My Favourite Mormon...

... as the Undertones never quite sang.

To Cardiff on Guy Fawkes night to see The Killers, and what a great night it turned out to be.  'Brandon and the Beardie Blokes' as they probably should be known as, were on great form.  They were tight and they rocked. Terrific light show, with extra fireworks thrown in as well, I suspect, given the date.  They played all the old favourites and about half of the new album, which is slowly growing on me but doesn't do it for me in quite the same way as the others.  'Deadlines and Commitments', my favourite on the album, wasn't one of the somgs they played, but hey.    

One thing, and I did check with my family that it wasn't just my middle-aged man's hearing, but my experience of the sound quality that the Motorpoint offers wasn't great.  Saw Franz Ferdinand there once and thought the same, which is a great shame because the Killers were a bit let down on that front I suspect. 

A really good gig, which would have been great if it weren't for that.  The whole family enjoyed it and that in itself makes it the most successful family gig ever. 

Set List
Mr Brightside
The Way It Was
Smile Like You Mean It
Spaceman
Bones
Heart of a Girl
Bling (Confession of a King)
Miss Atomic Bomb
Human
Somebody Told Me
Here With Me
For Reasons Unknown
From Here On Out
A Dustland Fairytale
Read My Mind
Runaways
When You Were Young

Encore
Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine
All These Things That I've Done
Battle Born

Men's Olympic Football - Great Britain v South Korea

Well, it looks like we may have missed the best day in living memory for Team GB in the Olympics because we were at the Olympics.  Whilst Jessica, Mo and Greg were performing heroically in the Olympic Stadium, we headed west for the Millennium Stadium and the Quarter Final of the Men's Football.  

It was my first trip to the Millennium Stadium and what a venue!  I have never been to a soccer match in the States but it is how I imagined it might be there - except with 70,000 people there.  The venue is clean and modern and we were sat in the Upper Tier, in terms of the kind of football I watch at Exeter it was like being sat up on top of the roof.  It made for a different perspective, easier to read the pattern of the game but a lot harder to identify who people were.

Ah, the romance of the game...

It was a very different kind of crowd to your usual football match, a lot of young families and people who don't usually go to games, or even have a lot of interest in football, but who wanted to sample the atmosphere - which was fantastic.  One woman I spoke to who had a five or six year old with her said that it should be okay because she had brought plenty of colouring for her. 

The game itself wasn't likely to convert many of the floating voters.  The standard wasn't great - Exeter City would have given GB a run for their money - and it lacked a bit of passion and even though it went to extra time and penalties - it wasn't so exciting because, nice though it would have been to see GB win, it didn't really matter much.  Had Exeter, or even England, been playing, it would have been much more tense because I would have cared a great deal more about the result.  As it was, this was a group of players put together for the tournament, a good thing but you know...    

As soon as it went to penalties we all knew what would happen.  Poor Daniel Sturridge, at least Stuart Pearce knows how he feels.  The journey home was ridiculously long, though they battled gamely to get us to our Park and Ride it took over an hour's queueing and then it was a slow drag to the M4.  The journey saw us get home at 1.45am but it was worth it.  In the words of someone fairly local to Cardiff, we can echo, "I was there."