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Everyone thought they could win it too –- bookies made them 3rd favourites, we had better players than everyone else according to the 2 Alan’s on MOTD. And this was the golden generation – how could they NOT win the cup??

So I thought I’d take a look at whether or not we’re actually likely to win based on past World Cup & European Championship performances.

I’d like to work out whether we’re likely to win a major championship in my lifetime and how long I have to wait until we play well (and win) in a meaningful match against good opposition. I’ll go back as far as the 1970 World Cup, because I was born in 1976, and we didn’t quality for 1974 or 1978.

Matches in bold are ones I am highlighting as games against top opposition, those rare ones in bold italic are ones we won!

1970 World Cup

1-0 v Romania
0-1 v Brazil
1-0 v Czechoslovakia
2-3 v West Germany

So we won 2 against mediocre opposition, and lost against the big boys. We are 0/2 so far

1980 European Championships

1-1 v Belgium
0-1 v Italy
2-1 v Spain

Yes! The first one, although I don’t know if we played well or not as I was too young. But we’ll have it. 1/4

1982 World Cup

3-1 v France
2-0 v Czechoslovakia
1-0 v Kuwait
0-0 v West Germany
0-0 v Spain

2/7 – Rock and Roll – 2 tournaments in a row that we beat a top team – this was clearly the golden age of English football

1986 World Cup

0-1 v Portugal
0-0 v Kuwait
3-0 v Poland
3-0 v Paraguay
1-2 v Argentina

2/9

1988 European Championships

0-1 v Republic of Ireland
1-3 v Netherlands
1-3 v Soviet Union

2/11

1990 World Cup

1-1 v Republic of Ireland
0-0 v Netherlands
1-0 v Egypt
1-0 v Belgium
3-2 v Cameroon
1-1 v West Germany

2/13 – 3 tournaments in a row without a decent win

1992 European Championships

0-0 v Denmark
0-0 v France
1-2 v Sweden

2/14 (Being kind to England here – Denmark won the cup, but you’d expect to beat them)

1996 European Championships

1-1 v Switzerland
2-0 v Scotland
4-1 v Netherlands
0-0 v Spain
1-1 v Germany

3/17 (Not counting Spain because we won on pens and they were better than us anyway)

1998 World Cup

2-0 v Tunisia
1-2 v Romania
2-0 v Colombia
2-2 v Argentina

3/18

2000 European Championships

2-3 v Portugal
1-0 v Germany
2-3 v Romania

3/20 (not counting the Germany victory because we were woeful, just less woeful than Germany)

2002 World Cup

1-1 v Sweden
1-0 v Argentina
0-0 v Nigeria
3-0 v Denmark
1-2 v Brazil

4/22

2004 European Championships

1-2 v France
3-0 v Switzerland
4-2 v Croatia
2-2 v Portugal

4/24

2006 World Cup

1-0 v Paraguay
2-0 v Trinidad & Tobago
2-2 v Sweden
1-0 v Ecuador
0-0 v Portugal

4/25

2010 World Cup

1-1 v USA
0-0 v Algeria
1-0 v Slovenia
1-4 v Germany

4/26

So there you have it – in 40 years of major football championships, we’ve won 4 games that count. Four!! That’s one every 10 years, or one every 2 and a half tournaments. And I’ve also been kind, because we didn’t beat Republic of Ireland twice in the early 1990′s and they were a good team.

If I live to 80, I’ve got around another 4 matches to look forward to and the next performance will be in the 2020 European Championships. Wonderful.

If you go back further, you’ve got the 1966 win which may skew the results – but it may not, because we didn’t win a single match of importance in ANYTHING prior to

So now I know why we’re so keen to get the World Cup hosted in England in 2018, because without it, we have zero chance of winning!

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The first version had a pretty basic component, used SOAP to communicate and had no in-built schema check to always produce valid WAPL code.

PHP Package as a Vendor

But now there is a PHP package available that handles the schema check and communication can be done by either REST or SOAP (the preferred method would now seem to be REST seeing as it has better error handling and doesn’t trigger a fatal error if a soap client can’t be created).

Plugging that package in as a vendor should be dead easy (although it does need a few little mods and upgrades of its own first) and then it’ll be just a case of writing a component and helper to make use of it.

Hopefully I’ll have something ready this week so you’ll be able to mobilize your real world cake apps!

Let me know if you have any ideas for how it should be built – as a component & helper? Maybe a plugin? Or just keep it as a vendor.. or maybe all of the above!

Related posts:

1. REST or SOAP? Or don’t care?

The setup you’d probably go for is some sort of load balanced setup, with multiple web servers and possibly a couple of database servers behind the scenes. You should also be thinking about the wonders of virtualization and all the benefits that brings but that’s for another day.

Having multiple web servers brings about its own set of issues. Your blog code needs to be deployed to all web servers (preferably at the same time) so that if you get visitors that happen to hit different machines, you give them the same experience.

Deployments and Uploads

But that’s not so much of a problem – you could deploy code to all servers with Ant or Capistrano, or even write your own system to do it exactly to your requirements.

However, in this kind of setup, you’re going to come unstuck with plugins, themes and uploads. WordPress has an awesome upload utility, but the file you select from your local computer will get uploaded to a location on a single machine in your server farm. When a visitor lands on a different machine, they won’t see the upload. If you’re using the automatic add plugin or theme wizard built into the newer version of WordPress then it’s the same situation.

Link to NFS locations

But the situation is not nearly as dire as you may think though. There are loads of ways to combat it – and it’s a piece of cake if you’re using Linux! The easiest way is to create an NFS share on web server 1 and link to it on web server 2 so that the “/plugins” directory on 2 actually points to the location on 1. Easy!

If you’ve got a file server, even better – create your NFS on there and link to that location instead so that content really is separate from your code!

With windows it’s just as easy with shared directories – same principle, just a different terminology.

The only issue you’ve got left is that some plugins may have the paths to their files built slightly oddly so that they load the wrong files. But then, if you’ve got errors with the plugins, it may be time to look for alternatives!

Have you had any problems with WordPress on load balanced servers? How did you solve it or did you choose another setup?

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His reckoning was down to the fact that most specifications for functionality aren’t tight enough. For example, if the spec for an adding function was to add two numbers together, adding 5 and 9 together and returning a value of 162 was acceptable. Even returning nothing, or null, or a gazillion was also ok. The specification should have said that the function had to add two numbers and return the correct mathematical result.

For a developer, this is great news. You don’t have bugs anymore, you have “undocumented features”. Feature specifications get better and it’s easier to write code that satisfies the requirements.

It’s a bug!

But I personally think blaming bugs, and they are bugs, on the specification writers is lazy. Bug reporters, whether they are developers or not can get quickly hacked off with being told that an error they’ve found isn’t actually a bug, but it’s the fact that it’s actually been implemented exactly to spec.

A bit of common sense in all of this is definitely required. If you need an adding function, it’s obvious to anyone that it should return the result. If the spec doesn’t say so, just do it and move on.

And if you need a function to return the results of whether a visitor is a mobile device or not, it’s probably wise to actually return the value rather than store it in a cookie. Oops!

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