Hands up all you nice people out there who travelled to the Ukraine and Poland to watch the English football team play? Hmm… five thousand of you eh! Likewise hands up those who watched the games on television from home or in a pub and were glued to the set. Christ! Millions more! And all of you so disappointed. Dear, dear, dear! Well please don’t be. This post is written specially for you because I want you to be happy!
Let me get straight to the point. I am now able to reveal for the first time to the many admirers of England’s football team the secret of their footballing philosophy and successes over so many years. We can at last share with all the many supporters and fans the great and guiding idea behind our style of play, namely that LOSING ISN’T REALLY LOSING AT ALL. No, the secret at the heart of English footballing success is the brilliant idea that LOSING IS ACTUALLY WINNING.
Yes, the idea behind each game England plays is that the team must do its best to lose.
Now please… there’s no need for you to get abusive or feel angry by this amazing discovery. The idea has been carefully considered over many years’ experience and is the only logical conclusion that can be drawn from all the many English performances… to wit, that all the hard work, the training, the effort of team selection carefully designed to pick the best players with the greatest skills, able to devote the greatest amount of energy has been for one purpose and one purpose alone… to help the team lose. Even the tactics and training are designed with this in mind i.e. spend eighty per-cent of the game in your own half… don’t attack under any circumstances… keep on passing the ball backwards, all the way back to the goalkeeper if possible rather than forwards, and more important than anything else, keep on giving it away as often as you can to an opponent.
Now of course there may be those of you who think that little skill is required to do all this but you would be sadly mistaken. From all the many results over the years it becomes clear that the chief criteria for selecting a player is PRECISELY their ability to do all these things, and please don’t knock it. Premier League footballers, the cream of the English beautiful game’s professionals, many paid more for ninety minutes work once a week than a nurse, fireman, policeman, teacher, junior doctor, scientific researcher or ambulance driver gets to see for TEN YEARS SERVICE helping people, are along with bankers, financial services executives, company directors and Russian gangsters the highest paid people in the land. Those who play for England are supposedly at the top of their game, the best that there is. They are the elite of professional football so that when these eleven players come together collectively to mostly play in their own half, pass the ball to a player from the opposing team on as many occasions as possible, kick or head the ball inches or yards wide of the other side’s goalposts from a distance of three feet away on such a regular basis, please do not tell me that this is bad or dreadful play. To do so would miss the whole point. That it is entirely intentional and that very great skill is required to do it.
Indeed, why else is it that those selected to play for England perform these feats with such panache and style and on such a regular basis? To say that it’s bad luck or that the player is ‘off form’ is to hide oneself from the truth. Huge skill and much training is required to make these so called dreadful misses, and make them look natural, and this only becomes clear once you understand the secret, the underlying philosophy of the English football team… THAT LOSING IS NOT LOSING AT ALL. IT’S REALLY WINNING!
And for those doubters and sceptics among you there is a way of proving this to be true. One which comes from the very soul of English football itself, namely the fans. Those of us who watch football tournaments where the England team is playing round the world will know that supporters of our team love singing the National Anthem or Rule Britannia. They are at their happiest when they’re singing these songs and they really don’t sing anything else. Now ask yourself… when do they sing these songs most? Yes of course, it’s when the team’s losing. Then everyone sings God Save the Queen or go on about never, never, never being slaves. So clearly, the fans are at their happiest when England is losing and that, of course, is the great secret they all share. That when the Germans have got four goals and we’ve only got one, or when they’ve got three penalties in the shoot-out and we haven’t got any it’s really England, secretly, who are winning.
Look at it another way. When England have made the dreadful mistake of attacking and the even more ghastly error of scoring there is a stunned silence that comes over England’s supporters followed by the team instantly reacting to a dire situation and doing what they know has to done, namely, avoid making the same mistake again under any circumstances by instantly retreating so far back in their own half that ten of the eleven players are soon standing on their own goal line! In short, key at all times is to let the other side win and the best way to achieve this is to play in our own half, not score any more goals ourselves and to always give them a chance of getting a goal by passing them the ball. That way you see, they score and we win! And of course, our supporters get to sing the National Anthem!
Look at it this way. Can you imagine how happy it makes the Queen? Knowing that the most ardent supporters of monarchy come from the massed ranks of the English underclass all on song with undying devotion when the other team get all the goals!
However, if you don’t accept the view that losing is really winning, none of this would make any sense, would it? However, the evidence is all there in front of your eyes and has been for many years. How else can you explain what you see with such regularity… the English football team so totally devoid of any imagination… its players having so little basic football skills… the endless back passing… the pathetic attacks… the endless defence. It’s like watching a bunch of highly paid cowards… unless of course it’s all really deliberate! That all this supposed skill has its very own secret purpose only known some way or other to the Football Association and understood by the underclass army of “football’s comin ‘ome,” fans most of whom are one pork pie short of moronic. Or could it be that losing is really winning after all? That it binds all the losers together as a band of brothers. Supporters who deny themselves and their families everything so that they can travel one end of the globe to another to vocalise their patriotism in self-affirming loss.
Could it really be true then? That England’s football supporters and the team itself as well as its succession of managers are genuinely imbued with the philosophy that losing is winning and that the secret to success is to pick the best players possible to help England lose because, make no mistake about it, these are highly skilled, highly trained professional players who do what they do for a living and earn huge sums of money for it. Indeed, you need to be exceptionally skilled to kick a ball ten yards wide of a goal post from three feet away with no-one else there to impede you or else head the ball high over the crossbar from a few feet away when all you need to do was stick out your bum to get the ball in the net. In short, huge skill is also required at what may best be described as GOAL SCORING AVOIDANCE and that is why these players are selected and it’s all really a huge secret, the custodianship of which goes far beyond MI5.
And horror of horrors! Could it be that 1966 was just a gigantic disaster from which English football has been trying to recover over the last 46 years?
Now either you accept this very English philosophy of football or you’ve got to accept something else. Something altogether less pleasant and you know what I’m talking about here! Or are all you ‘come on England’ supporters out there too thick, too ashamed or just too plain moronic to look truth in the face and admit it for what it really is. That English football on a national level is just a pathetic, shameless, hopelessly unskilled cowardly disgrace. That most of its players for donkeys years have been talked up media creations who’ve failed time and time over when required to step up to the plate. Pampered by the sports pundits… vastly overpaid as people with average skills at best… endlessly fawned over… feted and turned into things that they’re not by a sickening, sycophantic national press hungry to manufacture national obsessions so they can write stories and sell their shit-sheets to a public with concomitant festering obsessions. It’s like the national obsession with Royalty. A symbiotic self-serving parasitism.
Let’s go cold turkey and ask how an entire nation can be given the treat of a football player’s hairstyle on the front pages of its media when there was so much else going on in our country? What kind of people are we that we should be more interested in a footballer’s hairstyle that anything else? Well journalists, editors and newspaper owners would know, much the same as those Emperors of Rome. Bread and circuses! Have people changed much over the last 2000 years when they still buy into this shit?
Wayne Rooney’s fighting in the arena today and guess what? He’s had his hair done!
Well whoopee fucking do all you alcohol fuelled come on England jerk-offs. So much for your national pride! Your team of useless, pathetic losers has lost all over again and you don’t care, not really, because you’ve both got no pride. Your manager and players can shrug their shoulders and start coming out with the excuses they’d already thought up before the game even started. Pathetic, lame, cheap excuses perfectly suited for their uncritical, semi-inebriated supporters who don’t have the capacity to think and ask themselves why. No, don’t ask any questions. Just booze it off in some foreign bar or down at the pub!
The press, the television commentators and pundits have all, over the years, played their part in the damning and shaming of national team football in addition to the superb comedy of the Football Association’s appointment of foreign managers who seriously knew a bunch of fools when they saw one and milked the situation for what it was. Yes, let’s have Swedes and Italians, joke-joke, they know what they’re doing! But then you see, the joke was so big and so vigorously promoted by a salivating press that it clouded all rational thought and judgement, if there was any in the first place that is. The jokey Swede and the grumpy Italian! Coining it in millions and the football supporters going along with it all. That’s it, all you loyal supporters of the English national team, you’re the sick joke of Europe!
And now the reasons for it all. The facts as they stand are these. In the last three decades, professional football required financial support from the money men of the City of London so that it might expand and milk a lucrative traditional working class market. The money however came with strings. The main national clubs became private companies listed on the equity market and were now required to make profit for their investors. Part of their value was in land, the ground or stadium of the club, but more important than anything else, even the weekly ticket sales to supporters or the outrageous marketing of club shirt and other token of adoration, was the value of players. Over a few decades what had once been Club value was turned into Asset value. Human beings became financial assets. Thousands turned into millions and the buying and selling of players became club football’s biggest source of profit. Players, whether skilled or not, had to be talked up, their name and person turned into a commodity, easily and willingly manufactured. Stars! Stars with wives, haircuts and houses.
Footballers acquired the new value of celebrity. They were more important, had greater value as media creations than actual kickers and headers of footballs. Their celebrity and celebrity value became everything, their footballing skills nothing, their value secondary at best. That’s why they can’t kick a ball straight. That’s why they can’t score penalty goals… because they don’t have the skill to place a ball when they kick it. It was something they never learned, were never taught, not when being seen outside nightclubs was more important. In short, basic skill lost its value and was replaced by celebrity value and a Premier League full of prancing prima-donnas, semi or otherwise, evolved for the requirements of the London capital markets.
Poor, poor footballers! You’re just a pathetic bunch of actors now, pretending to be something you’re not. But never mind. The English team will still have its loyal army of supporters watching its thoroughly rotten performances on a regular basis so nothing to worry about on that score. They’ll still value you more highly than nurses, teachers, doctors, firemen or ambulance drivers. Your endless losing is the opium they need, the drug they just can’t shake off. Like you they need to wallow in the pathetic. It helps them stay juvenile. Prevents them from growing up and seeing things for what they really are; the politicians who deceive, the money men who cheat, the journalists who lie for a living and the Royals who smile and think what an amazing bunch of arseholes their adoring public actually are.
It’s football the beautiful game! It’s entertainment. So easy that you don’t need to think any more. You can boo or cheer. And when you’ve done your booing or cheering you can do another ten pints of lager and sing as you roll on the grass, FOOTBALL’S COMIN ‘OME!
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