Harry Kane is upset, but as ever, he is totally wrong

 

 

• Why watching football from England is a major disadvantage
• Why do the owners of PGMOL actually want the organisation to be ultra-secretive?

“Harry Kane: England captain expresses disappointment after nine withdrawals from Nations League squad.”

So says Sky Sports.

Their headline reads: England captain Harry Kane on squad withdrawals: “It’s a shame this week, obviously. It’s a tough period of the season and maybe that’s been taken advantage of a little bit. I don’t really like it if I’m totally honest. England comes before anything and any club situation.”

Kane has played 10 league games this season and he is relying as ever on a statement without context.    Indeed it is one of those statements that deadbeat journalists with nothing to say actually love: that players are reprehensible ne’re-do-wells and good horsewhipping is what they need.  The player is playing for his club but not for his country.  Shock horror.  Where are the stocks when you need them?

But look at this a little deeper and of the eight players who are said to have dropped out only two, Trent Alexander Arnold and Levi Volwill have actually played all 11 league games for their clubs.   The others have all not only dropped out of an England game (where of course the manger has at least 100 other players to pick from,) but have also dropped out of at least one club game, where the manager probably only has three or four possible replacements – and for most of those a certain amount of tactical adjustment would be needed.

What’s worse, we can all see how Saka has been struggling this season with the ten games he has played: what sort of idiot would pick Saka for an England game in his condition?   Indeed the same is true for Declan Rice.  And when we get down to Everton’s Jarrad Branthwaite who was picked as a replacement and then pulled out, he has only managed four games this season.

This is the old nonsense of an international manager picking a player and then the media making a fuss if he is injured, suggesting that for the honour of his country he should play with a broken leg (just like they write twaddle with a broken brain).  But if the player is injured and puts in only a half-best performance, he knows the media will turn on him.   So better all round to say “no”, and use the break as it should be used – as a break.

In this regard I was delighted to see Martin Odegaard realise what is best for him, and indeed recognise who pays his wages, by pulling out of the Norway squad in order to get himself fit again.

And let us not forget that when this comes to injured players Arsenal are not doing ok.  Ben White has for example undergone knee surgery, and will be out for the rest of the year quite probably.  That gives us seven first team players out at the moment.

For both the players themselves and for those of us who buy season tickets, these international matches are menaces, for which neither the players nor the fans get any compensation when a player is injured.   Indeed Arsene Wenger’s comment in 2006 comparing international managers to joy-riding car thieves was spot on.   

What Wenger said, quite rightly in my view was that “what the national coaches are doing is like taking the car from his garage without even asking permission.    They’ll then use his car for ten days, and abandon it in a field without any petrol left in the tank.

“We have to recover it, but it is broken down. A month later, they’ll come to take your car again – and for good measure, you’re expected to be nice about it.”

Of course the power has always rested with the clubs if only they would use it together, and now finally it seems that they are as they are starting (admittedly slowly but they are starting) to stand up against the ever-growing number of ludicrous international competitions, most of which are so badly run that they are accompanied by invasions of the ground by people without tickets.

We were talking about it in 2018 and here it is again with nothing changed.

So if you want to watch some players quite possibly be injured unnecessarily then it is ITV at 7.45, but it might be worth getting a stiff drink to help you through the agony.  And I don’t wish an injury on any player, but something in my head is saying that if Kane were to be injured playing in that match and as a result Bayern M lose out on the title once again, meaning that Kane still hasn’t won a league trophy, he might just for one moment, reconsider what would be called a “rant” if it had been said by an Arsenal player.