rider himself), or a stabbing or shooting as a result of him intervening in some street assault. The manner of his death seemed as incredible as it was unjust.

In his professional life Paul was a teacher (at South Kilburn and Queens Park community schools), with a special commitment to those who overcame various obstacles to succeed against the odds. He pioneered a number of access and vocational courses and at his funeral last year there were scores of his past and present pupils, many of whom had very personal stories to tell about how he had helped and inspired them. One of his many extra-curricular activities, I learnt then, involved organising and coaching some of them at football.

He’d kept that quiet from me, perhaps because at various times over the years I’d tried to rope him into some of the football teams I’ve been involved with. He turned out on a few occasions when I twisted his arm hard enough but he was a rugby man at heart. The only exception was when the England football team was playing. Then he’d be on my back to organise one of our regular (and increasingly large) gatherings of friends, relatives and other associates to cheer on our national side’s latest failure to win anything at football.

Actually we were an indiscriminate crew. We were far from being an exclusively English group, and as well as the England team, we were often as happy turning our loyalties towards the Scots, Welsh, Irish, Trinidadians, Japanese – or whoever Germany’s opponents happened to be at the time. We’d drink and we’d chant and we’d drink and we’d sing and we’d raise the roof (and the profits) of whatever pub we’d settled on for that particular tournament.

In a way I was glad when England didn’t make it through to this year’s European finals. It just wouldn’t have been the same without Paul leading the singing.

PS, for friends of Paul's thinking of paying a visit, the grid reference for the wood is SU665848, the triangle at the centre on the map.

The politically-correct guide to who to support at Euro 2008

With England, Scotland, Wales and the two Irelands all out of Euro 2008, the burning question for all good socialists is who should football fans from these islands support at next summer's finals?

The draw for the group stages throws up some enticing prospects and it’s not always easy to decide who to back. Johnny Turk or Sven’s Sweden? Socialist Spain or Multicultural France? As Nye Bevan once said, the language of priorities is the religion of socialism and there are tough choices to be made here based on a country’s size, politics, fan-base and footballers, fair shares of the football spoils and this author’s personal prejudices.

Here, then, is my quick guide to who to cheer on next June in Austria and Switzerland.

Group A

Switzerland: As the co-hosts, you want them to be happy, and as underdogs who’ve never won anything all the more so. The second smallest nation in the tournament (after Croatia), this is also the country that gave the world Hornussen, a cross between baseball and golf, which earns them a bonus point.

Turkey: A tough one. As with Israel, you wonder whether they’re really part of Europe at all, and their human rights record is none too hot. But nothing would upset the boneheads more than a victory for Johnny Turk. And their flag is mostly red.

Portugal: Worth supporting for coach Luiz Felipe Scolari alone, and not just because of the punch he threw at Serbia’s Ivica Dragutinovic during the qualifiers. But no matter how good Christiano Ronaldo is, he’s still a Man Utd player.

Czech Republic: They deserve something for Munich 1938 and Prague 1968 (not to mention Uruguay 1934 and Chile 1962). Beating Russia in the semis would strike a belated blow against Stalinism.

Group B

Germany: The country the English love to hate, and even if they don’t deserve it the Germans have won enough already. Mind you, despite (or perhaps because of) its Nazi past, Germany remains among the most generous of nations to foreigners. By hosting 106 refugees per 100,000 population, for example, it ranks second only to Denmark in Europe. The UK hosts 48.4.

Croatia: If small is beautiful, Croatia is the most beautiful of all at Euro 2008, with a population of under 4.5 million. But its fans can be ugly, with their notorious racist chanting perhaps the worst in the Europe.

Poland: Having got rid of half of the Kaczynski twins in their recent elections, the Poles are on their way to rehabilitation. But there’s still the other one to go before we can cheer them on in the family of footballing nations.

Austria: Co-hosts with a capital city on a human scale. But are they really Germans in disguise?

Group C

Holland aka The Netherlands: Everyone’s favourite footballing nation, even with a conservative government. Even Gerry Adams wears orange when they play.

France: Any team that has given the world Michel Platini, Eric Cantona, Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henri and 100,000 football fans singing La Marsellaisse is going to be hard to top. All the more so when they’ve also managed to so upset Jean-Marie le Pen and every racist in France. Shame about Sarkozy.

Italy: Sorry, Italy. Nothing personal but until you sort things out football-wise, there’s not a neutral on the planet who won’t want you to lose. Badly.

Romania: One of only four teams to play in the first three World Cups (France, Brazil and, er, Belgium, in case you were wondering), support them if you value the upset factor and don’t care about Romanies.

Group D

Spain: There may be a Socialist government in Madrid but never forget that it was Spain’s coach Luis Aragones, who told Jose Antonio Reyes in 2004: ‘Demuestra que eres mejor que ese negro de mierda’ (‘Show that you're better than that shitty black’) when facing his Arsenal teammate Thierry Henri in a game against France. Aragones went unpunished.

Greece: Having pulled off one impossible Euopean Championship success four years ago, retaining the trophy would be even more impossible this time around. Rather like socialism in our lifetimes, so always worth cheering for.

Russia: The idea of giving Vladimir Putin anything to smile about makes my toes curdle. So it should yours.

Sweden: Even now, as England at last begins to awaken to just how good Sven Goran Eriksson was as manager, there’s still the old objection that he and the rest of the Swedes lack passion. Just get out your blue and yellow gladrags, put on your Viking helmets and praise the gods of Ikea and Volvo if the part-timers pull it off.

Wembleyshambles

Kate Moss didn’t turn up but Pete Doherty did and Babyshambles turned in a set last night that made it worth the trip to that graveyard of English footballing aspirations called Wembley. (I said nothing about the Croatia game here last week and don’t intend to do so now. But Belarus, Andorra and Kazakhstan – the ninth biggest country in the world, bet you didn’t know that . . . aren’t you just itching for them to show us how it’s done in the World Cup qualifiers?)

I was told a possibly apocryphal tale by two lads in the Sports Bar across from the Wembley complex that the last time they’d been to a Babyshambles gig, on the Jools Holland show, Doherty’s failure to show resulted in his replacement with James Blunt of all people. Doherty himself remarked from the Wembley Arena stage: ‘They said that QPR and Babyshambles would never play at Wembley.’ Which might have been a good joke if it wasn’t for the fact that QPR have played there at least four times to my knowledge, including twice in the same year in 1982, when the FA Cup final against Spurs went to a replay.

But let’s not begrudge Doherty his moment of gloating. Given another chance to prove he can perform after a series of drug-induced disasters, he and Babyshambles seized the opportunity. Which is more than be said for the shambles of a football team who failed to turn up last Wednesday.