Today England played their first game in the World Cup (against Paraguay) so, in true English tradition, a group of us went to go see it in a pub. It was kind of an interesting day (even if the football wasn’t always so) with three different pubs, three different experiences, two world cup games – all in all one very long day.

The (first) venue we tried was The Elusive Camel at Victoria, yes a sister in a chain of Camels as per the one we went to last week near Waterloo. It had apparently rated very highly as a venue for football watching and at first it seemed okay – having at least one nice big screen where we had prime watching position to see the game. Then it all went downhill from there with pricey drinks and food (for a pub) and then finding out, more importantly, that there was to be absolutely NO football jersey wearing allowed during a football game. What the?! On the day of England’s very first game in the World Cup and patrons are not allowed to wear their England jerseys? What an outrage. It was clear that we weren’t going to get much atmosphere at this pub for the game as all the English supporters, doing their patriotic duty in donning their jerseys, were simply walking out in protest. We decided to mount our own protest by going to find another pub. But unfortunately we made this decision too late for James and Jon who each went off to buy drab green t-shirts to wear instead … see pic above of the dashing due in green.

We ended up at The Litten Tree which is actually not too bad a venue. There are two large screens in separate areas and although the tables are a bit awkwardly set up we managed. As with many other pubs around Victoria The Litten Tree didn’t seem all that crowded. Either the weather was too fabulous on the outside (and it really was fab) or Victoria is too much of a commuter area to attract too many people during weekends. I think we’re actually planning on coming back to this pub on Thursday for England’s second match so it will be interesting to see how much more crowded it gets. I tried to instigate a Shot (of alochol)-Per-England-Goal for the game to make things interesting but unfortunately England failed to deliver much. Although they did get a result (a 1-0 as if you didn’t already know) it really was one of the more boring games of football I’ve seen (also considering the goal was an own-goal!) This is to be contrasted with the one we saw later between Sweden and Trinidad and Tobago at King’s Arms which I thought was infinitely more interesting even though it ended in a 0-0 draw (and no, it wasn’t purely due to the eye candy on display! The Swedes have AMAZing bone structure …) Strangely there also appeared to be a lot of Trinidad and Tobago supporters in the King’s Arms including the bar staff which added to the atmosphere. Not something I expected in an English pub that’s for sure.

One small nitpick about the King’s Arms. They obviously shopped at the same place for flag hangy thingies as the Stanhope Arms because to my annoyance once again there was no Australian flag to be seen in the bar! To be fair though, we weren’t the only ones to miss out with Angola, Ecuador, Ghana, Iran, Serbia and Montenegro, Togo and Tunisia also missing representation. And just for me here are the flags of the missing countries – nice and big so no one misses them. 🙂

The evening was rounded out with an Indian curry at a local curry house. Quality of food wasn’t the greatest but we had tons of fun entertaining the little kid at the table next to us with flags pilfered earlier (see pic to the right for Operating Take-Every-Flag.) She is going to be one huge England supporter when she gets older. Oh, and we scored some more pint glasses for the office. See the spoils of war here.