Sporting times.

Great excitement yesterday evening. I could still hear fireworks at 1 in the morning.

Earlier in the day yesterday we had speculated on the quietness around our block of flats. Not a soul was around apart from the English speakers. We had the pool entirely to ourselves. As the Spain-Paraguay match was not until the evening we decided that everyone must have headed for the beach. I had seen a couple of families getting organised when I was setting off for the supermarket in the late morning.

In the relative cool of the evening Phil and I ventured out for a walk and returned in time to catch the tail-end of the news and then the second half of the football match. We already knew that Germany had sent a sad and possibly even tearful Maradona and his football team home to Argentina. The news reports showed desolate fans with tears streaming down their blue and white painted faces.

Before that the news showed reports of El Día de Orgullo Gay in Madrid. Lots of people all dressed up danced through the streets of Madrid in the sunshine. Kylie Minogue was there apparently: the icing on the cake for some. One elderly lady was telling the reporter it was the first time she had seen a Gay Pride March, how lovely it all was and that she had brought her grandchildren along to watch. Now, that would not have happened in the not too distant past in Spain! Back to the football.

We tuned in just in time to see the Spanish penalty with the goal that wasn’t. It’s a good job they scored again later or there might have been mighty cries of “¡Nos lo robaron!” (We were robbed!) as the ball went into the net the first time but then the penalty had to be repeated because Cesc Fabregas and a couple of other players had been a little too quick off the mark and set off over the line before the penalty had actually been taken. On the repeat the Argentinian goalie was ready and stopped the ball going in!! Shock horror!! Still they managed to get the ball past him later and we were left with a tense 5 minutes + 3 minutes extra time during which Spain had to keep possession of the ball and just prevent Argentina from scoring. Phew, they managed it!

There was an immediate outburst of pipping of horns, blowing of all kinds of trumpets and setting off of fireworks around here. Even the sunset decided to wave Spain’s colours across the sky.

The sports commentators in the Telecinco were extremely emotional. One of them told us, “Es el día más feliz de mi vida professional.” You would almost have thought that they had actually won the cup. One of the papers this morning has a delightful cartoon about laying to rest the ghost of quarter finals. Everyone is so pleased to get through to the semi-finals that it might almost be enough to have got that far.

And now they have to face Germany on Wednesday and just possibly either Uruguay or Holland, depending on the results of those countries’ confrontation on Tuesday.

What exciting sporting times we do live in. Rafa Nadal's just beaten Berdych at Wimbledon. And then Alberto Contador in the Tour de France is currently in something like 6th place, 5 seconds behind Lance Armstrong, and about 11 seconds behind the leader Cancellara, but they have only had the initial time trial stage so it’s early days yet!

We just need him to get his legs going nicely and Spain’s happiness might be complete.