How do you solve a problem like Team England?

Before wa talk about solutions lets have a nice sober look at the problems we face with English football. We gave the world the sport that has now surpassed all others as the King of sports, more popular than any other, if you made four piles of jumpers and threw a ball at 22 people , there would be a game even if they didn't speak the same language. So why is it that the land whence sprung the funny old game cannot field a decent side in the World Championship of the sport it invented?

I'll start at the peripheries and make my way to the core of the matter slowly as it's worth looking at it from a few angles. My first target is a press machine that fuel our vanity and expectations like delusional parents telling their 5 year old they're brilliant on the piano even if we're rubbish. Of course we'll go all the way, that loss to Malta or Northern Ireland was an aberration, we played the C side , it was cold, it was wet, it was too dry, the pitch was to blame. We will triumph over all comers and bring to an end 44 years of pain. Then the lads get on the plane for South Africa, the already frenzied war drums and shrieks reach a terrifying level of insanity that make Joseph Geobles seem reasonable and measured in his expectations of the players. Once there, the media machine crank it up to ludicrous levels with adverts exhorting us to "Do it for Bobby", Brian Blessed shouts at us to excel and take no prisoners. After a while of this you begin to think they surely they wouldn't go to these lengths if were utter shite? They must be as good as they say they are, Com'n lads, make us proud! For Bobby , for the Busby Babes, for the Hillsborough victims, for the soldiers in Afghnistan, for little baby Baz and his Mam and his dog.....YOU CAN DO IT. Imagine being one of the players so assaulted by all this pressure, all those hopes and dreams on your well paid pampered shoulders, can YOU resist maybe getting a bit nervous? Then the inevitable crash as manager and players board the bus emblazoned with ironic words like Glory and Pride. The inquisition in the various media begins even now with huge banner front pages crowing the news of the returning prodigal sons who are not worthy of forgiveness, their clueless manager talking of meetings and deadlines. These hapless inadequate ambassadors, once heroes, were never as good as advertised and the press knew it, The FA knew it, Murdoch knew it, WE knew it. But the red tabs, television networks and various promoters were not going to let that wee detail stand in the way of a massive marketing exercise designed to make millions for certain parties involved. A World Cup without England? Sepp Blatter would rather kiss a cucumber in public than miss out on all those supporters, I mean travelling parties. The Sun wouldn't sell as many papers, and ITV would have an even harder time getting us to watch James Corden. And now the Jackals fall on the players like some kind of tsunami of hate and shame. Indignation and anger following every word photo and page. Hardly the kind of behaviour conducive to a realistic branch and root review of football.

Next goat in this tragicomedy of errors is the combined ego and power of the Premiership. These clowns pay ever increasing wage packets to players who rightly believe they are above most people and clearly superior to any mere mortals within a golden age of them. Not content to inflate wages and egos the Premiership goes out of it's way to staff teams with only the caviar of footballers. Real Madrid may have its Galacticos, but the Premiership is the richest and most expensive league on planet Earth. Filled with the great and nearly great from all over the globe, If you're Jimmy Grimble trying out for Man City, you won't get a game until all the overpriced talent have a go first. Little wonder England can't find a decent back four, midfield or goalkeeper. If every foreign player left the Prem today, the top 6 teams would be so strapped for players it would allow in form mid table sides to grab top spots. One of the worst talent deficits is in the goal keeper gap. Peter Check, Edwin Van der Sarr, Shay Given, Brad Freidel, all are better than the two keepers who to played for England in the last 6 years. West ham and Portsmouth, powerhouse teams that finished so close to bottom you could smell the fear months ahead of the last day.

This next target is the one I know you'll find most amusing. The oddball collection of managers the FA has hired and fired since Svenn Goren Useless. First offence, they to a man ignored the wealth of under 21's and assuming the collection of passionless mercenaries could be made to play as a team, they still needed somebody they could respect. Maradona, Dunga, Lippi, Hiddink, all command the respect of their teams. They say jump the players ask, how high sir? But our wastes of space would take any order from Keegan, McManaman or Shearer as a suggestion and an invitation to question the manager's wisdom. The only man who manages in England that could do the job is Alex Ferguson. None of these soft babies would dare talk back to him. More importantly, apart from some very strange formations and subs a few year back, Fergie has clearly got it right with his lads. I suspect Wenger would do as well. They both understand the English game and the players and they have the weight of experience and authority of award winning seasons to impose their thinking. Something Sven to Capello were not able to do. You can take 22 of the best anythings, but if you don't turn them into a team they are worse than bad, they are an accident waiting to happen. One of the huge mistakes Capello made was to choose players not fit for purpose, did not require the players to seriously try out with real risk of being dropped. Treated the players like monks or children, not mega stars with a routine that for better or worse produces results. He then locked them up away from family and friends doing more practices than ever did at their club sides. Hermetically sealing these players was only ever going to lead to one thing, they would get tired sloppy and loose focus. Lastly he never varied 4-4-2. Arsenal got rumbled that way by the end of the run of 49. There is a school of thought that states if Odin himself came down to boss England, he couldn't get these Toffs to put in a single half of decent football.

Lastly the Players. Any group of lads who know they need to be healthy for MAN United, Chelsea, Arsenal, or Liverpool, cannot be expected to give it their all for England. Is it any wonder we saw the spectacle of a manager and selected players get trotted out to give post match interviews all singing the same drug induced cheerful message that the team played well, they were unlucky to get the goal not given, and had it counted, who knows how great they would have been. Honestly, they were lucky it wasn't 8-2 Germany. Capello is realistically looking at loosing his job, even it is the insane asylum better known as the English FA. He should be made to give the money back and go home now.

So how do we fix this? "Simples" as a certain meercat would say. First we accept that we won't qualify for Euro, that we won't qualify for the next World Cup and that the current crop of England caps will be told to finish their days at club sides while England do the following drastic treatment.

1- Look at the under 21's and under 19's. Form a team that will compete from here in against the rest of the World in European and WC qualifiers.

2- Conduct a two year program during which the length and breadth of Great Britain is scoured to find and train up the next great goal keepers needed to dramatically improve the chances of England Wales Scotland and NI.

3- Finally implement the dream of Trevor Sir Brooking whereby we install a full training system throughout Great Britain that will produce enough quality players to fill every Football team in every division twice over with Keepers, defenders, mid-fielders, sweepers and strikers. These player will then replenish the Leagues and develop into powerful talented players that will be diverse enough that even an amateur trained on FIFA 2010 could at least cruise through the qualifying without any embarrassments.

4- Un-tarmac the pitches turned over to car parcs for the London games or other such sacrifices perpetrated to local parcs over the last few years. Convert a large number of 11 a side pitches currently being used by 10 year olds into 7 or 8 aside pitches with smaller nets. If you keep it proportional, the young players will learn and develop better.

5- Bring in total football, teach players enough skill to respect and understand how other positions play. Look how the Brazilians broke down Mexico. It was the kind of multitasking you just don't get with English players. We all want to be the hero and score the goals, but somebody has to be stopper, somebody has to defend, somebody has to feed the ball up to the front.

6- Reduce the wage packet to only 30 times that of a teacher per year. Limit the number of non local players a club can bring in and lower ticket prices by the amount saved.

7- Force players who want to play for England to compete in open trials for spots. No player should ever be allowed to think he can just walk into a spot because he's at Chelsea or Real Madrid. Besides, if we implement the above, they will have to worry that some younger better player won't pip them.

Do I think this green and pleasant land will come to pass? A man can dream.

Ich bin ein angry England supporter

Shambolic, catastrophic, dire, apocalyptic, mingning, decrepit, rubbish, Howler , clanger, mass suicide, torrid, incoherent, shite, crap, unacceptable, cringe worthy, load of utter donkeys droppings, incompetent, lazy, useless, debacle, spanking, dismembering, utter humiliation.

abominable, amiss, atrocious, awful, bad news, beastly, bottom out, bummer, careless, cheap, cheesy*, crappy*, cruddy, crummy, defective, deficient, diddly, dissatisfactory, downer, dreadful, erroneous, fallacious, faulty, garbage, godawful, grody, gross*, grungy, icky, imperfect, inadequate, incorrect, inferior, junky, lousy*, not good, off, poor, raunchy*, rough, sad, slipshod, stinking, substandard, synthetic, the pits, unacceptable, unsatisfactory

That felt good. Before I go on about our quality side, let me say a few words about goal line technology. That was a goal, it took a second  of replay to see that. Football is the only sport to not embrace the modern world, is FIFA a bunch of Druids? Maybe they're Amish or perhaps they haven't been off their estates in so long they don't know the world has moved on since 1870. Sepp Blater is a luddite who is bringing football into disrepute, he has to go NOW.  I say this for the matches to come and the deflated unhappy fans  yet to be disappointed by yet another such debacle. I think this may be the straw that broke the camel's back as half the FiFa executive are home nation reps Now on to the main event. What was Capello thinking? He played Barry, he played Milner he played an entire side of worthless over paid lazy Premirship pansies. The only decent person out there was David James. I apologize for every bad thing I ever said about you Calamity, you kept us from being spanked 9-0.  Then Capello chooses to sub in Heskey when we're down and he can't score. Where was Crouch? I would have accepted Beckham at this point.   Then the man in a post match interview says England played well. What match was he watching? What drugs is he taking , I can use some now. This is what happens when the powers that be do not take International football seriously. I would have been happier sending the best England had, even if they were 19 years old, look at those Germans, young men  mostly, but they are good, they are well formed into a team, and the manager has them playing like a Panzer division. Our team consists of a collection of stars who are used to getting their own way and getting paid wages we can only dream of. What ever pride in wearing the three Lions  vanished the first time they got a big contract and a permanent spot in the rotation. This is as bad as the bad old days under Svenn, then no one had a look in unless one of the Man U, Arsenal, or  Liverpool stars was hurt. It's time to rip up the car parks that cover pitches all over London in advance of the Olympics, get young people playing en masse and invest in the domestic players like Australia have done for every sport they have gone on to master. Something is rotten in Denmark and it starts at the top. The Premiership is partly to blame, they have produced a 2nd rate England side by eschewing ( my word for the week ) home grown talent for Mega Stars from any other places. They then pay them huge wage packets that could have gotten a less spectacular but more English set of players Premiership wide. After not much more time, these same players would be just as big as Kaka, or the winker Ronaldo. Next we need to set up goal keeping academies, churn out enough of these geezers to staff every team down to Nationwide three times, maybe then we'll have a  few stars to choose from in goal.  Lastly, why is not Britain naturalizing a few more footballers from other places, every other country in Europe has it's Brazilian, Turk or Cameroonian. .  Our defence also needs sorting, that back 11 of England was like butter on hot day, seems the system only really ever focusses on strikers. Brazil have exported the concept of total football to the rest of the world, we need to adopt it. I'm not saying the top Brazilian strikers are the best keepers on earth , but I suspect they can teach Green a few tricks. Enough already about England, I'm sick of them, hope they all crawl off into a hole for the summer. Wags money mansions cars, it's what they know, Rooney , Lampard, Gerard, Cole, Heskey, Terry, Upson, Milner SWP , the lot of them were shades of their proper form. I'm more embarrassed having supported England than I've been before. Oh I was upset other times, always had a decent scapegoat, (Listening to Five live.... Grow up Capello , Resign now.  Don't wait for the meeting you eedjit. ) Where was I? but this time even if the goal had counted , we still would have lost 4-2, we deserved to loose 8-2 but James was that good. I hope he knows we appreciate his work. Germany proved they deserve to win the whole thing now. I will be supporting them in the next round and Lord Help anybody who gets in their way. Argentina will  give them a good run  but it's the only side that can do that. So there it is the real World Cup final will be a Quarter final. Nothing else matters. Brazil are decent , but not good enough for me, Germany will edge them in a tight game. Today only one side came out to play and showed us from the first few minutes how it's done. One of the few European sided to do so. France Italy, Greece, Spain and now England., have all played rubbish anti football. Only Spain seem to have woken up in the last few minutes to save face, the rest are all deservedly gone. Not sure if I'll watch the Argies now or just flip over to Top Gear, Mexico could still pull a blinder .....

"It's been an itsy bitsy start here with Liverpool" & other World Cup follies

Another day another obvious conclusion thrown out the window.  The news from French base camp and English base camp continues to be strange and it's harder and harder to take the actual football seriously. But it's not all  something you would only expect in an over the top footie film trying to keep you interested past the scene where Pele, Beckham and Dizzy Rascal face Germany in a tense battle of pens. Some of it is even stranger. One of the best bits today was a subtle error which showed the strain some of the commentary types are under. During the ITV portion of the day while Spain and Honduras were playing , an auto pilot set of instructions kicked in when you heard the following "It's been an itsy bitsy start here with Liverpool". They could be forgiven for the confusion as the place was awash in current and past Scouse players. What it does demonstrate is that despite the professionalism of some, you do eventually reach a point where you need to be taken off the mike and rested. In a less pleasant episode from the same broadcast, Adrian Chiles , noted football commentator and humanitarian, went out of his way to take the piss out of Honduran players and their  not so on key or well sung rendition of the Honduran national anthem. Perhaps they weren't the Welsh boys choir, but they sang with passion and true patriotism. Pity Adrain ,our own players aren't capable of the same. Maybe if they cared a bit more we'd not be in such trouble. If like me you think Mr. Chiles needs a bit of a reminder  to grow up and show a little respect, you can send a polite but strongly worded note to OFCOM. While I'm at it, it needs to be said, ITV has ignored, underestimated and treated poorly in commentary, countries not in the traditional seeding of so called "Big Clubs". ITV World Cup football is only ever on because we must. I avoid the run up tuning in only for the match itself. On a lighter note, I'd also like to complain that FIFA, the responsible ones for the camera work, are just not showing the lovely lasses like they used to. I'm aware that perhaps not as many of them came, but surely they can do better than the miserly collection of munters we've been treated to this far. BTW I must be imagine things. I'm nowhere near South Africa and yet I  hear a vuvuzela moaning like an injured  water buffalo somewhere near here. Note to self, must go on a search and destroy mission later. Wait it just cut off  suddenly like, there is a God after all.

In a tournament where the big boys from Europe are showing cracks and frankly playing like they would rather already be in training camp at their respective clubs, the South Americans are head and shoulders ahead of the rest of the pack. Even IF they have massive contracts to get to after the WC, they are in fact doing all they can to insure their team does well and the fans at home are proud of them. Brazil, Argentina,  Uruguay, and Paraguay have all come to play and win. I can only assume that the next World cup in Brazil will be the absolute best ever one regardless of anything else. A genuinely football mad continent in which the host nation is one of the top practitioners of the sport. That tournament, unlike the PR ones in the USA and the Far East  will be a celebration of the world's game, hosted by the most passionate supporters on Earth. A fair final this time around would in fact be an all South American affair as they are the most deserving of being in  it aside from Germany .

Ah the football... If you missed the ambulances collecting the body bags, Portugal destroyed North Korea   7-0 , 6 of those in the 2nd half . I don't know if that's a record for most goals in a single half , but it has to be close to one. Poor North Koreans, they did keep the wolves at bay for a time , but Tiago and friends were indulging in target practice and nobody was going to stop them. The most important thing about this result is that the others in Group G have to do a lot more than just win or draw to advance. As usual, goal difference plays a big a part in the fate of the other teams.  Too bad they forgot that in the early stages. All those missed shots and cautious draws will come back to haunt more than a few teams between tomorrow and the final reckoning for the 16 teams going into the knock out rounds. The  North Koreans, we can only hope, will not be badly treated on returning home, should be proud of their performance. If they had been  an English club side, they could have kicked around fizzy pop for several years. Before I forget, the other thing I took personally from this match and judging from the reactions of mates, is that we still with a passion, want to do terrible things to that grinning oily twat Christiano Ronaldo. It was fun for a while seeing him  increasingly frustrated at his inability to score, sadly he broke his duck in the end. Seems memories are long and we all still feel the sting of going out on pens to a bunch of diving cheats who were the principle perpetrators of crimes against football in that infamous Portugal Holland match of 2006.

Chile Switzerland was an entirely other kettle of fish. The 1-0 result flatters the winners and is one of the most poorly officiated matches of this tournaments. 9 yellows and 1 red. Mad ref K Al Ghamdi did all he could to destroy any tempo to the game with a continuous stream of mostly ridiculous yellow cards whose only effect was to stop the match in its tracks. At one point it was clear players were worried about even moving a bit for fear of attracting the attention of the card happy official. The biggest problem was the clear intention of the ref to curtail any kind of body contact that would be taken for granted anywhere else and for the first half of the match kept Chile from getting anywhere near goal. To the bankers credit, the Swiss defence did do an admirable job of stripping Chile of the ball several times and stymieing any penetration...in other words they parked the bus. In case you didn't know, Switzerland now hold the record for not conceding  a goal in 551 minutes, surpassing Italy as the stingiest defence in the World Cup  . Chile will in fact rue the missed chances and the missed penalty. Near the end they almost conceded a goal  that would have left the result 1-1, a disaster if you consider what it takes to get out of the group stage. In the end you should ignore the fan boys at ITV going on about the famous victory, Chile did not do enough with it's chances and may well end up paying with an early trip home.

Liverpool v Honduras was a better show, despite the minnows never getting near the Spanish keeper, it was at least pretty football. for most of the match. 2-0 does in fact reflect the honest result, Honduras defended well and were a worthy opponent. There was bit of rough stuff and we saw the use of a bog roll as on pitch treatment to a nasty split lip. TBH if the Saudi ref had been at this one the card haul would have been twice as high. But football isn't a rough sport for nothing, we got a good physical  match with some pretty passing.  Only problem again is the scoreline, 2-0 may not be enough to get out of the group. Spain never really turned on the heat like Portugal or Germany. It's all still to play for and Spain know they could have nailed down the spot if they had tried earlier and harder .

Coronation Street has nothing on the continuing goings on in the France Camp and England, both having hotted up even more. The French practised today. several players were seen perfecting hostage demands in between passes and penalty takes while Raymond Domenech received the Minister of Sport sent in to get the children in line. While I will never advocate open rebellion for no good reason, these players have cause and plenty of it. Larent Blanc, Manchester United legend is to take up the managerial post after the team returns, and if the trend continues that's  tomorrow night . The only people who seem to think there is nothing wrong with the status quo are Domenech, the FFF and the Government. The tradition of knowing better goes back a long way and shows no sign of waning. In stead of keeping Anelka around and sending in Blanc early, they will persist in destroying the souls of those players. I cannot bring myself to guess how the France South Africa match will pan out, but the South Africans have an excellent chance to go out winners.

Across the channel so to speak, in the England camp, John Terry inexplicably was allowed to have a press conference, followed on by a bit with Capello on ITV. You can read the summary here , but it's clear from  Capello and the FA that it's the last chance saloon time for Capello. Win on Wednesday and he's saved his job for two years, loose or draw and he's gone. I'm torn, I'd love to see the lads win, but I want Capello gone. As far as he's concerned he's done nothing wrong and the players are being dramatic for nothing. As you know, I have argued that our players are spoilt, uncommitted and rudderless, this only explains the normal mediocrity we suffer from. What is happening now goes way beyond that, England are not quite the basket case France is but when  Capello says there is no revolution.....I say  BOLLOKS. The thick black smoke coming from behind him is telling another story. I would be happy of a win, but I won't for a second think it has anything to do with the manager nor will I delude myself into thinking we are world beaters.

Because the English football fan needs to find solace somewhere,  he nuzzles at the teet of someone else's misfortune, it's Perverse!.  So I'll be watching  France v South Africa  as for the second set of matches, here's hoping the footie is worth splitting ourselves in two for.