The waiting game

I love the World Cup, but it’s a bit like flying business class. It spoils you. I flew business class once… well, twice. There and back again. I was taken on a press VIP trip to Japan and it was simply fantastic… Bloody fantastic. Space, comfort, personal service, a choice of quality meals, drink the whole way and no questions asked. Delightful – pure and simple.

I have flown hundreds of thousands of miles since. Economy class. And each time I do, I can’t help the unpleasant little tingle of resentment when I see those bastards queuing up and filing on first, but turning left at the entrance to the plane.

That’s what the World Cup is – that’s what it does. It is a luxury journey that we have the right to once every four years (which, granted, is a lot more frequent than my flying business class).

You see, last year, come May, I had already geared myself up to yet another year in the Championship for West Bromwich Albion and the fact that nothing else would happen for another three months.

This year, I got myself all keyed up for the World Cup, desperate to read and watch anything and everything pertaining to it for the month before South Africa kicked off against Uruguay, then watched just about every game through to July 11th and the (more deserved than most people seemed to give them credit for) Spanish lifting the trophy.

Since then, I have been at something of a loose end. Yes, I have started a blog… Two blogs in fact. I have got the ball rolling on establishing my own website – at last! I’ve only been chuntering on about it for about ten years. I have written a few songs and recorded a couple and set up my first gig playing my own brand of digitally looped guitar (Auraloramas)… In fact, I don’t think I have done so much in a two to three week period for decades. 2010 is indeed turning out to be an important year for me, as I had suspected it would be…

But it’s all falling a little flat at the moment. There is a hole in my life and there is nothing I can do about it except wait.

You see, I had failed to prepare myself for the one month and one week of no football between July 11th and August 12th. Completely forgot to prepare myself. What a knobber.

So, I found myself this morning, a little hungover, admittedly, scouring the ‘on demand’ section of BT Vision looking for something to feed my embarrassing habit.

I found it in a rather pants programme detailing the best goals of the first three seasons of the Premier League. Goal after meaningless goal went in, filling me in on three seasons I had largely missed due to my being in Bulgaria at the time.

My wife caught me at it. “Isn’t this a bit like porn?” she asked (a little too shrewdly for my liking). “Just goal after goal and you get a bit desensitised to it."

Well, yes, it was (although I didn’t admit that to her). I felt a little guilty being caught watching it, too.

Did I learn anything? As a matter of fact, yes I did. I learnt that Alan Shearer was as excellent as I remember him being (before he joined Newcastle and became just ‘good’). I learnt that Matt le Tissier was a damned site better than I remembered him. And I learnt (or rather had confirmed) that Ryan Giggs was a blindingly good player in the first three seasons… And, thinking about it, still is now… The bloke’s a living legend. Every season since 1992. A goal in every season. How many titles? A dozen? How many cups? Five? How many European Cups? Two (I know that one). All with one club.

I suppose 2010/11 could be his last season. I hope it’s a good one. I hope he scores a few goals. I hope his record stands for decades to come…

And I wish, as with Le Tissier and Giggs, that players could develop and shine with one club that they love – but I know that’s never going to come true. We’ve come too far.

Still four weeks to go until the season starts… How do we cope? I’m now waiting for the second episode of the best goals of the Premier League to be uploaded… Although next time I’ll wait until my wife goes to bed.

England has never won the World Cup: Part II

So, yes, another whimpering disaster for the (ahem) Three Lions. Not since 1973 has a football team been less worthy to wear the famous emblem on its chest. Then it was the misguided belief in Alf Ramsey and his misguided belief in a bunch of players that were way beyond their sell-by date and a smattering of young ‘talent’ – for some reason the name Trevor Cherry keeps springing to mind, but there were a lot of below par players in that squad… Yet, of course, we managed to lay the blame at the feet of ‘a clown’ by the name of Tomeschwski – the Polish goalie who’s unorthodox talents kept the English team from scoring and, ultimately, from qualifying for the 1974 World Cup…

Just as well really, that was the year the Dutch and the Germans came to the fore and real football – modern football as we know it today – was born. Had England qualified, Ramsey would probably have been kept on until 1977 – despite the fact that embarrassment awaited us in Germany in 74.

In Part I, I discussed the fact that England is not as good as we all wish it were… It’s not as good as we hope it would be and, in fact, it’s just not very good. We don’t have the desire, we don’t have the spirit, and, to put it bluntly, we don’t have the players.

What the cure for the English malaise in international football is, I don’t know – I’m not sure anyone knows, but I do have some hope for the English fan.

It started with a haranguing session on the old BBC 606 site just before the last World Cup in 2006. Some Johnny Foreigner (or a joker pretending to be is probably closer the truth) was going around all of the team chat rooms saying ‘England has never won the World Cup and it is unlikely to win it now.’

Needless to say, he left a trail of huffing and puffing Englishmen (me included) questioning his ability to lead a normal life without hospitalisation and extreme chemical support. But his odd argument is now ringing true with me.

“England has never won the World Cup,” he railed. “What you won was the Jules Rimet trophy. The competition was to win it three times and Brazil did that. The England win was – and is – worthless and meaningless.”

Hmm…

On top of that, a few years previously – well, four in fact, before the 2002 World Cup – there was a ‘history of the World Cup’ special on TV, presented by Paul Whitehouse. It was a tongue in cheek affair, and he began by issuing the premise for the programme…

“We’ll begin when the World Cup really started – in 1966. Well, it was just the Worthington Cup before that, wasn’t it?”

Well, Paul, yes and no. It was all a bit Worthington Cup up to 1970, really and that was when the Jules Rimet competition (as I will now call it) ended and football began. 1970 was the cut off. It was when the Germans began their scintillating run of success, the Dutch were about to spring total football on the world, Africa and Asia were on the verge of entering the world stage and the style of athletic, professional and high-energy football we all know and love today was finally emerging.

Why does England go to each World Cup tournament steeped (and stooped) with pressure from fans and media? Because we are fooling ourselves that somehow we are good enough to win the World Cup.

Why do we think we can win the World Cup? Because we have won it before.

So, let’s nip that sprawling sucker down at the roots, eh? Let’s saw the weed of at the top of the roots and inject the roots with a high-powered poison. With that out the way, the ten roses that decorate the three lioins might finally get the chance to breathe and thrive.

England has never won the World Cup – Never. Not ever.

We won the Jules Rimet trophy once, in 1966, but it was all a bit Worthington Cup back then and the aim of the Jules Rimet was to win it three times. Brazil did that, so our solitary win was (and is) pretty meaningless.

It’s nice to win the Worthington Cup (or whatever it is called these days). I’d love to see West Brom win it gain, that’s for certain, but let’s not get carried away with ourselves. The Worthington Cup is NOT the World Cup.

If we can forget about that insignificant little victory, maybe we can start looking at our team with some reality, with some genuine, objective acceptance that we are (certainly at the moment) a bit pants.

God only knows, but if we did that, we might even get the Scottish cheering for us again. Now that WOULD be a victory!

England has never won the World Cup: Part I

Germany has a pretty good national football team. Sad, but true. Sadder still because England doesn’t have anything approaching a decent national football team. Even sadder still when one considers how good the English Premier League is…

And sad to degrees that inspire inconsolable wailing when one also considers that the Bundesliga (spelling, anyone?) is one of the most depressingly stagnant and dull football leagues in the developed world…

More of that another day, but for now I feel it is time to put a little something to rest and hopefully make watching the world cup a damned site more enjoyable for English fans come 2014… (Or even 2012 and the European Championships.)

So, yes, England has gone out of the World Cup to Germany – again. I think it is probably a good thing, not least because Germany looks good and England looks like Munich 1860.

Hopefully now we can stop all of this ‘two world wars and one world cup’ nonsense. We have played Germany in tournament finals six times now. Drawn one, lost four, won one… When did we win one? Well, waddaya know? 1966.

Other than that one game, we have lost to Germany when it matters – every time (the draw, obviously, was in the group stages of a European Championship and is not worth mentioning. It was a very, very drab affair). And, no, I do not accept that we drew against them in 1990 or in 1996. For those with poor memories – or a poor understanding of the rules of tournament football – those games went down to penalties and England lost… Yes, lost… L-O-S-T: Lost! We didn’t go through to the final of those two tournaments. No, we lost in the semi-finals and went out. Four to one, Germany to England… Sound familiar?

The thing is, now, with the ruthless, clinical and exceedingly talented Germans having dispatched the talented (but in no way ruthless or clinical) Argetines by four goals to nil, I see a lot of England fans saying: ‘Oh, that’s all right then – we did better than Argentina!’

No we didn’t. We lost to Germany in the last 16, Argentina lost in the quarter finals. Argentina did better than England. The fact that Germany is (quite sensibly) upping its game from game to game as the 2010 World Cup tournament progresses shows how good Germany is. Germany has not now become a yard stick by which we measure the ability of the England team.

We were dreadful. Shocking. Appalling. Drab. Uninspired. Lethargic. Pedestrian. Fragmented. Disjointed. Dull. A team without skill, drive, verve, determination, spirit or desire. It was a team that didn’t really care – probably, I suspect, because they all had earned good money throughout the year, earned good money from the tournament and were looking forward to a couple of weeks in the Bahamas, before heading home to their mansions and the continuation of high-energy domestic football, where than can be made to look good by the efforts of the French, Spanish, Brazilian, Argentine, German, Dutch, Italian, Czeck, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbia, Nigerian, Ghanaian, Ivory Coastian (?) and Togan players that combine to make the English league the scintillating spectacle it is.

The dwarf on a giant’s shoulders sees furthest of all. Sure! But what happens when 23 of those dwarves are taken down from the shoulders of giants and put into a football team? Well, just look back over England’s attempts at the 2010 World Cup and you will see. Apart from Wayne Rooney, I don’t think anyone in the squad played any worse than they do in the domestic season. They simply look better in the domestic season because they are playing with some of the best players in the world.

There is a cure for this… No, not for the inadequacies of English footballers – that, I’m afraid is the remit of far more specialised brains than mine. There is a cure for us – the fans. We can get over this and need never suffer the misery of watching England at a World Cup again for as long as we live – or until we get a group of players again that can do us proud…

But there’s no room here. You’ll have to click here and move on to Part II…