World Soccer Champs 2010 (iPhone)

I appear to be paralysed.

Not, you know, physically. I can still type. I haven’t stood up for a while, so I guess my legs might have stopped working, but I can still feel them, so they’re probably okay.

No, I’m paralysed in top iPhone footie game World Soccer Champs.

(And not because of the low memory issues. Running the System Activity Monitor app before starting the game sorts all that out.)

It's a bit like chess. Only instead of playing chess, you're playing football.

I’m paralysed, you see, because I can’t quite bring myself to play the game. I got England through to the second round of World Cup. (Or the World Tournament or whatever they call it to avoid giving FIFA a million, billion dollar-pounds.) We’re going to face Germany in the second round.

And, I suspect, we’re going to lose. But if we win I’ll have got further than ever before. So I don’t want to play, because I’m going to blow my chance for glory.

I have no belief in myself. Hardly surprising, really, when we only won the group because of some lucky penalties against Algeria and the USA.

I need to work up the courage to play the game at some point, then dust myself off and start again if I lose. But it’s Germany, man. Germany. My arch nemesis. The Master to my Doctor. The Palpatine to my Mace Windu. The mega shark to my giant octopus. The meddling kids to my pissed-off, costumes-obsessed janitor. The Jason Voorhees to my sex-crazed, reefer-smoking twenty-something teen. The snakes to my plane.

You get the idea.

Still, at least I don’t have malaria.