Thank you for your understanding and good wishes last week. The female biped was a little under the weather. I kept a very close eye on her and did everything possible to help her until I’d nursed her back to health.

I also have my paws full supporting the male biped while he follows England in the World Cup. Anyone who knows anything at all about football (soccer) knows that supporting England is not for the faint of heart! It isn’t surprising that he needs me to cheer him up during and after the matches. I can always be found at his feet while he’s watching, unless, of course, I’ve been offered the opportunity to go for a walk! What dog can refuse a walk?

We have a lovely tradition that means that I get a treat when the correct team scores a goal. It all began the very first time that I watched a football match with him. He was quite excited and cheered when his team scored a goal. This startled me and so he asked me to sit and then gave me a treat. Ever since then I’ve had a treat to help celebrate a goal. Sometimes I get one when the wrong team score because I know there’s been a goal and I look up for a treat. He gives me a treat because he thinks I don’t know which side has scored!

One day when we were watching a match his cheers about a goal turned to groans of despair and he told me it wasn’t a goal as it was offside. The female biped said that was unfair, the pundits will spend what seems like hours discussing whether someone was offside or not so he shouldn’t expect a dog to grasp the offside rule. He said that, of course, he was going to give me a treat and handed it over. I decided that if the ball goes in the net then I’m counting it as a goal and that means a treat!

The rules of the game seem fairly straightforward, but they are all open to interpretation. I wouldn’t want to be a referee – it seems that each decision they make upsets the supporters of one side or the other. I have struggled with understanding when a tackle should be penalised. Sometimes a player is “blatantly taken down by a cynical tackle” and the player doing the tackling should be given a yellow, maybe even a red, card. At other times, something that looks the same to me is a player going down because “his legs are made of jelly” or “he is diving” in the hope of getting a free kick. I use the colour of the shirt that the player is wearing as a rule of paw to know which is which – obviously my biped doesn’t support the team with the players who dive and do bad tackles!

England lost their first two matches, but that’s not altogether bad news – they scored some goals! The players will be on their way home, after playing their last group match, by the time you read this. But my duties as a football supporter won’t be over, the male biped will be picking and choosing which matches to watch based on how enjoyable he expects them to be. I hope there are lots of goals in the games we watch – not because I get a treat for each one, oh no, but because that will make the games exciting for him!

See you next Wednesday!