Born Offside #7 – International Football is POO

Last week I highlighted the fact that European football is poo, this week International football is POO.

International football is dead. I think that ever since Sven Goran Eriksson changed the entire team during an international friendly against Australia I have lost interest in what England are doing. I used to look forward to England games and get caught up in the unreasonable hysteria that comes during tournaments. That night Sven devalued the team, replacing the established line up with the young pretenders at half time. For me the status of international matches has never properly recovered. The reason that all those changes were made was that Sven was beholden to the Premier league managers that didn’t want their players to risk injury and fatigue in what they saw as a meaningless friendly match. And they were right.

International friendlies are purely money making ventures, which are why we see fixtures like England playing Brazil in Doha, or Argentina playing Brazil at the Emirates.  The teams are whored out by their football association and players that are involved in heavy domestic campaigns are dispatched all over the world, much to the displeasure of their premier league managers. However as a nation England still get so carried away by what they expect to happen in major tournaments, even though qualifying for them is no longer a given as Steve McLaren proved in 2008.

When England flew out to South Africa in the summer of 2010, England believed that all the team had to do was to pass the ball to Rooney and we would win the World Cup. Oops. Sadly Rooney was about to be revealed as a sex pest of inordinate proportions and so his mind was elsewhere. Plus he forgot to pack his first touch and as a result he played like Carlton Palmer. As if that wasn’t enough Emile Heskey mistook Rio Ferdinand for a bench and sat his huge frame down on the skipper. Nowadays Rio is nearly as brittle as Dobbin Van Horsie of Arsenal and so the captain was ruled out of the whole tournament. With Rio out and Rooney playing like a shire horse England were doomed and upon reflection were the most disappointing side at the world cup. So once back home what drastic action did the FA take? Well of course they had a meeting, drunk some sloe gin, had a game or two of gin rummy and then forgot what they were doing and headed up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire without sacking the hapless Capello. So England lumbered on with the same manager and the same useless pissbuckets that had failed in multiple tournaments before, yet obviously England were still expected to win the European Championships in 2012.

Now as they near another round of ultimately boring and needless qualifiers England are being thrown into a state of flux by the captaincy. Rio is injured, Gerard has gone on a month long rob all round the Wirrall so is unavailable and so Capello has decided to appoint John Terry. The man who he publically announced was not fit to captain the country not very long ago. This has sparked such a debate across all media platforms that you could be fooled into thinking it was a hugely important piece of news. I was lucky enough to be listening to the ridiculous Talksport one morning this week and the programme was all about this conundrum, should Terry be the new captain, or should they cart him off to Hackney Moors and castrate him with a safety pin. The lead presenter of the programme continually insisted that it wasn’t an important matter, for him it was irrelevant who the captain was and this posed a question to me. If it isn’t important then why the bollocks have you dedicated a whole three hours to it? All the programme consisted of was scousers and cockneys taking it in turn to badmouth the other player. Team Terry insisted that he was a natural leader and he was humiliated by Capello and actually they thought he should tell the Italian where to stick his captaincy. Team Gerrard spoke a lot quicker and in a language that I couldn’t really understand but I think they were saying that Stevie was better than Terry, despite the fact that Terry has led Chelsea to a lot more trophies and is so in touch with his feminine side that he doesn’t mind having a weep in public. The debate was merely a tit for tat and led me to the conclusion that 90% of the country aren’t really that bothered about the wellbeing of the national team, they just want their players to be selected. However once they have been selected for the squad they don’t actually want them to play in case they get injured.

These are the same fans that don’t actually want to go and see England play because the stadium is nearly inaccessible for anyone north of Watford, costs an unrealistic amount of money to get into and then accepts only gold bullion or internal organs in exchange for food and drink, such are the exorbitant prices. I made the mistake of going to watch England play Brazil in the first senior international to be played at the new white elephant. I had to park more or less in Oxford and catch a train to the stadium. That cost about £13 to start with. The tickets were £50 each and to help me justify the expense Brazil loaded their team with second rate reserves that had probably played that morning in the Russian leagues, which was nice. At half time my cousin and I got a burger, we are still paying £23 a month for that, despite putting down a healthy cash deposit. We shared a drink as their wasn’t enough time for them to harvest a kidney to afford 2 and made our way back to our seats, just in time to see England make six substitutions, removing Rooney for someone that once played crown green bowls in the Somerset league. After 90 minutes of crap we made our merry way to the train station, but as the stadium does not have any car parking facilities so did 89,998 other people. All in all I found the Wembley experience to be less enjoyable than watching Sex and the City 2.