So let’s get it clear for all those
romantics who love the game and follow their clubs and their heroes. The
Premier League of English football was created as a meat market for you to do
your weekly thing and watch those you think are great with the ball earn the kind
of money for ninety minutes’ work a week that might otherwise take you many
years to accumulate! You need to
think they’re highly skilled and marvellous with the ball anyway because you’re
attending your weekly ritual and paying for them and while they earn very
serious dosh the real money is made in deals done in the back rooms over their
names. One of the more interesting results of this evolution from sport to
business is the relationship between a footballer’s pay and his value on the
transfer market. Most of the players, whether they’re foreign or British, come
from working class backgrounds and are often poorly educated at best. When lads
in their late teens suddenly find themselves much in demand for skills real or
pretended and soon earn huge salaries enabling them to indulge in a fantasy
lifestyle, something happens inside their heads. They become prima-donnas. And
so many of these players in the English Premier Division teams are simply just
that with varying degrees of ability.
The important thing is that they don’t have
to demonstrate wonderful skill. What really counts is their name. One that’s regularly
mentioned and talked about in a media carefully geared to the interests of a
barmy footballing public. This not only includes newspapers but television
where commentators for football games, particularly those involving the English
national team, specialize… absolutely specialize in talking
players up so that a hopeless performance full of missed opportunities and a
serious lack of skill is turned into a dull
performance or an off day! And
nowhere is this best typified than by those supplying commentaries on England’s
games on television where quite frankly, judgements verging on double-think over
ghastly misses sound plain pathetic. And quite frankly even more so because the
people they’re talking about earn a weekly wage that’s simply staggering.
England’s players primarily come from the
Premier Division of the English Football League. It’s a Division whose teams
incorporate very large numbers of highly paid teenage prima-donnas attached to
whom are eye-watering values on the transfer market. It’s the value that
counts. One that’s supposedly based on their footballing skills but more often
in fact depends on a value acquired by proxy from the media. The Premier Division
indeed is more often a place full of talked up names rather than players with
brilliant professional skills. At best a weak combination of mediocre skills
and names. Skills more suited to club performances where they are regularly
surrounded by supportive colleagues than the English national team.
This said, it is from among such players
that English football team managers and coaches make their selections for the
English national team. Among whom, I repeat, are many players with poor all
round skills who have a tendency on and off the field to conduct themselves
like prima-donnas! Especially so with the attention of a football-mad clientele
at the time of a World Cup tournament and it is here that I wish to comment on
the very unusual overall selection procedure used by England football managers
both now and in the recent past for creating their team. Anyone with any basic
common sense would think that when a new manager takes charge and begins the
process of creating a national team, the word team here is crucial, you
might think that for the first six months to a year the manager would
immediately create a pool of best players from those available and
spend the next three years blending them together, harmonizing
their actions and performances and further developing their skills to the
sharpest level possible. In other words spend all his time building a
united, skilled and disciplined team.
In the case of creating England’s football
team of today exactly the opposite has happened. In fact, right now, with only
a few days to go before England’s first match against Italy, no-one yet knows
who’ll be playing! Not even those in Roy Hodgson’s pool of players! Now having
what may be described as a TEAM essentially involves players who are very
experienced in working together and know each other’s capabilities and skills. It’s something entirely different from
putting together people in an ad hoc fashion, changing the composition of the
group from one game to the next and even more jokingly, swapping them around by
making endless substitutions within the course of a single game. Such a
procedure is a plain recipe for disunity and disharmony… players not knowing
exactly what they’re supposed to be doing which leads, in the case of
uncertainty, to them repeatedly passing the ball back. In only too many of
England’s games recently that’s exactly what they’ve been doing! Passing the
ball back when they should be pushing forward with imagination, confidence and
drive. Knowing where they are going and what they are doing because they all
know each other and are blended together as a fighting unit.
In short, Roy Hodgson’s creation of
England’s football team over the last few years has been little more than a
joke when you compare it to the creation of the national teams of Germany,
Brazil, Spain and Argentina. Even of Portugal! All these countries have been
carefully building their units for years, just as the great French team of
recent times was put together. With these national sides it’s been a matter of
careful construction. Of harmonization. In the case of the English team it’s
been more like chucking people together and hoping.
If anyone needed evidence of how true all
this is then think about what you just saw on television against Ecuador and
Honduras! You’re talking of big name players here earning big time money at
their clubs, yet the performances were dismal. Deep shit at best… and players
like Welbeck and Sturridge are being put up for England when so many of their
previous performances are puce. Is that a joke or something? They are
essentially club players nothing more, same as Wayne Rooney. Presumably, to
play for England you need to be better than that. Presumably!
But I guess that all of this will escape
the attention of the large numbers of England fans all heading for Rio who
will, I prophesy, wind up drowning their sorrows after games against Italy and
the Uruguay in the arms of those world renowned Rio de Janeiro mulatto
prostitutes and have to attend certain clinics back home in England before
getting into bed with their girlfriends and wives. Sure, how I’d love to see
them beat the Italians only the latter are sharp, slick and dirty, and England
just can’t afford any misses; and as for Uruguay they can kiss it so it’s out
in the Group Stage I’m afraid. But then never mind. If British men in front of
the telly and those being laddish together inside and outside the pubs can join
in singing In-ger-land, Rule Britannia and God Save Our Gracious… with the Army
inside Brazil’s stadiums then that’s what really counts. They’ll all be back in
a week or so, excuses prepared! It was too humid… too hot… too cold… The food
gave us all belly ache… Yes the excuses are ready and waiting, same as they’ve
always been!
Honestly, I really don’t want it to be that
way. I’m rooting for the team same as everybody only what team is that? When
England start preparing in the right, methodical, disciplined way with serious
professionals rather than puerile prima-donnas, then I’ll know. In the
meantime, best of luck. And please, you boozed up English fans in Rio, or
wherever, unless you want a much greater agony than watching England go down
the plughole, try using a condom.
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